Two months after Health Services eliminated non-emergency walk-in appointments, the new system is running smoothly, and students are beginning to adjust to the changes.
Health Services began its appointment-only policy Aug. 30 in an effort to cut down patients' waiting time and maximize provider availability. Until this academic year, students had the option of scheduling appointments in advance, but most patients walked into the offices after class only to wait in line with other sick and sniffling students.
The new system was in development for a year before being implemented this fall. Edward Wheeler, director of Health Services, said a handful of employees with differing roles meet once a week as the "It's About Time Team" to monitor the system and discuss further improvements.
According to team member and office manager Jennifer Hodshon, the transition has been free of any major problems. "We talked to a lot of health services who had made the change to appointments from walk-ins so we could foresee staff needs, and we made some equipment purchases," she said.
The only problems Health Service staff noticed have been routine. "Most problems were things like people were booked for the wrong time or mistakes we made as we were learning to use the system, rather than problems with the system itself," Wheeler said.
As well as training the staff to do scheduling, the transition to an appointment system required the conversion of a few spaces into exam rooms and the increase of some part-time employees' hours. Each medical provider now has a specific workspace of two exam rooms and one medical assistant assigned to help the provider stay on schedule by getting patients to the exam room, taking their vital signs and checking that their medication is up to date. Medical assistants can now also do routine birth control checks and EKGs, saving doctors' and students' time.
The department plans to measure a series of indicators - patient volume, average wait time, double-booked appointments and "do-not-keep-appointments" - in the next two weeks. Additionally, a phone survey will be conducted in late November and a more formal survey will follow in February.
"We felt we had to give the system two months to get out the bugs, get used to it, before we started measuring it," Wheeler said.
But he said his sense is that students are responding positively to the change. "We feel confident that our volume is up," he said. "We're taking that as a good sign that hopefully means that access is improved."
Both Wheeler and Hodshon said they believe most students are now aware that they need an appointment at Health Services. "We have had students who have come to front desk and are surprised to hear we don't have a walk-in system anymore," Wheeler said. "But most of those (students) we've given an appointment that day or the next, and they seem to be OK with it."
"We sent out bookmarks, we went to all the orientations and used Brown Daily Herald advertisements," Hodshon said. "We used every venue possible to get the word out."
Gillian O'Reilly '08 said her Residential Counselor told her she needed to call ahead for an appointment. She called the 24-hour hotline at midnight with a bad cold and scheduled an appointment for the next afternoon. "It was definitely better than going to my doctor at home, because I hardly had to wait," O'Reilly said.
But the department's efforts to spread the word have not reached everyone. "I wasn't aware that we couldn't walk in," said Jennifer Shea '06. "But I can see how that would be a lot better.
"I didn't like having a line of people behind you when you're trying to say what's wrong because it's private," she said. "It's better on the phone."
