Summer Wrap-Up

Last week, at our team meeting, we cleaned up the aftermath of the summer. Doctors' holidays make it challenging to keep up with our backlog. Last summer, we saw our 3rd NAA times creep up. In the early part of this summer, the numbers were looking good, and we thought we'd changed the system enough that the wait wouldn't grow, despite reduced capacity.

No such luck. Our latest 3rd NAA is up to 60 days. Here's hoping that the end of summer holidays signals an improvement here.

There is some brighter news. Last post, I looked at our patient-recall patterns. We've got data from May to August now, and there's still a striking variation among urologists in the rate at which we recall our patients for review. Here are the average recall rates:

Here's the promising part:

Isn't That Special?

In "Bang for your Buck," I reported our urologists' recall rates. The variation among urologists was striking. Some rarely recall anyone, while others recall nearly a quarter of their patients. Here are the rates (thanks, Amanda) for May to July:

Two of the docs have zero monthly recall stats because they were away for those months. But another doc, who was working during this period, also had no recalls. I asked both of the low-recall docs why they are so different from the rest of the group. One didn't know why there was such a discrepancy, but commented that maybe he wasn't recalling often enough!

In the previous post, I made the same observation. I meant it slightly tongue-in-cheek, but there is a kernel of truth in that comment. We want to reduce unnecessary recalls (internal demand), but not at the expense of compromising patient care.