Ethnography Summary- Ranae: Receptionist at Family Medical Center inside Saint Joseph’s Hospital
Team members Joe Krause and Alex Charron interviewed receptionist Ranae in order to determine how often appointments are missed and cancelled with the Family Medical Center of SJHS .
Date: 3/4/17
Type: Interview
Location: Family Medical Center within Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Mishawaka, IN.
Team participants: Led by Joe Krause and accompanied by Alex Charron
User Characteristics: “Veteran Receptionist for the Family Medical Center”
- 10+ years handling patient appointments, cancellations, and no-shows
- Helps register patients who have appointments
- Makes reminder calls to ensure that people are aware of their appointment
Memorable Quote- “The transportation services provided through Medicaid are inefficient and often result in a patient being so late that they completely miss their appointment.”
Top 3 Learnings:
- Access to transportation in order to get to a medical appointment is a much bigger problem than people think.
- Medicaid will pay for transportation to appointments, but they require a 72 hour notice and the patient must use specific approved cab companies. These cab companies often show up late, causing a patient to be late to an appointment.
- There are a lot more cancellations than no-shows because a patient may lose complete access to the office if they miss a few appointments with no advanced notice. However, no-shows are unproportionally due to lack of transportation.
Key insight- Medicaid will cover the costs to get to and from an appointment, but most of the time cab services are late which cause patients to also be late. The family medical center has a policy that if a patient comes more than 15 minutes late, then their appointment will be cancelled automatically. Furthermore, not all patients are aware that medicaid will cover transportation expenses, so they look for alternative ways of getting to appointments that do not always work.
Activities:
- Met Alex on campus and took uber to the hospital.
- Spoke with various employees and patients
- Took referrals in order to gain the perspective of multiple stakeholders
- Left the hospital
Environment:
- Saint Joseph’s Hospital
- Family Medical Office
