The ab|inventio Gazette

One of the world’s most beloved brands wants QLess for their event at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver this month, and is looking for an Olympic sponsor who would get prominent exposure in displays, kiosks, SMS, phone calls & more, + access to an audience of hundreds of thousands of rich Olympic attendees, asking them if they’d like to opt in to a special SMS offer from the sponsor, who’d be able to send interactive SMS coupons, promotional messages and/or surveys to every opt-in thereafter. Do you know anyone who’d be interested? A list of Olympic sponsors at http://www.vancouver2010.com/more-2010-information/about-vanoc/sponsors-and-partners/vancouver-2010-sponsors/ Amazing marketing/PR opportunity to sponsor the first ever QLess Olympics for less than you would think. Contact sponsorshipsqless.com for details.

–Alex

After tens of thousands of students queued, here is a sample of what Mesa Community College learned by using QLess Analytics:

• An astounding 94.4% of Mesa’s students who had to wait more than an hour showed up for service –unparalleled loyalty, quite possibly built by the fact that students can roam freely while they wait.
  
• Mesa CC students have an almost infinite patience –the % of them who show up for service after queueing does not appreciably diminish with the wait time.
  
• The average delay between when students were summoned and when they arrived for service was under 1.5 minutes. QLess’ proprietary and patent-pending Two-stage Predictive Summoning made sure that advisors did not have to wait for students, as QLess predicts when a student is soon to be summoned and pre-summons them to the waiting area.
  
• The record wait is held by a student who waited 11 hours and 20 minutes –and showed up!
  
• The peak average daily wait was 684 minutes, for admissions, on October 30th.
  
• The highest student return rate (the % of students that visited multiple times) was 3.8%, for financial aid. Perhaps not surprising…give money out and expect them to come back for more!
  
• Laura Carrillo gets the prize for the most transactions logged any week, with 504 students served the first week of this year.
  
• Mesa CC students are a diverse bunch. Take a look at the attached map to see where they all come from. 87% come from Arizona, but the rest come from 109 cities nationwide. The city outside Arizona with the largest student population in Mesa: Denver, CO.
  
• At 2 PM on January 4th, there were 51 people waiting for advisement at the Southern and Dobson campus. The holidays sure need some advice to recover from!
  
• The hours to visit Advisement for the shortest wait: 8 AM and 6 PM.
  
• The adviser who spent the most time per student seen: Kathy Silberman, at more than 40 minutes median time spent with each student.
  
• Mesa CC has saved its students over 518 days of wasted time waiting since it deployed QLess. 
  

Posted with permission from Mesa Community College.

–Alex

New rules were announced last week aimed at limiting the long wait times for patients in health maintenance organizations to see a doctor.

QLess allows health organizations to comply rapidly and inexpensively by moving to active or dynamic scheduling. Dynamic scheduling improves patient access to doctors, reducing wait times, in three ways:

1. QLess SMS and voice appointment reminders reduce no-shows by 15 to 40%, eliminating unproductive gaps in a doctor’s schedule.
2. Today, appointments are scheduled based on average appointment durations. If a consultation is shorter than expected, they cannot ask the next patients to come earlier. QLess allows that via automated interactive SMS and voice notifications, making each appointment exactly as long as it actually is.
3. By not promising appointments and scheduling actively in real time, QLess can more schedule in a way that’s better than FIFO (first in first out), such as allowing patients marked as urgent to be seen sooner.
   

QLess is revolutionizing appointments as we know them.

–Alex

Reprinted from the San Jose Mercury News:

HMO patients will soon have shorter wait times to see a doctor

By Sandy Kleffman
Contra Costa Times

Posted: 01/19/2010 05:15:11 PM PST

California regulators will announce new rules today aimed at limiting the long wait times for patients in health maintenance organizations to see a doctor.

In most cases, HMO doctors will be required to see a patient for a primary care appointment within 10 business days.

Specialists will be required to see patients within 15 business days.

Those with urgent problems requiring prompt attention should be seen within 48 hours.

The regulations, to be announced in Los Angeles, will make California the first state in the nation to provide such consumer protections.

Advocates hailed the move.

“This will help patients get the care they need when they need it,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California. “It will help improve health outcomes, since care delayed is often care denied.”

Long delays to see have a doctor have been a frequent complaint of HMO patients. A 2009 study in Los Angeles found that new HMO patients wait on average 59 days to see a family practice physician.

The rules will apply to the 21 million residents who are in HMO plans, but not to other patients.

