Waitwhile facilitates safe, streamlined urgent care management for ModernMD

The Challenge

This winter, ModernMD was in the thick of treating an ever growing number of COVID patients and providing rapid COVID testing. They needed a solution for managing the increasingly long lines.

As an urgent care network, ModernMD had been walk-in only, a model that worked well pre-COVID. To ensure patients had immediate access to the urgent care they needed, ModernMD was open late into the night, seven days a week. But with the new, COVID-related social distancing constraints and increased patient volume and wait times, patients and staff were having to wait outside in front of urgent care centers while the weather grew increasingly colder. ModernMD’s walk-in model was quickly becoming unsustainable.

Given that wait times during the height of the pandemic were averaging two to three hours, ModernMD began to look for a queue management system that would allow patients to register, then wait from anywhere.

The Solution

ModernMD started using Waitwhile’s waitlist to improve their patient experience. Now, instead of having to physically line up outside in the cold, patients could wait comfortably from wherever was convenient for them. Using Waitwhile also allowed the ModernMD team to see the exact number of patients waiting and get a quick overview of their needs, making it possible to prioritize certain patient types.

Waitwhile offers multiple features, but for ModernMD, being able to reach out to patients via the Waitwhile SMS feature to ask clarifying questions or give additional information prior to their appointments, proved to be a real game changer. The medical facility was able to add custom patient intake fields that asked about insurance and gave information that could greatly affect the cost and quality of visits. Because patients now knew exactly what to expect, they were able to make decisions whether to come in or not in advance.

At first, ModernMD was concerned that less tech-savvy patients would have a hard time getting used to scanning a QR code in order to register and would continue standing in physical lines while more tech-savvy people got to wait from the comfort of their homes. But with the introduction of the text-to-join feature, (the ability to register via text message), this concern was resolved.

Another feature that proved valuable was Waitwhile’s data collection functionality which ModernMD used to identify the percentage of no-shows and cancellations. They were also able to better prioritize care after gaining a clearer understanding of their visits mix - how many patients were coming for an illness, versus an injury, versus a COVID test.

The Result

ModernMD attributes a large part of their success from Q3, 2020 onward to having Waitwhile as a differentiator for their patients. They came through a very challenging winter and have continued to see growth in visitor volume, revenue, and patient satisfaction.

Perhaps most importantly, the implementation of Waitwhile did a lot to boost ModernMD’s employee morale. Creating a way to better understand patients needs, improving waiting room management, monitoring social distancing capacity, and prioritizing the sickest, made it possible for both employees and patients of ModernMD to feel positive about their experience.

“We have received hundreds and hundreds of positive reviews about our waitlist platform and the resulting patient experience and level of satisfaction” - says Melissa Cohen, Vice President, Marketing & Business Growth at ModernMD Urgent Care. “Last spring and summer, we saw patient satisfaction dip as wait times got longer. But within a month of implementing Waitwhile in November, we saw an immediate upward trend back to our previous extremely high levels of satisfaction. Within three months, we were back to pre-COVID levels of patient satisfaction”.