The Patient Journey Must Not Be an Obstacle Course

Everyone will to reduce waiting times. In October 2012, the French health Minister, Marisol Touraine, announced her wish to guarantee an access to emergency care in less than thirty minutes for each French people and to ease congestion in the emergency services. Even though there is still work to do, solutions exist. For instance the patient can be allocated to a queue according to the degree of urgency (in accordance with the triage patients protocol). Concerning the accompanying person,they are informed at any time of the patient’s status (while maintaining confidentiality), either thanks to the scan of a reception ticket on a reader or thanks to a SMS.

One of the keys to improve reception is to offer an optimized journey for each patient and to guide them from the appointment scheduling to the way out.  To do this, it is primordial to perfectly identify the patient’s need on their arrival and to inform the staff about it. An interactive reception kiosk can be installed to organize efficiently the patient journey.   Once they are identified, the patient is automatically directed at each step thanks to a unique reception ticket. This solution is installed at the Port Royal maternity (Paris), and should be deployed in other hospitals.

Software and hardware solutions are more and more tested and approved by health care facilities to manage efficiently the patient journey. The benefits of these solutions are numerous: