Scheduling Flashcards
1
Q
In terms of Scheduling what is accessibility?
A
Accessibility, or access to care, is the ability to seek and receive care at an organization. It is a patient‐centered scheduling concept. It can be stated as: “How long do I have to wait to see my provider?”
2
Q
In terms of Scheduling, what is availability?
A
Availability is provider‐centered scheduling concept. A provider may want to know how much of their time is open ‐ or available ‐ on any given day.
3
Q
In terms of Scheduling, what is utilization?
A
Utilization is the opposite of availability. It represents how much of a provider’s time is used.
4
Q
What is the problem with measuring availability by looking at how many days we need to look ahead to find an opening for a particular provider, department, or hospital?
A
If we only look for the first available opening, our numbers might be skewed by cancelations.
5
Q
What is the industry standard to avoid having accessibility metrics skewed by cancelations?
A
To report on the third next available appointment (3NA)
6
Q
What master file stores the accessibility configuration records?
A
SNR
7
Q
What are the three steps that accessibility configurations calculate their numbers?
A
- Define the date on which to perform the search: This is determined by the scheduled batch job
- Find the date of the occurrence for each entity and level: While the occurrence is frequently the 3rd next available appointment, this can change based on SNR build
- Calculate the difference in days between the dates from parts 1 and 2: Depending on SNR build, this may only count business days
8
Q
What is lead time?
A
Lead time represents the number of days between creation of an actual appointment and the appointment date.
9
Q
What column is used to find the lead time for a given appointment?
A
VisitFact.AppointmentLeadTimeInDays
10
Q
What table holds lead time goals across a facility?
A
LOC_SA_LEAD_TIME_GOALS
11
Q
What table holds department level lead time goals?
A
DEPT_LEAD_TIME_GOALS
12
Q
What master file stores appointment requests?
A
ORD
13
Q
What is another name for appointment requests?
A
Schedule orders
14
Q
What table lists any relevant appointments scheduled from the request?
A
APPT_REQ_APPT_LINKS
15
Q
What four pieces of information are needed for every appointment?
A
- Patient. When we create an appointment, we are creating a contact on an EPT record.
- Provider/Department. When thinking about appointments, it’s best to think about the provider and department as a pair. The appointment is scheduled with the combination of a particular provider in a particular department ‐ you cannot schedule with just one or the other.
- Start Date/Time. The appointment date also defines the contact date.
- Appointment length. Appointments will have a length in some multiple of 5 minutes.
16
Q
What are the core database objects in Caboodle and Clarity for reporting on scheduling?
A
- Caboodle: VisitFact
- Clarity: V_SCHED_APPT
17
Q
What is the granularity for VisitFact?
A
Every row represents a visit
18
Q
What is the granularity for V_SCHED_APPT?
A
Every row represents an appointment
19
Q
What is an appointment?
A
It is any EPT contact that has defined an appointment status, provider, department, and visit type.
20
Q
What is a visit?
A
Visits include those appointments and any other encounters that of a type that an organization specified. For example, telephone encounters, telemedicine visits, and in‐home visits are not classically considered appointments, but many organizations choose to consider them under the term of visit.
21
Q
If there are multiple departments or providers associated with an appointment, then V_SCHED_APPT only stores the ID of the _____ department and provider in the list.
A
First department and provider in the list
22
Q
What are appointments with multiple providers or resources are referred to as what?
A
Joint appointments
23
Q
For an appointment to be considered joint, what must be true?
A
The times selected must be the same, overlap, or touch for all providers/resources involved.
24
Q
What Clarity table has a row for each action a user takes to schedule an appointment?
A
PAT_ENC_ES_AUD_ACT
25
What questions can PAT\_ENC\_ES\_AUD\_ACT help answer?
* In which department is a user logged in when they schedule an appointment.
* What actions are users taking to schedule appointments.
26
What is stored in the table, SCHED\_ORDERS\_WQ?
This table contains information about appointment request workqueues (WQF records)
27
What is stored in the table, SCHED\_ORDERS\_WQ\_ITEMS?
