Irish-founded appointment scheduling system Swiftqueue has been integrated with fellow Dedalus’ platform PatientAide to further streamline the patient experience.

Swiftqueue is also introducing new capabilities such as dynamic questionnaires and the use of AI to its technology to help predict patients who may not attend their appointments, along with running new projects for oncology appointments in Ireland and a project with Boots in the pharmacy sector.

Swiftqueue was founded in Ireland in 2011 and is used throughout the hospital and community sector in Ireland, along with the NHS in the UK, Canada and now also in Australia and New Zealand.

First established as an enterprise appointment scheduling system, it is able to manage referrals, waiting lists and clinical appointments across acute and non-acute services, offering 24/7 visibility of available appointments along with integrations through APIs with patient administration systems, including Dedalus’ own iPM and WebPAS.

Acquired by Dedalus in 2021, Swiftqueue has recently been integrated with Dedalus’ patient engagement platform PatientAide to enable patients to manage their healthcare journey from a single interface.

Dedalus promises that it will enable patients to easily schedule their appointments through a user interface that allows them to book, reschedule or cancel appointments at their convenience.

Patients can also view real-time availability of their nearest clinic so they can find the most suitable time slot, and for healthcare providers, the scheduling engine will allow clinics to optimise appointment management and provide data driven insights into patient behaviours and appointment trends.

Did not attend rates

Patients can also receive timely reminders through an integrated notifications system, which Swiftqueue’s co-founder, Brendan Casey, said was shown to reduce no-shows by giving patients control of their appointments.

Mr Casey said this ability to give patients ownership over their appointments has been shown to improve do not attend (DNA) rates.

“Patient engagement is a big part of this, because patients who are engaged in selecting their time will attend their appointment,” Mr Casey said.

Research done in an implementation at Imperial College London Healthcare NHS Trust showed that enabling patients to take ownership of their appointments has transformed the way that their radiology service operated, he said.

The project had some key findings. “The first was that 80 per cent of all their patients booked their appointment within one hour of receiving their invitation,” Mr Casey said. “That gave them huge confidence that people were engaged. And this was from a standing start – we didn’t have another clinic in that hospital beforehand.

“The second was that the patients booked their appointment with the visibility that there were multiple locations, giving patients greater choice and ensuring they would attend. They were able to drop their DNA rate in the time they were running this initial study from 12 per cent to three per cent.

“And in one of their locations, they had no DNAs at all. If they were unable to attend, they were able to reschedule their appointment for a later date or for a different time or for another location.”

Community pharmacy

Swiftqueue is also being used as part of a broader initiative for the community pharmacy sector, including work in the UK with a number of customers to see how they can maximise their capacity and deliver certain types of appointments.

“We were able to provide access to patients so that they could see across the whole network where they could go for those appointments, and in some cases, they would be seen much faster in those locations than they would be seen in the hospital where they were attending for other treatments,” Mr Casey said.

“That was an example that we did a number of years ago, but it’s very relevant at the moment, because more and more services are now being offered by community diagnostic hubs, where they’re away from the main hospital locations, but also with other partners.

“We’re working with Boots in Ireland in terms of providing additional services, and there’s a lot of service evolution there in terms of what appointments are available in different locations with different providers.

“It comes back to the digital front door, so through the hospital website or a national patient portal, you can provide visibility of where patients can attend to get those appointments, those treatments, and then those treatments are then fed back into their overall patient record and back into the national system.”

Oncology in Ireland

In the UK, Swiftqueue is working with the NHS on integrations with some of the large scale diagnostic centres in terms of providing digital front door access for X-rays, ultrasounds, blood tests, but also for cardiology tests and for endoscopies.

“In Ireland, we have a big focus at the moment on oncology and in terms of implementing our oncology platform to support a national rollout for the scheduling of treatments of care,” Mr Casey said.

“For people attending for multiple sessions of chemotherapy or radiotherapy, they are able to view and see and understand what’s involved as part of each treatment. So it’s patient engagement, but also scheduling, not just for today, but for the next 10 to 12 treatment cycles, and providing that joined up view for the clinic too.”

This capability is now being used in community care settings in Ireland and for home care visits for NHS Trusts in the UK. Much of this developed during the Covid pandemic, when Swiftqueue was used to help organise clinics outside of the main hospital settings.

“Swiftqueue was able to configure our solution so that patients were able to be contacted and then offered an appointment across a network of locations,” Mr Casey said.

“Post Covid we have expanded across community services, providing that linkage between healthcare in the acute settings, but then expanding it into the community settings as well, so that the patients are looked after by physiotherapy in the hospital as well as physiotherapy in the community, and you have the patient at the centre of their care planning.”

AI for DNA prediction

The company is also exploring how to use AI, Mr Casey said. “AI can absolutely help in terms of building on the foundation of the data that we process on behalf of our customer clinics.

“One area that is getting a lot of attention on our platforms at the moment is the use of AI to predict people who will not attend their appointments. Based on their previous booking history, based on their previous appointment history, we are able then to effectively identify patients with a higher propensity of not attending, and they will be contacted two days before their appointment to confirm that they will attend that appointment.

“We have a number of customers who are waiting to see the outcome of these trials. You could contact every patient and ask them, ‘Are they going to attend in two days’ time?’ but that is not a great use of resources, so we’re using the AI to identify those patients as early as possible and engage with them and to see are they going to attend.

“If they’re not, we absolutely want to know that, so then an appointment can be made available for another patient, either to book for themselves or to be able to call someone forward for an earlier appointment.”