athenahealth Automation

This is an independent project I’ve undertaken in order to bridge my engineering background with medicine, to ultimately advance accessibility and efficiency in a clinical setting. This project is currently underway, and so this page will be regularly updated with images, code, and project ideas. I received a grant for this project from the Undergraduate Research Fund, from Tufts University.

I am working with a Dermatology practice in Rochester, NY to address various points of inefficiency they have identified in their day to day practice. The problem I am currently working on pertains to their waitlist: the problem they have identified is that appointment slots that get cancelled are difficult to refill, due to the nature of how they contact their waitlisted patients, through phone calls.

When working with the physician, we identified texting to be the best way to get a hold of patients quickly. Many of her patients don’t identify the phone call, and so ignore it, or simply are too busy to pick up the phone when the office calls them. On the other side, when the patients call back, the office is often inundated with phone calls through the day and can’t answer every single one immediately. They end up caught in a game of phone-tag, trying to track down someone with the availability to fill the slot. Texting would be a fast, easy way to contact patients, and most people would be able to see a text immediately, even if they are preoccupied.

I have planned and am currently in the process of building software that would automate this process, thus freeing up the front desk staff to answer incoming calls and perform other patient care duties. The basic scope of it is that the waitlist, which is normally stored in athenahealth, will be exported to an external database and regularly updated. From there, whenever an appointment slot opens up, all the staff will have to do is issue a command for the program to send out a mass text message to all members of the waitlist, instructing anyone with availability for that slot to call the office for an appointment. I am writing the program in Python, and using an SMS API to perform the messaging portion of this software.