Improving business efficiency – appointment slot analysis

January 8, 2025

Improving business efficiency – appointment slot analysis

Taking a careful look at how your practice’s appointment book is managed can help improve overall efficiency and future business planning. One Care’s business intelligence team can analyse how you utilise your slots, if use of your workforce is optimised, and how accurate your appointment planning is.

Read on to find out how an appointment analysis can improve your practice’s operations, and how the team helped a PCN improve use of staff time and demand mapping.

How can your practice benefit from this?

Our BI team can investigate the appointments your practice offers and books. This will help you to:

adjust your slot provision to suit patient demand
structure appointments based on the actual duration rather than an assumed duration
consider refining the types of slots you offer
book additional patients to fill slots
plot staff working patterns against the appointment data

The analysis can be specific to clinicians and roles, or it can be a broad investigation of all users in your appointment book. It can also look at specific cohorts of patients – the nature of the work they generate and the time it takes, DNA rates, and planned and actual appointment durations.

Slot analysis case study

Background: The BI team analysed the appointments for all mental health clinical roles across a PCN, to understand appointment availability and planning, how the appointments were being used, and appointment duration and DNA rate.

Findings: The analysis took two months and results were really positive. The findings, presented to the PCN in a user-friendly format, showed:

appointments for all staff were well-used, with a high volume of face-to-face slots
DNA rates were acceptable
the planned appointment duration of 29 minutes was inaccurate. Appointments were taking an average of 37.5 minutes, eight minutes more than planning allowed for

The findings helped the PCN’s practices improve their appointment mapping based on patient demand, and rethink their staff allocation to better meet that demand.