Why a Robust Scheduling Solutions Ensures Accuracy for The Center for Sports Medicine & Orthopaedics

By Blakely Roth | January 22, 2025

The Center for Sports Medicine & Orthopaedics empowers their patients to book their own appointments. As a result, they’ve enhanced satisfaction and alleviated call center workloads. Prior to their success with digital scheduling, they quickly found out that not all online solutions are one in the same, with their original tool creating scheduling inefficiencies and increased burdens for staff. See where the differences stand so you can implement the right solution for your practice. 

About: 

• Practice Management System: athenaOne 

• Number of Locations: 11 

• Number of Providers: 21 

The Scheduling Complexity Challenge

Chief Operating Officer at the Center for Sports Medicine and Orthopaedics, Connie Roberts, says, “That convenience factor we had given patients was taken away when our previous solution wouldn’t map patients to the appropriate bookings. It didn’t allow us to set the parameters and rules we needed. Patients would book their appointments and plan accordingly, just for our team to call them and redo the process.”  

Going on she shares, “That was a critical piece and what led us to look at Clearwave as a new vendor.” 

With heavy phone traffic and complex orthopaedic booking workflows, the practice was looking for a reliable online scheduling system to keep schedules full and provide a positive patient experience. Lauren Lawson, Director of Marketing at the Center for Sports Medicine & Orthopaedics, shares, “We want to give our patients greater access to schedule online but also have a solution that is effective for our team. One that’s accurate and helpful.” 

Lawson continues, “Each provider has parameters for the types of patients they want to see and when they’re available to see them. With so many providers, locations and types of patients we see, our schedules can be highly complex. We needed a reliable scheduling vendor that could ensure that the appropriate patients made it into the appropriate spots on our physicians’ calendars.” 

The Clearwave Impact

With an existing solution that couldn’t keep up, and even caused additional work for staff, the practice instead turned to Clearwave’s patient-led scheduling software to fulfill their goals. The Center for Sports Medicine & Orthopaedics launched Clearwave Scheduling, for Call Center and self-service scheduling, to enhance agent performance, acquisition and patient experiences.  

As a result, The Center for Sports Medicine & Orthopaedics now provides patients with a streamlined scheduling process that ensures booking accuracy and reduces call center burdens. Lawson shares, “We’re no longer in a situation where new problems are popping up and setting us back, which is something that often happened with our previous vendor.” Roberts adds, “The time spent backtracking and calling patients to reschedule has significantly reduced from our previous solution.” 

Roberts shares the impact on call center agent performance, “The efficiency for our call center agents is much improved and we’ve tremendously mitigated scheduling errors.” 

Patient-Powered Results

• Approximately 3,000 call center bookings per month 

• 682+ online appointments scheduled monthly

• 23% of online bookings made by new patients 

• 26% of online bookings made last-minute 

• 39% of online bookings made after-hours 

These outcomes highlight the system’s effectiveness in increasing patient autonomy, acquisition and operational efficiency. 

Roberts shares how Clearwave implementation plays a role in their success, “Clearwave’s team is very engaged and always answers our questions with a ‘yes.’ When we asked, ‘Can it do that, or can you optimize for this challenge?’ It was, ‘yes, let’s sit down and hammer it out together.’ It was a collaboration. We now can focus on opportunities to tighten our workflows or expand to new appointment types. We’re making a very strong scheduling product a little bit stronger every day.” 

Read The Center for Sports Medicine & Orthopaedics full story here. 

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