This table contains information about appointment request workqueue items (WQI records)
28
What is stored in the table, SCHED\_ORDERS\_HX?
This table contains user activity history for appointment request workqueue items
29
What columns from VisitFact will allow you to report on how patients conduct their own scheduling?
* ScheduledOnline ‐ a 1/0 column that indicates whether the visit was scheduled online
* PortalActiveAtScheduling ‐ a 1/0 column that indicates whether the patient's MyChart patient portal account was active at the time of scheduling
* PortalReasonForVisit ‐ if the visit was scheduled
30
How does ticket scheduling work?
If a clinician makes an order for a future appointment and the patient needs to schedule the appointment, the patient can receive a ticket in MyChart. Tickets appear as messages in MyChart for the patient to resolve by scheduling an appointment.
31
How do you determine in Clarity how many tickets were presented to patients?
Filter APPT\_REQUEST to only include rows where:
* REQUEST\_METHOD\_C = 7 ‐‐ Patient Portal
* RELEASED\_TO\_PAT\_YN = 'Y'
32
What is used to tie related contacts (such as cancelled/rescheduled appointments) together?
Appointment Serial Numbers (ASN)
33
What is Fast Pass?
Fast Pass is a wait list feature in Cadence that automatically sends patients text or email messages to notify them of a wait list appointment offering. Upon receiving the message, patients can then log in to MyChart and claim the offer if it is still available or decline the offer to keep the original appointment and wait for another offer.
34
What is a Slot?
A schedulable range of time in a provider's schedule. Slots are specified by a begin time and an end time; the length must be an increment of 5 minutes.
35
Define Opening.
An opening represents the ability to schedule an appointment into a slot. An opening may be filled by a single appointment at most. To allow a provider to be scheduled to have more than one appointment at a given time, a slot can have more than one opening. All the openings within a given slot have the same length.
36
Define Overbook Opening.
Some schedules allow schedulers to overbook appointments beyond the number of regular appointment openings. Each slot has a number (zero or more) of overbook openings specified, which only schedulers with Overbook Security may fill once all regular openings are filled.
37
Define Super Overbook.
Once all regular and overbook openings are used, only users with Super Overbook Security can schedule additional appointments into a slot. There is no limit to the number of super overbook appointments. The appointments that result from super overbooks may appear outside of the normal slots for the provider's schedule template.
38
In terms of scheduling, what is a Template?
The template is the blueprint of a provider's schedule. The provider needs unique templates for each department. It does not contain any appointments. The template describes how the slots should be built for the provider's schedule. This data is stored in an M global, not in Chronicles.
39
Define Schedule.
The schedule is the detailed information per slot that is created from the template. It contains entries for each slot, each appointment in each slot, and each block in each slot. This data is also stored in M globals.
40
Define Appointment.
An appointment is a specific date and time that a patient is scheduled to see a specific provider in a specific department, for a specific visit type, for a specific length of time.
41
Define Joint Appointment.
A joint appointment is an appointment scheduled with more than one provider or resource. For an appointment to be considered joint, the times selected must be the same, overlap, or touch for all providers/resources involved.
42
Define a Block.
Used in Cadence to reserve time slots on a provider's schedule for specific types of patients or visits. Examples include specific appointment times set aside for new patients, same day patients, or inpatients. Similarly, blocks can reserve certain types of procedures for times when limited resources like machines, rooms, or technicians are available.
43
Define a Split Slot.
If an appointment does not require the entire length of the slot the slot will be split into two, leaving a slot with a length equal to the remaining time in the original slot. Even though the resulting two slots were not defined in the template, the schedule will display the two slots separately. As the leftover time in the new slot often is insufficient to accommodate a new appointment, the resulting time often goes unused. Split slots are an indicator of ineffective schedule strategy.
44
Define Spanned Slot.
If an appointment requires a length that is longer than a slot, the appointment can span two or more slots. The schedule will still display the two slots, but the appointment will appear in both of them. There will still only be one appointment contact in EPT.
45
What two ways are most frequently used to measure utilization?
