Integrated ambulatory care services in oncology

In today's medical care environment of cost containment and restricted reimbursement, it is important to maximize the use of expensive facility and personnel resources. Concurrently, it is important to provide superior and timely patient services in order to remain competitive in an extremely flexible market. There are many areas in today's larger hospital environments where such ideals can be easily achieved. One of the more obvious areas is the automation of appointment and resource scheduling for ambulatory care services. This article focuses on maximizing the use of available physical and personnel resources in the ambulatory care setting of large and specialty hospitals. The Johns Hopkins Oncology Center's integrated outpatient scheduling and resource management systems are used as examples of what can be achieved. It is hoped that the experiences of the Oncology Center in developing these integrated systems will help others in similar efforts.