The regulations spring from a 2002 law that required the state to ensure timely access to HMO care.

For seven years, the California Department of Managed Health Care has worked with consumer advocates, HMO representatives and others to draft the rules.

HMOs will be required to submit plans for meeting the standards, then implement the plans within one year.

Critics have argued that the organizations may have to hire more doctors, which could drive up health care costs, and that doctors may be forced to rush patients through more quickly, which could compromise care.

However, many HMOs, which were heavily involved in the negotiations, are cautiously supporting the rules.

“We think these regulations, with enough flexibility, can make it clear to everybody what the standards are,” said Patrick Johnston, president and CEO of the California Association of Health Plans.

He said that doctors should still be given leeway to see patients with the most critical problems first. Regulators should look at general compliance with the time limits, he said, rather than occasional violations.

Kaiser Permanente leaders noted that they already offer members same-day urgent care appointments, 24-hour phone advice, and Internet-based tools that enable patients to e-mail their doctors.

“We worked with the Department of Managed Health Care during the development of the new access regulations. “… We will continue to work with regulators on implementation of the regulations, ensuring that we meet the 2011 compliance requirement,” Kaiser officials said in a written statement.

Consumers who think their HMO has violated wait times can complain to the state Department of Managed Health Care at 888-466-2219 or www.healthhelp.ca.gov.

The Vator.tv video about QLess got me thinking about the origins of standing in line. We now know it goes back at least as far as the Egyptians. Tim recently found two references to standing in line in Ancient Egypt:

“We have a picture of them lined up awaiting their turn as an itinerant barber, who has set up his stool under a tree, shaves a customer, leaving him with a cranium as smooth and shiny as a billiard ball”.*

* Lionel Casson, Everyday life in ancient Egypt, p. 24, JHU Press.

A second reference is found in the tomb of Userhat, who lived during the reign of  Amenhotep II was the 7th Pharaoh of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty,  usually dated from 1427 to 1400 BC:

“The left half of this scene shows simple soldiers in the three upper registers. They have bags with provisions in their hands and are lined up before the supply depot waiting for their food.”

Sigrid Hodel-Hoenes and David Warburton: Life and death in ancient Egypt: scenes from private tombs in new kingdom Thebes, p. 75.

It’s not everyday that you get to improve on a custom that has been ingrained across humankind for at least three thousand years.

–Alex

QLess launched successfully in Ohmycut!, a salon chain in Spain. So far QLess has reduced the no-show rate by 63%!

–Alex

The % of those using their cell phones to queue up via the QLess home kiosk who show up for service is equal (if anything, a little higher) than that of those doing it on-site at the DMV, validating the model of remote or off-site queueing pioneered by QLess.

–Alex

Nespresso, the fastest growing division of Nestle, the world´s largest food and wellness company, launched QLess, increasing the % of customers who show up for service among those waiting more than 10 minutes by 64%:

Photos below:

“I think this is a wonderful way to improve patient satisfaction and reduce expenses…I think this would be a killer thing to have in a healthcare organization. I’d like to have it…It’s extremely neat…I wouldn’t want to build and operate this in-house –I want to sleep all night long”.

–Kurt Vanriper, Manager, Pharmacy & Analytical Systems, Kaiser Permanente

We visited Mesa Community College and asked QLess users what they thought of the system. Here’s what they said:

“QLess? It’s quick, it’s convenient. Quick and easy tool. Quick to navigate through. It’s very easy for me. I don’t have any complaints.”

-Chloe Crims-Merritts, Receptionist, Admissions and Advisement, Mesa Community College

“I love the fact that we can cell phone numbers in and students can go anywhere they want pretty much on campus. They don’t have to necessarily wait here…Basically, I really like it.”
–Christiana Ravecchioli, Receptionist, Admissions and Advisement, Mesa Community College

Can your alma mater use more time in the library and less time waiting for service? Refer them to http://qless.com/colleges/ and then claim your prize at
http://qless.com/affiliate/ .

From today’s L.A. Times:

As concern spreads about H1N1 flu, a new survey of California voters found that while most consider the vaccine safe, a majority had no plans to get vaccinated …

The findings come from a new Los Angeles Times/University of Southern California College of Letters, Arts & Sciences Poll. The survey, which interviewed 1,500 registered voters from Oct. 27 through Nov. 3, was conducted for the Times and USC by two nationally prominent polling firms, the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies. The results have a margin of error of +/-2.6 percentage points.