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TIMElync (pronounced “time-link”)
Patient Appointment and Resource Scheduling for Health Care Organizations
What is TIMElync?
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Since 1993, TIMElync has been one of the most powerful, highly featured yet easy-to-use patient appointment and resource scheduling systems available. TIMElync is currently used in over two hundred health care organizations including private practitioners, multiple office clinics, urgent care facilities, and hospitals. It takes much of the pain and suffering out of the encounter scheduling effort.
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TIMElync provides the capability to quickly and easily schedule patient appointments based on the scheduled availability of:
- people (doctors, nurses, therapists, technicians etc.)
- places (treatment areas, offices)
- things (specialized medical equipment, transportation vehicles, etc.)
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TIMElync continuously calculates “appointment opportunities” based on the health care resources scheduled and currently available for the specified appointment type.
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TIMElync is configured to work with the specific health care user organization’s requirements. For example, it may be simply configured to schedule any appointment type with any available practitioner as long as there is a treatment space available. Or, as another example, cardiology appointment opportunities might only be shown for those times having a specific cardiologist, cardiology treatment room and EKG equipment simultaneously available.
Scheduling an Appointment
Even in busy, multi-station, multi-facility health care scheduling environments, a new patient may be entered and scheduled or an existing patient selected and the appointment made in less than one minute! This is because of the innovative methods used to present the patient and calendar information to the scheduling operator. Only two basic forms are used for appointment scheduling—the month calendar/timesheet form and the patient information form:
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These forms may be instantly accessed via mouse or keystroke. The patient is entered or chosen using the patient information form. Then, with a couple of mouse clicks or key presses the type of appointment, the appointment day and the appointment time are chosen.
Patient information includes all data required for a health care operation including insurance, contact information, notes, etc. A patient’s complete appointment history and future scheduled encounters may be instantly accessed.
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Appointment Types and Scheduling Templates
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Appointment types are established for specific health care encounter requirements. An appointment type coordinates type the time requirements for the resources (people, places and things) for that particular encounter or procedure. Examples of appointment types are: “new patient exam”,” stress test”, “echocardiogram”, “dialysis”, etc. This allows TIMElync to maximize the use of available resources via work loading algorithms.
Scheduling “templates” may be established that embody the “intelligence” of knowing shift intervals, the type of appointments allowed for a given practitioner, place or thing, etc. These templates may be used to quickly establish resource schedules in the future.
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Establishing Resources
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Capabilities may be established for each resource (e.g., health care practitioners may be grouped by specialty, treatment rooms by type of facility, etc.) to allow the correct type of resource to be applied to the specific appointment type.
Resources may be scheduled in groups or as individual items (practitioners, treatment areas, etc.)
Appointment types may be assigned to resources also. For example, a specific practitioner may be specialized to specific treatments. All of this is accomplished quickly by use of graphical input forms.
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Scheduling Resources
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Scheduling of resources—e.g., health care practitioners, treatment rooms, specialized equipment—is made easy through the use of a graphic scheduling module. Not only may resources be scheduled for “shifts” but also “exceptions” may be applied as to the appointment types to be allowed on that shift based on practitioner, practitioner group, place and/or equipment.
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Reporting
Examples of TIMElync’s extensive reporting features include
- Appointment schedules (e.g., by time, patient, practitioner, location)
- Several types of resource schedules listings
- Appointment exception listings caused because of schedule changes
- Open time listings
- Management analysis reports (e.g., operator logs, schedule change analyses)
- Schedule change listings
- Patient appointment history
While all reports may be viewed on the screen or printed, special “instant” screen reports are also provided for patient and practitioner schedules and patient history.
Stand-alone or Networking Environments
The system may be employed in “stand-alone” or local or wide-area networking environments (including the Internet). It may be seamlessly coupled to other systems (such as medical billing or local point-of-service to take advantage of an integrated data environment.
Security
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Up to four security levels may be set to safeguard resource schedules, limit “overbooking” capability, etc. Each individual operator is assigned a security level. Only the “superusers” or administrators of the system may change user security levels.
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Dozens of other features
There are literally dozens of other features incorporated in TIMElync, that may be used to customize the system to a specific operation--features such as the ability to make “sets” of appointments at one time for purposes such as physical therapy. Please Email DataLync for more detailed information or call 1.877.759.7842.
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