Darcie Peacock, CEO of pediatric, in-home and clinic-based therapy services Solace, discusses how a partnership with mobile workforce management platform Skedulo, has helped match the best clinician with each patient they treat.
What is Solace? What does it offer?
Solace provides pediatric in-home and clinic-based therapy services, school-based services and family caregiver services in Colorado, Texas, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, California and Wyoming. Our In-home and clinic division provides occupational, physical and speech therapy services to children from birth to 21 years old. My vision for Solace is to be admired for the quality of our services, the kindness of our people and the integrity and innovation of our work. Our team works incredibly hard to provide exceptional care and support to our families so they can live their best life.
How does Skedulo work?
To understand how Skedulo works, it’s easiest to understand what it is in the first place. Skedulo is a mobile workforce management platform that enables deskless workforce productivity. It is used to maximize the productivity of deskless workers who are not in a traditional office setting — allowing companies to manage, engage and analyze workers across a wide variety of industries, including healthcare, utilities, solar, non-profits, public sector, construction and more.
From mobile phlebotomists and vaccine administrators to solar technicians and commercial cleaning professionals, Skedulo’s deskless productivity platform has been used to schedule over 35 million appointments worldwide. During the pandemic, Skedulo pivoted to play a critical role in assisting testing efforts with BioReference Labs leveraging their high-capacity scheduling solution to execute testing for the NFL, NBA, MLS and more. Skedulo also aided vaccine administration in several countries, provinces, and U.S. states, such as California, Maine, Ohio and Ontario, Canada.
How did the partnership between Solace and Skedulo form? Why was this partnership critical to Solace?
In the past, we would receive referrals and turn around to decide which clinicians served the necessary area, then email out those clinicians. We would have to sit back and wait to hear back from them via email and approve the request. However, clinicians can’t constantly check their email and respond to requests when they’re serving families. We weren’t using our resources efficiently and effectively, and it was impacting our clinicians as well. For instance, we might have a clinician willing to take a patient, but towards the end of the day another clinician checks their schedule and they happen to be working in the same area or down the street and they also have an opening. So now, we have a clinician driving a half hour to see this family when we already had someone in the area and could’ve worked more efficiently.
Initially, we only had our scheduling team and patient access team who worked with their own methods to find referrals and clinicians for them. It made things much more challenging when someone on these teams had to be out or if we wanted to track data or trends. The cross-functionality of it was not working. This delayed our ability to get services to families, causing stress for the ones who wanted answers. They want somebody to come and evaluate their child and guide them through the next steps. While we were figuring out the operations behind the scenes, these families were waiting for us to get started.
Prior to Skedulo, we had our first scheduling platform for a little over a year or two. While it was meeting our needs, it was not able to scale with us. We started to search for a new platform and came across Skedulo’s website which showed us the technological platform we were looking for actually existed. So, once we set up the demo, we realized this was a partnership worth investing in.
How does Solace utilize Skedulo + how has its partnership with Skedulo helped it embrace innovative health technology?
The main way we use Skedulo is scheduling. It allowed us to ensure we match the best clinicians with the best skill set for each child every single time. So now, if we receive a referral from a family that needs a Spanish-speaking therapist with feeding expertise in a certain area of Denver, we can find that and ensure continuity for that family. We no longer have to wait around for acceptances and approvals.
We also use the system to directly communicate with families. It sends them 24-hour reminders of upcoming appointments and alerts when clinicians are on their way. Families also get weekly updates to plan their week with reminders of upcoming appointments.
How does Skedulo’s new solutions help match the best clinicians to patients?
Skedulo’s Healthcare Therapy solution helps us match patients with clinicians who can speak their native language, are comfortable with pets in the home and know how to manage certain behaviors like feeding, for example. Skedulo can also match a preferred or consistent clinician for every possible appointment a family has and manage patient availability between households. Continuity is so important for us to serve our families because a number of our kids already have challenges building connections. In the past, sometimes a clinician wouldn’t work out with a family if, for example, the commute was too long, then we would need to transition the family to a new provider. The child would then be immediately impacted because they had already formed a bond with their clinician and now have to start over and that delays their progress toward their goal. Skedulo’s Healthcare Therapy solution also uses authorization data to create a schedule that ensures our families receive all of the services their insurance qualifies them for.
Skedulo helped us take the administrative burden off of our clinicians. It allows them to truly focus on the care and service we provide for families. This partnership really has been transformational on every level. We no longer have to focus on cross-functionality, because Skedulo can do it for us. Now, as our organization grows, weekly home visits have increased by 50% YoY and we are constantly looking for ways to innovate its operations and better support our mobile clinicians as they serve patients and their families
Lastly, how exactly does this partnership enhance patient care and business growth? Is this something other providers should be looking into?
Using Skedulo’s solutions, Solace has grown to more than 8,000 patient visits per week and 800 clinicians. On every level, there are so many ways we use Skedulo that we didn’t even imagine. It might not seem as though Skedulo will impact billing, our health information management team, or our nursing team, but it truly does. Taking the time to understand what every department needs from this software in order to be successful as a whole organization was incredibly valuable.
Through our partnership and Skedulo’s Healthcare Therapy solution, clinicians are assigned to jobs that match their personal preferences and scheduling criteria. Our organization prioritizes the satisfaction of our clinicians by allowing them to access job offers on their mobile, reduce time driving and provide a fair distribution of work to reduce frustration and turnover. Within one quarter of using Skedulo, we saw an 84% reduction in patient no-shows for appointments. Now our clinicians can be confident that when they go out, families will not forget about their appointment. For our families, we know they can consistently access our services and make faster gains toward their goals. Not only does Solace’s partnership with Skedulo demonstrate a commitment to our care providers, but it translates to better care for families and efficiency in the field.
Other providers and organizations in this industry have a lot of behind the scene processes that can be extremely manual. Healthcare is slowly but surely modernizing, with fewer resources and more to do. Efficiency is a top priority for everybody and you have to look at what else you can do and how else you can engage your customers. I think if we had only been looking at this to solve that scheduling issue, we would have been missing a lot of opportunities for our organization and customers. It’s important to look at things much more globally when other providers start on that path to find solutions to challenges.