How much time and money can you save using Hero Health?

The stats

Before we get into the nitty gritty, there are a number of important statistics that we have used in order to inform our calculations. They are:

·      The average GP receptionist spends 5 minutes and 30 seconds on the phone per appointment.

·      Based on an average GP receptionist salary, 5 minutes and 30 seconds of time equates to an adjusted salary of £1.50 for this amount of time.

·      On average, every patient is seen by the GP ~5 times per year.

·      On average, a patient spends ~8 minutes waiting on hold before they speak to a receptionist

Money saved

For every appointment automated by Hero, you are saving £1.50 per appointment. This is exclusively the administrative costs associated with booking the appointment and doesn’t account for other savings associated.

If the average patient population sees their GP x5 times per year, and the average GP patient population size is around ~15,000, there is a potential financial saving of £112,500 per year if you were to automate every single appointment booked at your practice.

However, we appreciate that it is unrealistic to assume that you would automate all appointments using Hero Health. It’s likely you would use Hero to automate those ‘directly bookable’ appointments such as phlebotomies, smears, asthma reviews etc.

Therefore, even if you were to use Hero to automate just one appointment per patient each year, you would be saving £22,500 of administrative time.

Importantly, this is the saving for a practice serving a patient population of ~15,000 patients. For larger organisations such as PCNs or Federations, the savings will be exponentially higher.

A simple calculation to work out how much money you save with Hero would be:

Number of appointments booked through Hero x £1.50

Time saved

Not only are you saving money on reception time spent scheduling appointments, you are reclaiming critical time for your team, that can be re-focused elsewhere.

Using the same example above, a GP practice serving a patient population of ~15,000 patients could save 82,500 minutes of administrative time each year, by using Hero to automate just one appointment per patient a year. Breaking this down further, this equates to 1375 hours saved.

Again, to calculate this for other population sizes, you can use this simple calculation:

Number of appointments scheduled through Hero x 5.5

The other benefits

Whilst time and money saved are going to be the most important metrics success is judged by, there are other, less quantifiable factors, that Hero can be assessed on.

Crucially, patient satisfaction is driven exponentially when using Hero. Again, if we imagine every patient in a practice of ~15,000 used Hero to book just one appointment. Based on the assumption that a patient typically spends ~8 minutes on hold before speaking with a receptionist, this equates to 120,000 minutes saved. This equates to 2000 hours saved.

This will not only drive patient satisfaction, encouraging them to book with your practice as they don’t have to face the prospect of waiting on the phone, it will encourage them to use the service again, making it more likely they will see a doctor or nurse when needed.