Intelligent Patient Flow Management System at a Primary Healthcare Center-The Effect on Service Use and Costs

Abstract

An intelligent patient flow management system (IPFM) was piloted at a large primary healthcare center in Finland in August 2017. The goals of the system are to help patients avoid unnecessary calls and visits to their health center and to enhance the use of professional resources through more streamlined patient pathways and the re-allocation of professionals from assessment tasks to actual patient care. These goals should be reflected in the decreased service costs through optimized contact forms. Using multiple regression analysis, we studied the associations between IPFM and patients' service utilization (17,943 patients; 73,038 service contacts) during the first five months of the pilot in 2017. The results indicated that the use of IPFM by the patient was associated with a decrease of EUR 31 in the total service costs of the patient in the study period. This decrease is 14% of patient's average total service cost.