Optimize Your Intake Process with PracticeVital

A smooth intake process is crucial for maintaining a productive practice. PracticeVital provides detailed metrics that can help your therapy practice develop a more data-driven intake process. By leveraging these insights, your practice can easily determine who needs openings and ensure that caseloads are balanced across clinicians.

Let's explore how the data in PracticeVital can streamline intake coordination and why having an automated system will improve your intake process.

1. Utilization and Average Weekly Sessions 

To easily determine which clinicians need new referrals, navigate to the “Clinician Metrics” section of PracticeVital. The “table view” allows you to see all of your clinicians and key metrics in a summary view. You can either look at the first column “average weekly sessions” or the “utilization” column to determine who has openings. You can also sort this column from highest to lowest or lowest to highest to determine who is under or over utilized.

Clinician metrics such as average weekly sessions and utilization percentages enable optimized scheduling. For instance, clinicians Eugene Miller or Mary Parker, with utilization rates above 100%, indicate a full caseload, while Joanne, Megan, and Patrick need referrals. Patrick and Joanne, who have an average of 0 weekly sessions, are new hires and good options for the new referrals. Megan’s metrics illustrate that she is having a hard time keeping a full caseload and well below her weekly quota of sessions. She is averaging 13.9 sessions per week out of an expected 25 which gives her a 57% utilization rate. A natural next step here would be to view Megan’s other metrics such as cancellation rate, retention and churn rates to determine whether or not she should continue to receive new referrals or if additional coaching is needed first.

2. Completed Sessions and Clients Seen

PracticeVital tracks the number of clients seen over a selected time frame, with "last month" being the most useful for intake coordination. By selecting "last month," you can view the number of unique clients each clinician has seen, providing an accurate count of active clients on their caseload. This method offers a more reliable representation of each clinician’s workload compared to the EHR's active client list, which relies on clinicians manually deactivating clients who have terminated– a task that is often overlooked.

If the intake coordinator is interested in seeing who may have upcoming openings, they can look at the “completed sessions” column in conjunction with the “clients seen” column in order to see the frequency with which clients are attending sessions. For example, Mallory saw the most clients (38) over the past month but did not have the most completed sessions (87). The data suggests she saw each client an average of 2.2 times during the month (87 sessions / 38 clients = 2.2 sessions/on average). The infrequency of client visits might indicate that many clients are scaling back on treatment– a sign that they may terminate soon. The intake coordinator will want to work with Mallory to plan for upcoming terminations and the need for new referrals.

3. Cancellation Rate

Monitoring clinician cancellation rates (e.g., Megan Ramirez with a 34% cancel rate) helps determine the need for additional bookings to buffer expected cancellations.

Megan is expected to see 25 clients per week, but with a 34% cancellation rate, around 8 clients will cancel weekly. Therefore, schedule around 33 appointments with her each week to account for cancellations. Monitoring cancellation rates can also improve administrative processes for appointment reminders or follow-up protocols with clients. 

4. Upcoming Bookings

Within each clinician’s metrics page, the area called “upcoming bookings” shows the number of scheduled appointments in the upcoming three weeks. Clicking into the “i” bubble shows the number of intakes that are scheduled in addition to regular appointments. The intake coordinator may use this information to determine if each clinician has enough upcoming appointments scheduled to meet their weekly goal. This section is also useful to see, at a glance, the number of intakes that new hires have scheduled for the upcoming weeks.

Leveraging data from PracticeVital can significantly optimize your intake process, leading to balanced clinician caseloads, efficient scheduling, and overall ease of intake coordination. By utilizing metrics such as utilization percentages, average weekly sessions and cancellation rates, you can ensure each clinician’s workload is optimized. Embrace the power of PracticeVital to automate aspects of your intake system and elevate your practice to new heights.