Virtual waiting room

Virtual waiting room

An innovative solution to automate the process of connecting patients to clinicians, by creating a virtual waiting room and a predictive dialer for video and audio consultation

A truly killer feature that became key market differentiator and the main selling point of the product

The unmet need

  • Remote health service providers use video and audio to provide clinical consultations remotely
  • The prevailing practice is, that service requests flowing into the system are queued for a clinician
  • Clinicians pick a patient from the top of the queue and initiate the call
  • Which means that clinicians have to deal with unanswered calls, wrong numbers, patients not ready to take the call, etc
  • As a result, much of the clinician's time is wasted doing non clinical work, which leads to longer waiting times and overall inefficiency

The value proposition

A system that calls queued patients and puts them in a "virtual waiting room", enabling the clinician to click "Next" to join the call and immediately start the consultation

The KPI

  • Increase the ratio of clinicians "consultation time" to "connection time" versus a benchmark
  • Reducing manual resources needed to operate calls versus a benchmark
  • Keeping average patient waiting time in the virtual waiting room less than a target value
  • Increasing the system's throughput while reducing the operational resources

The main requirements

  • Should be workable 'out of the box' with predefined best practices configuration scenarios
  • Enable non-technical users to fine tune the basic scenarios to accommodated different business and operational use cases
  • Enable support / professional-services teams implement low level customization to the basic logic, without installing a new product version

The system logic

The overall predictive dialer logic

Predictive dialer logic
Predictive dialer logic (To enlarge, right-click the image and select "Open image in new tab")

The waiting room logic

Waiting room logic
Waiting room logic (To enlarge, right-click the image and select "Open image in new tab")

Trigger and fetch methods

  • The 'trigger' and 'fetch' methods are two functions at the heart of the virtual waiting room logic
  • They determine the logic by which appointments are selected from the queue to start the calling process, and how they will be fetched from the virtual waiting room once a clinician is available
  • A predefined list of trigger and fetch methods are delivered with the product
  • Additional methods can be configured and quickly added per specific use case

User experience

Administrator

Service administrators can define the dialer settings, including the trigger and fetch methods, and the waiting room settings. Configurations are made per service and can differ from service to service

Predictive dialer settings panel
Predictive dialer settings panel

Clinician

All the clinician has to do is click "Next" to start the conversation with the patient

Clinician Next appointment screen
Clinician 'next appointment' screen
Clinician consultation screen
Clinician video conversation screen

Patient

The patient receives a call from the system, and is asked to join the waiting room. Once the clinician is available, the patient is automatically connected to the clinician

Patient virtual waiting room screen
Patient virtual waiting room screen
Patient video consultation screen
Patient video consultation screen

The impact

The virtual waiting room and the predictive dialer became the core capability of the product, and the main market differentiator. It's unique capabilities and fit for purpose, enabled organization to increase the number of patients served per time unit by 50% to 200% in some markets, reduce the operational costs by 20% - 40%

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