Phygital Clinic Simulator

A day in the clinic

• The schedule rules. Each doctor has a shift and a consultation length. Patients arrive at their time, a little early, and each consultation lasts as long as it lasts: that is where waiting-room delays and waits come from.
• Three streams of administrative work: what the patient arranges after the consultation, which comes in bursts tied to the schedule; what the doctor asks for during the consultation, which leaves the room on hold while the doctor waits; and the phone, with its own curve and its own abandonment.
• The secretary is there when her doctor is. She starts a little before, leaves a little after and takes a lunch break. The phone of a morning-only room is dead all afternoon and is not forwarded to the room next door: that is where most unanswered calls come from.
• In person comes first. The patient in front of her and what her doctor asks for go ahead of the phone, which never interrupts a task already started. The rule can be changed in the parameters.
• People who reach nobody call back, in all three scenarios. What counts is how many people end up talking to someone, not how many attempts are answered: each person is lost only once. A patient who leaves without their next appointment and calls later to book it is not another caller: it is the same task, resolved if the call is answered.
• Z, what gets resolved. Callers who get through, plus the patient tasks resolved —next appointment and changes, test appointments, authorizations and the doctor’s requests— out of all those requested.

What changes in each scenario

• 1 · Conventional. In-room secretary: one secretary per doctor, inside the consulting room. She keeps the doctor’s schedule, answers that room’s phone and handles what the doctor asks for during appointments.
• 2 · + Video Kiosks. Scheduling, the phone and the doctor’s requests move to VCCaaS agents, during clinic hours. Patients handle them at a Video Kiosk, talking by video with a person.
• 3 · + Video QR. In addition, patients who don’t want to wait for the kiosk scan the QR and continue on their phone; and extended hours: VCCaaS agents answer the phone before opening and after closing.
• Each scenario has its own staffing. Front desk, secretaries who stay, Video Kiosks and QR totems are set separately in “Staff and screens”.
• There are people in the VCCaaS. Nothing is resolved automatically. The agents, dedicated to this clinic, take breaks like a secretary, but staggered: coverage never drops to zero.
• In-person service does not disappear. Check-in, payment, invoicing and signed paperwork stay at the front desk in all three. And the work doesn’t go away with the position: an adjustable share of the secretary’s other tasks falls to the front desk; only the coordination she did for her own doctor goes away.
• Service cost: CX Gap rates. By default, 13.50 USD per in-person interaction, by a secretary or at the front desk, and 7.16 USD per interaction by a VCCaaS agent, including the phone and the doctor; Video Kiosks and QR totems, per month. The parameters let you switch to cost per position.

Sources and assumptions