* Provider utilization
* Schedule utilization
46
How is Provider Utilization calculated?
Completed Appointment Time / Regular Available Time
47
How is Schedule Utilization calculated?
(Noncancelled Appointment Time + Time Lost to Late Cancels) / Regular Available Time
48
What is Regular Available Time?
The sum of time associated with regular openings in the schedule.
49
What is Completed Appointment Time?
The sum of time used in appointments with statuses of Completed, Arrived, or any custom statuses the organization considers completed. If calculating provider utilization for future dates, this also includes appointments in a status of Scheduled.
50
What is Noncancelled Appointment Time?
The sum of time associated with appointments that weren't canceled. This includes no‐show appointments. This is sometimes called booked time.
51
What is Time Lost to Late Cancels?
The sum of time lost to patient‐initiated late cancelations of appointments. This is sometimes called unmitigated patient‐initiated late‐cancels. If there
are more late‐cancels in a slot than there are unfilled openings, this will use the time associated with unfilled openings instead. After all, it wouldn't make sense to claim that there was more time lost to late cancels than there was unfilled time to begin with.
52
What Epic-released metric is used to measure your organization's provider utilization?
ES Provider Utilization (With Exclusion)
53
What Epic-released metric is used to measure your organization's schedule utilization?
ES Schedule Utilization (With Exclusion)
54
What Epic-released Reporting Workbench template returns one row per unique combination of provider and department that matches the search terms you include?
ES Provider Utilization Health Report Template [55061]
55
What Epic-released Reporting Workbench report template focuses on utilization numbers for slot types?
ES Schedule Slot Type Utilization Report [55081]
56
What is this provider's regular available time across these slots?
180 minutes
57
Do the number of openings and the number of blocks in a slot need to be equal?
No
58
True or False: A single accessibility configuration can be used to populate ACCESS\_PROV, ACCESS\_DEP, and ACCESS\_ALL\_DEPS.
True
59
True or False: You can use an accessibility extract configuration to automatically calculate how many days a patient would need to wait to be seen in a given department.
True
60
An accessibility configuration record completes its search once. Which of the following is required to calculate how many rows it creates in ACCESS\_DEP?
A. The maximum number of days in the schedule the search will evaluate
B. The occurrence number (whether the search finds the first, second, third, etc. next appointment)
C. How many departments the search evaluates
D. How many providers the search evaluates
c
61
Which of the following would an inner join between APPT\_REQ\_APPT\_LINKS and PAT\_ENC return if the join condition were APPT\_REQ\_APPT\_LINKS .APPT\_SERIAL\_NUM = PAT\_ENC.APPT\_SERIAL\_NO?
A. The final appointment of any status in the series of canceled/rescheduled appointments built from
B. The final non‐canceled appointment in the series of canceled/rescheduled appointments built from the appointment request
C. All appointments in the series of canceled/rescheduled appointments built from the appointment request
D. No appointments
c
62
Which of the following is a joint appointment? Choose just ONE of the following.
A. Any appointment in an orthopedics department
B. Any appointment that spans multiple slots
C. Any appointment that involves multiple SER records
D. Any appointment that has been rescheduled at least once
c
63
You are creating a report on canceled and rescheduled appointments. To do so, you use the following linking diagram. Will the sample report shown below meet this need? If not, why not? Choose only ONE answer.
A. The report will work correctly
B. The report will not work correctly because the columns in the join are incorrect
C. The report will not work correctly because the database objects are incorrect
D. Both
b
64
For which of the following would F\_SCHED\_APPT\_STATS be appropriate? Choose only ONE answer.
A. Calculating the number of no shows in a given department
B. Calculating the number of no shows for a given patient
C. Calculating the number of new patient appointments were in a given department
D. Calculating the number of no shows by scheduling user
a
65
A clinic manager needs to see the percent of regular available time a provider is actually caring for
patients. Which Epic‐released metric would be most appropriate?
