How to Measure Patient Cycle Time

Happiness is important, especially when it applies to your patients and your staff. With those two groups content the way is paved for providers to enjoy life a little more as well. The trifecta of happiness. It’s a good goal.

Believe it or not, there is one measure that's been linked to greater satisfaction scores for all three groups, patient cycle time. The only way to know yours is to measure it. 

Cycle Time

Patient cycle time refers to the time included in an office visit, beginning the minute the patient arrives for the appointment and ending when they walk out the door.

Having a cycle time over an hour is one metric that seems to be connected to lowered patient, staff, and physician satisfaction. That means it’s something you’ll want to avoid. We’ll be providing another blog post soon with tips on reducing patient cycle time, but for now let's stick to how to measure it.

What to Measure

There could be many reasons why your cycle time may be longer than you'd like. Maybe patients are arriving late. Maybe the front desk is getting behind logging patients in. Maybe exam rooms are not adequately stocked and staff are searching from one place to the next for materials to handout to patients or tools to complete exams. 

The thing is, you won't know what is causing your backlog unless you measure your patient flow. Consider some of the following elements you can measure as part of a Patient Cycle Time Assessment.

• Patient appointment time
• Patient check-in time
• Patient exam room check-in time
• Provider enters the room time
• Patient leaves the exam room time
• Check-out time

You can add more or remove items from this list, depending on how long you want the assessment to take. 

How to Measure

There are some easy ways to measure cycle time for your practice. Here’s an example of one process:

1. Be sure to include a sampling of patients for each of your providers
2. Include a minimum of 15 patients in your sampling
3. If you have an EHR, you may be able to track a patient's progress through their exam electronically
4. You can use the form provided by IHI (link below) to track patients manually.
5. Record the time patients progress through different parts of the practice
6. Produce reports that show results overall for the practice and by provider.
7. Share the Patient Cycle Time Reports during your next staff meeting and talk about bottlenecks and ways to improve patient flow.

Cycle Time Benchmarks

What’s a good goal? Some experts say a good benchmark for patient cycle time is 30 minutes. Of course, that depends on the amount of time the patient is scheduled to see the provider. A good rule of thumb is that the cycle time should be about 1.5 times the exam time. That means if the exam is scheduled for 20 minutes, the cycle time goal would be 30 minutes.

Below are some more resources to help you through this process. Stay tuned because we'll be sharing another blog post soon on Cycle Time Analysis.

Additional resources:

• Strategies for Better Patient Flow and Cycle Time by the AAFP's Family Practice Management.
• Office Visit Cycle Time by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's
• Measuring Office Visit Cycle Time by Efficiency in Practice