Part of the challenge (and the fun really) in working in our space is educating our clients (and prospective clients) about how to be more efficient in what they do. We’ve found that many of the managers we talk to believe that their visiting staff members are using efficient routes to drive to their daily destinations, while the truth is quite different. So we decided to post this blog entry, “The Top 3 Myths About Efficient Routing.”
Myth #3: I’m using a Mapsco book, I’ve got efficient routing.
Reality: Not so much. Most people can eyeball a route on a printed map and figure out a reasonable way to get from point A to point B. But what happens when your daily drive takes you among points A, B, C, D, E, and maybe F, and G? There are several thousand possible combinations of driving between those points, and each segment of the trip can likely be traveled by at least 2 different paths. The “old eyeball trick” quickly fails to produce optimal results as soon as your trip involves 2 segments or more.
Myth #2: I’ve already got efficient routing because I’ve got Google or [insert brand name here] maps on my cell phone that shows me the quickest route to my next stop.
Reality: That’s a good start. But have you considered the order of your trips for the day? If your first visit is west of town, your second is east of town, and your third is west again, then you’ve just wasted at least one cross-town trip. Efficient routing is much more than getting from A to B in an efficient manner – it is also a matter of organizing your visits to A, B, C, D, E, F, and G by the most efficient overall path.
Myth #1: I’ve got efficient routing because I’ve got a computer program that organizes my visits for the whole day along the shortest path to the full set of destinations.
Reality: Now you’re getting there! This is a Good Thing as Martha Stewart used to say. (Does she still say that?) However, consider two clinicians each with a full schedule. What happens when their routes overlap somewhat? What if each of them have visits on the West, East, South, and North sides of town? Between the two of them, that’s at least two extra cross-town trips. You could have split their patients up so that one nurse serves West and North, and the other serves East and South. In fact, you could have analyzed your entire census and created a set of routes that minimizes the mileage for your entire team. Each clinician will only visit patients in a small area, avoiding large drive times as much as your geographic case mix and workforce parameters will allow. And you can run this optimization every morning before your nurses leave for their daily visits. Now you’ve got efficient routing! Or do you?
Bonus Myth: I’ve got efficient routing because I’m doing full census, full staff routing optimization.
Reality: You are almost there! You’re saving a huge amount of money. Now take a look at your travel reimbursement procedures. Have you standardized your reimbursement policy based on your optimal routing software? Does your customized daily route map for each clinician tell them exactly what mileage will be reimbursed for that day? And do you check their mileage report against that route map when the day is done? So that sounds like a huge administrative burden, who has time to do that, right. What if you had a system that automatically checks mileage reports against optimal routes that were provided to clinicians daily, and generates an alert whenever the claimed mileage was outside a certain range relative to the optimal route? Then you’d only have to chase down red flags, not every single mileage report.
Now — now — you’ve got efficient routing. You’ve optimized your visit schedule across your entire workforce and you’re running daily optimizations to ensure that ongoing patient admits and discharges aren’t skewing your routes over time. And you’ve got checks and balances in the system to ensure that clinicians are accurately reporting their mileage. Here’s the real beauty: your visiting staff is making more visits per capita than ever before, your mileage expense has dropped by 30%, and your revenue and profit are both significantly up. Yes, now you have efficient routing.
Best-
Matt