A. ES Provider Utilization (With Exclusion)
B. ES Schedule Utilization (With Exclusion)
a
66
How can you tell which rows in the V\_AVAILABILITY view are for slots and which are for appointments? Choose only ONE answer.
A. The APPT\_NUMBER column will store 0 for appointments and greater than 0 for slots
B. The APPT\_NUMBER column will store values greater than 0 for appointments and 0 for slots
C. You cannot distinguish slots from appointments in V\_AVAILABILITY
b
67
A row of AVAIL\_BLOCK stores a non‐null value in REL\_BLOCK\_C. What must be true about this row?
A. All original blocks in the slot have been replaced by Time Release of Blocks
B. No original blocks in the slot have been replaced by Time Release of Blocks
C. The relevant slot once used the block represented by REL\_BLOCK\_C, but the slot no longer uses this block
D. The relevant slot currently uses the block represented by REL\_BLOCK\_C
c
68
11. A row of AVAIL\_BLOCK stores a value in BLOCK\_C and stores a null value in REL\_BLOCK\_C. What must be true about this row?
A. All original blocks in the slot have been replaced by Time Release of Blocks
B. No original blocks in the slot have been replaced by Time Release of Blocks
C. The block represented by BLOCK\_C replaced the block represented by REL\_BLOCK\_C
D. The block represented by BLOCK\_C was originally present in the slot and has not been replaced by Time Release of Blocks
d
69
True/False: Cadence completes regularly-scheduled batches to calculate accessibility numbers.
True
70
For what purpose are appointment requests most frequently used?
New patient appointments and requests for specialty care.
71
What is the focus of the table, APPT\_REQ\_AUDIT?
The outcomes of actions on each individual appointment request.
72
What master file stores a visit type?
PRC
73
What is the granularity of the PatientApplicationSessionFact?
One row for each session.
74
What is the granularity of the PatientWorkflowAttemptFact?
One row for each workflow that a user attempted while in a patient-facing app like MyChart.
75
Imagine that there was a 15-minute slot with two regular openings and one overbook opening. Two appointments were scheduled. There were zero late-cancels and zero no-shows. What is the provider and schedule utilization?
Provider Utilization: 100%
Schedule Utilization: 100%
76
Imagine that there was a 15-minute slot with two regular openings and one overbook opening. One appointment was scheduled. There were zero late-cancels and zero no-shows. What is the provider and schedule utilization?
Provider Utilization: 50%
Schedule Utilization: 50%
77
Imagine that there was a 15-minute slot with two regular openings and one overbook opening. One appointment of two was scheduled. There were zero late-cancels and zero no-shows. What is the provider and schedule utilization?
Provider Utilization: 50%
Schedule Utilization: 50%
78
Imagine that there was a 15-minute slot with two regular openings and one overbook opening. Two appointments were scheduled. There were zero late-cancels, but one was a no-show. What is the provider and schedule utilization?
Provider Utilization: 50%
Schedule Utilization: 100%
79
Imagine that there was a 15-minute slot with two regular openings and one overbook opening. Two appointments were scheduled. A patient late-canceled one of the appointments, and this late-cancel was not mitigated. The other appointment proceeded as planned. What is the provider and schedule utilization?
Provider Utilization: 50%
Schedule Utilization: 100%
80
Imagine that there was a 15-minute slot with two regular openings and one overbook opening. Two appointments were scheduled. A patient late-canceled one of the appointments, and this late-cancel was not mitigated. The other appointment proceeded as planned. What is the provider and schedule utilization?
Provider Utilization: 50%
Schedule Utilization: 100%
81
True/False: Late cancelled appointments are included in the numerators or denominators for Epic-released metircs
False
82
True/False: The ES Provider Utilization Health Report template does include late cancelled appointments.
True
83
What is the granularity of V\_AVAILABILITY?
* One row/slot and
* One row/appointment in each slot
84
Can you use the sum the BLOCKS\_USED column to get the number of appointments that were of that block?
No. If an appointment spanned slots, then it would contribute to the BLOCKS\_USED value for multiple rows.
85
Do the number of openings and the number of blocks in a slot need to be equal?
No
