Specialty Medical Practice Uses Appointment Request Feature for Website and Business Success

by Mark S. Gothberg

The Illinois Neurological Institute (INI) represents a key service line for OSF HealthCare, an integrated health network based in Peoria, IL. With a clinical staff of 60, it sees more than 95,000 patients a year and generates some $100 million in di­rect contribution margin. While OSF HealthCare employs a substan­tial number of primary care and phy­sician specialists, the growth of INI is dependent on consumer self-referrals and physician referrals from outside the system. Those two groups make up more than half of the service line’s profit.

“The key problem was that we weren’t meeting the needs of poten­tial patients who were searching for us and our services,” says Vickie Parry, INI marketing manager. “The website was static and offered little engagement for potential patients and referring physicians alike.”

The solution was to create an online appointment request feature, along with a system to track patient rev­enue generated by the new offering. The way in which this feature was developed and the results achieved were the subject of a presentation made at the Sixteenth Annual Healthcare Internet Conference. Scott Lungwitz, senior Web content specialist at OSF HealthCare, and Brian Moloney, managing partner at Chicago-based Imaginary Landscape, joined Parry in the presentation. Parry recently supplied updated in­formation.

The first step in the project was to hold discussions with all the major stakeholders in the organization to cover objectives and how they would be achieved. Particular emphasis was placed on assuring stakeholders that 1) the processes and work flow to accomplish the project safely and securely from a privacy/HIPAA standpoint and 2) the capability to follow up in a timely manner on ap­pointment requests would be ad­dressed.

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