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We hope you enjoyed the mapping exercise. Now you are ready for the final step in understanding your current patient visit process: Collecting Baseline Data. "Baseline" is just the statistically conventional way of saying "starting point". In other words, how are we doing now?

In Patient Visit Redesign™ we are interested in two primary data elements: cycle time and productivity. Only two indicators? Yes, and actually the emphasis is on cycle time. If you streamline your visit process so that visit cycle time is reduced significantly, you will find that productivity rises naturally. In other words, stop seeing "productivity" as something for which the clinician alone is responsible. Productivity is the end result of what we all do together. And, how we work together has a great impact on productivity.

Cycle time is the amount of time it takes to complete a single patient visit, from the time the patient walks in your door until the time the patient exits. We deliberately do not start the clock at the time of the patient's appointment, but rather at the time of the patient's arrival. Why? Because we are focused on the patient's experience in its entirety.

Productivity is measured as "throughput", i.e., patients per hour per clinician (or, after redesign, per Patient Care Team). And as explained in the instructions in the Baseline Data ToolKit, in calculating productivity we count all the hours a clinician works. For example, if the afternoon clinic was four hours long and the clinician saw 12 patients, but spent two hours afterwards recording progress notes, then we would say the clinician saw 12 patients in six hours (not four).

Download the tool: Baseline Data ToolKit (PDF), and follow the instructions for completing this vital and final step in understanding your current patient visit process.