The future utilisation forecast metric provides practices with insight into their upcoming appointment book and how full they are with patient appointments.
This metric provides valuable insights to practices about their upcoming utilisation in their practice and how full your appointment book is in the coming weeks.
This metric can be found under Clinic Insights > Future clinic metrics.
The sections in this article related to future utilisation includes:
- Future utilisation forecast
- Future utilisation
- DNA-adjusted future utilisation
- Future utilisation by Practitioner
- Future utilisation by role
Future utilisation forecast
This graph shows the proportion of available time over the selected time period that has been booked to see patients in the future.
Utilisation is calculated by dividing the duration of all booked appointments by the total available session hours for team members.
Forecasted utilisation for the next 7 days is calculated by dividing the total realised duration of booked appointments by the total session hours, over the last 90 days. Double booked appointments can be included by selecting the relevant checkbox under filters.
TOP TIP! Use this metric in your practice to find out what days will be busy or quiet over the next 7 days. For example, if you're not very busy on Friday when normally you would be, consider reviewing your current roster to adjust how many team members are working.
Future utilisation
This figure shows the proportion of available time that has been booked to see patients in the future. Utilisation is calculated by dividing the duration of all booked appointments by the total available session hours for team members.
Double booked appointments can be included by selecting the relevant checkbox under filters.
Use the role filter to drill down to see how utilised your doctors, nurses, allied health and specialists are.
TOP TIP! Use this metric to help answer questions such as:
- How quickly does the practice book out?
- When is the next available appointment with an individual practitioner, and are there enough on-the-day appointments in our appointment book?
- I'm planning a staff meeting, when is a good time or day to do that?
DNA-adjusted future utilisation
This figure shows the proportion of available time that has been booked to see patients in the future, accounting for your clinic's average did-not-attend rate over the last month.
Double booked appointments can be included by selecting the relevant checkbox under filters.
TOP TIP! This metric is particularly useful to see how much of an impact DNA rate has on your utilisation at your practice and whether or not steps need to be taken to reduce your DNA rate, which will, in turn, increase your Practitioner utilisation rate and increase your cash flow.
Future utilisation by Practitioner
This figure shows the proportion of available time that has been booked to see patients in the future. Utilisation is calculated by dividing the duration of all booked appointments by the total available session hours for team members.
Double booked appointments can be included by selecting the relevant checkbox under filters.
The dark blue dots show your target utilisation for that Practitioner, so you can see how they are tracking in meeting their goals.
NOTE: If you would like to share the Practitioner's information with them, you can filter by individual Practitioner, giving you the ability to discuss your findings whilst still maintaining the privacy of your other Practitioners.
TOP TIP! This is a great metric to review first thing Monday morning, the value showing how utilised each practitioner is for the rest of the week. For example, are bookings low? Perhaps you may need to focus on some advertising this week. Alternatively, you may be already booked out by Monday morning. Do you need more practitioner hours to keep up with patient demand? Or which practitioner's appointment books are filled out first, or which practitioners need more new patients?
Future utilisation by role
This metric shows the proportion of available time that has been booked to see patients in the future, grouped by role. Higher numbers indicate that your team is more heavily booked.
Some roles like nursing may complete admin tasks, so will ordinarily have a lower utilisation rate in order to ensure Practitioner and patient support tasks are completed.
Future utilisation by role shows you a great snapshot of availability in your practice. It could be used as a metric that helps you with workforce forecasting.
Adding context to this metric, you could view the number of booked hours to determine if staff being absent could impact service delivery, or you may need to ask a part-time doctor if they are interested in a few extra hours as you are fully booked leaving no capacity to manage on the day requests for appointments. Check out our metric % of appointments booked on the day in our Appointment optimisation cabinet, to help in that decision-making process.
TOP TIP! On days or weeks where your nurse's utilisation forecast is low, look to have them focus on Chronic Disease item numbers, such as 10997s, if appropriate for your practice and patients.