Running at 60% capacity. The efficiency went into filling it, not cutting staff.
South Florida Diagnostic Imaging sees around 350 patients a day and keeps its doors open from six in the morning until ten at night. Automation took over a quarter of the work in some departments, and Bill Leon spent every hour of it on capacity rather than payroll.
South Florida Diagnostic Imaging
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“South Florida Diagnostic Imaging has a very busy practice. We see approximately 350 patients a day. We have a lot of machines, a lot of staff.”
“Patients can get a link through a text and schedule themselves as easy as making a reservation at a local restaurant. Two or three steps, and they can select the desired day and time, and they can also schedule this at 4:00 in the morning or after hours when the staff may not be available, or on the weekends.”
“Instead of receiving a fax and typing all this information into our old system, now with AbbaDox things are getting automated. With artificial intelligence software, all these faxes automatically get interpreted or read and input into the software. So our medical records personnel do not have to type all that in.”
“In terms of cost saving, you can either say, okay, I’m going to cut staff, or I need to grow my business. My utilization of my facility is about 60%. I need to fill my machines. So with the personnel that I have, now increasing efficiency, I can address that.”
“What we were missing up until now was to have state-of-the-art enterprise software that goes with that. So I think we feel fairly complete now that all the pieces, now we have the infrastructure.”
What the saved time was actually for.
Bill Leon is President of SFDI. He is unusually direct about the arithmetic of an imaging business, which is why his account of automation does not sound like anyone else’s in this set.
“South Florida Diagnostic Imaging has a very busy practice. We see approximately 350 patients a day. We have a lot of machines, a lot of staff.”
“Patients can get a link through a text and schedule themselves as easy as making a reservation at a local restaurant. Two or three steps, and they can select the desired day and time.”
“They can also schedule this at 4:00 in the morning or after hours when the staff may not be available, or on the weekends.”
“Instead of receiving a fax and typing all this information into our old system, now with AbbaDox things are getting automated. All these faxes automatically get interpreted or read and input into the software. So our medical records personnel do not have to type all that in.”
“In terms of cost saving, you can either say, okay, I’m going to cut staff, or I need to grow my business. My utilization of my facility is about 60%. I need to fill my machines.”
“The ease of taking appointments compared to the old software. Our schedulers now, it’s made it more efficient to actually take on a phone call and make an appointment. We have automatic wizards with intelligence, and it’s a tremendous improvement.”
a wide range of services
the whole plan answers
departments, automated
The machines are the asset, and they were idle
South Florida Diagnostic Imaging is a high-volume practice: around 350 patients a day across a wide range of services, a lot of equipment and a lot of staff. The doors open at six in the morning and close at ten at night, though most services run from seven to five.
And by Bill Leon’s own reckoning the facility runs at about 60% utilization. That single number reframes everything that follows. An imaging center’s cost is largely fixed (the scanners, the rooms, the rent) so the question is not how to spend less running them, it is how to put more work through them without hiring proportionally to do it.
- Around 350 patients a day
- Open 6am to 10pm; most services 7am to 5pm
- About 60% facility utilization
- Fixed capacity, and the goal of filling it
Faxes that read themselves
The clearest saving is the least glamorous. Orders arrive by fax, and before this the medical records team received each one and retyped its contents into the old system. Now the fax is parsed automatically and the information lands in the record without anyone keying it, which is a whole category of work that used to consume a department.
The phones changed too. Schedulers work with a guided wizard rather than raw search, so taking a booking over the telephone is quicker and needs less expertise to get right. Bill Leon’s summary of the difference is not subtle: they were in the twentieth century, and now they are in the twenty-first.
- Faxed orders parsed and entered automatically
- Medical records staff no longer retyping incoming orders
- Guided scheduling wizards on the phones
- Tasks that took minutes now take seconds
“You can either say, okay, I’m going to cut staff, or I need to grow my business. My utilization of my facility is about 60%. I need to fill my machines.”
South Florida Diagnostic Imaging
As easy as a restaurant reservation
Patients receive a text with a link and book their own appointment in two or three steps, choosing the day and time they want. The part Bill Leon keeps coming back to is the clock: they do it at four in the morning, after hours, at weekends, all the times a practice cannot staff a phone line but a patient is nonetheless deciding to get a scan done.
The same logic runs on the referral side. Referring offices get a portal that tracks each patient through scheduling, cancellations, rescheduling, completion and the report, so nobody rings to ask where something is. And the moment an exam finishes the patient gets a text with a link to the report. For a practice competing on being easy to deal with, that is the product.
- Self-scheduling from a text link, in two or three steps
- Booked at 4am, after hours and at weekends
- A referring-physician portal that tracks each patient to the report
- Patients texted a link to the report as soon as the exam completes
Into the schedule, not out of the payroll
In some departments automation now covers 25% or more of what people used to do by hand. That is the point at which most operations stories talk about headcount, and it is exactly where this one turns the other way. The residual capacity went back into the schedule: the same team, filling more of the day.
The mechanics are ordinary and they compound. An automated waitlist fills a cancellation instead of leaving a gap. Calendar utilization improves because self-scheduling reaches into the hours nobody was answering the phone. More of the sixteen hours the building is open becomes billable, with the staff already on the payroll, which is what Bill Leon means when he says he wants to do more with less.
- 25%+ of the manual work automated in key departments
- The freed capacity redeployed to fill the schedule
- An automated waitlist that backfills cancellations
- Better calendar utilization across a sixteen-hour day
- Growth without hiring in proportion to it
What changed at SFDI
patients a day,
and room for more
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