What Makes Cross-Provider Scheduling So Difficult?

Let’s Also Explore the Technologies to Solve it

The service sector accounts for about 64% of the world economy (services include activities such as haircuts, hotels & restaurants, transportation etc.). Scheduling the unique services of skilled professionals at the convenience of the consumers seeking their expertise for purpose is the very engine that drives this massive segment of our World’s entire economy - that  makes scheduling a Big Deal! (and growing bigger every year).

And yet, scheduling of services remains a frustratingly complex and nuanced solution domain, a perennial favorite for consumer complaints of ineffectiveness & and inconvenience, and a constant limitation to the optimal utilization of service provider’s valuable time across every sector.  In this article, we will focus on a particularly thorny set of scheduling challenges which inevitably complicate what we will refer to as “Cross-Provider Scehduling”. Namely, the problem domain within services scheduling which seeks to enable scheduling across multiple organizations, multiple service specializations, and multiple service categories, all simultaneously. These are likely to be the most difficult services scheduling challenges to face, and therefore, represent the most beneficial to solve for once the mysteries have been revealed.

Let’s begin by exploring the main root causes which result in Cross-Provider Services Scheduling becoming so complex and challenging. Once we understand the main influencers in this problem space, we can begin to apply uniquely adapted technologies which have been thoughtfully optimized to address these challenges for contemporary scheduling solutions that surprise and delight consumers and demanding businesses who seek superior scheduling experiences.

What Exactly is Cross-Provider Scheduling?

In the context of this article, the term “Provider” is meant to refer to an individual professional who possesses a combination of skills, experience and the related qualifications necessary for them to provide a specific range of services for their customers. These may include; accredited Financial Advisors, Wealth Managers, Investment or Financial Services Providers, Lawyers, Tax Accounts, CPA’s, etc., in Healthcare Providers include, Doctors, PA’s, Nurses, Medical Techs, PT’s, and many more, in Beauty and Wellness, Providers will cover a range including Estheticians, Hair, Nail and Waxing experts, Tattoo Artists, Massage and Therapeutics, etc. What do all of these professional Providers have in common? They all operate on tight schedules that want to be fully utilized, monetized, and yet flexible enough to suit the diverse and complex needs of their various customers. 

And none of them have any work until someone schedules something with them.

While ‘just scheduling’ of a Provider’s Services sounds deceivingly simple on the surface, the factors we’ll review below, along with many others, all conspire to make single-Provider scheduling a significant challenge. But that’s like Air Traffic Control (ATC) must have been back when there was only one Airplane in the World. No Provider is an ‘island’, all providers are a part of the vast eco-system of their chosen professions, consisting of the sum of all possible Providers (note we didn’t say ‘all available Providers’, because that already demands a scheduling solution just to be capable of identifying the difference between possible and available…that comes a bit later).

Our phrase “Cross-Provider Scheduling” then, by extension, refers to the act of many Customers (or Consumers, Clients, Patients, etc.)  all intent on scheduling one or more Services with a Provider of interest, from a diverse and independent pool of multiple potential Providers. The Providers in our Cross-Provider scenarios are generally a mixture of independent (often even solo) operators taken along with groups of Providers (in Clinics, Practices, Groups, Firms, Boutiques, Salons, etc.) and often all in competition for the business opportunities which the ‘scheduled Appointments’ represent to each of them. These conditions move us from the single airplane ATC days to something more akin to JFK, O’Hare or Heathrow on a stormy holiday rush day!  

Factor 1: Crossing the Multi-Organizational Chasm

The ‘Cross’ in Cross-Provider Scheduling highlights the reality that each individual Provider is essentially in professional competition with every other Provider of similar Services. Regardless of the domain (Healthcare, FiServ, Wellness & Beauty, Legal, Accounting, Plumbing, etc.).   Even within a single organization, all the individual Providers are also managed for performance and quality, etc. The book of business potential represented by the sum of the Providers is one direct metric of the capacity of said organization. Therefore, the seemingly benign topic of scheduling is actually fraught with internal competitive factors from the outset, even before the needs and foibles of the intended Customers are factored in.

Organizations (whether public or private) employing Providers must all seek to optimize the collective operational efficiency, throughput, brand prestige, plus revenue reliability and predictability. Therefore, the scheduling of these Providers, as a pool, is of utmost relevance. On the other hand, when viewed from the the individual level, Providers of every sort instinctively focus on maximizing their personal value via the utilization of their hard-earned skillsets, natural talents and qualification credentials. These natural forces create inevitable stress and strains on the logic and governance of Provider Scheduling 

Beyond the individual Provider level influences on the process, there are many additional layers of inter-organizational considerations which also confound most efforts toward Cross-Provider Scheduling. For example, each Provider organization will, of necessity, be focused on its own brand identity, its own operations and technology toolsets and organizational structures. Anywhere a Provider organization touches their respective customer bases, there is due jealously for eyes and loyalty. These influences are most clearly expressed on each Provider/org’s digital properties (e.g. websites, social media nexus, etc.). This need for Provider/Org specific identity at every touch point, of itself, adds much complexity to Cross-Provider Scheduling. 

Often the opportunity for expanded business via participation in a Cross-Provider scheduling forum becomes cumbersome for the intended Customer/Client/Patient audience as a direct result of the inherent imbalances between asserting Provider identity, USP and ‘advantages’ over all others. An important challenge to all our Cross-Provider activities is therefore finding creative ways to establish what might be called ‘inadvertent collaboration’ between adjacent, or even directly competitive Providers for sake of increasing the probability of Prospect Conversion to Client for at least one of the contenders often enough, that the natural randomness of the target market itself will distribute these conversion opportunities amongst the inadvertent collaborators as a pool.  
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Finally, one must consider and address the unavoidable complications due to the  multiplicity of physical locations for in-person services delivery, along with the geo-limits of specific service qualifications (e.g. Medical, Financial or other Regulatory Certifications, Licensing, etc.).

Factor 2:   The Conundrum of Free-Form Terminology

Most service domains which require expertise and/or regulatory qualifications on the part of the Service Providers are also replete with a lexicon unique to the service space. We’re all familiar with the confounding ‘language’ of medical treatment, the playground of acronyms which typifies Financial Services, or the language soup of contemporary Beauty & Wellness services terminologies, add their own layers of obfuscation to the attracting and conversion of prospects into happy-camper customers.

Making matters worse for those attempting to facilitate Cross-Provider Opportunity Scheduling is the fact that many Providers within the same service domain will gravitate to using their own home-spun terminology when referring to the same things. (e.g. NAIC says that ALAE is “an estimate of the claims settlement associated with a particular claim or claims”, that’s obvious right?). How does this complicate Cross-Provider Scheduling? Because in addition to the human and organizational barriers, we’ve come to recognize that the very terminology used to describe one’s own services may literally impede Prospects from what we call "Service Discovery”. 

When establishing forums through which multiple Providers can offer ‘similar but not identically described’ services (maybe we should call these SBNIDS ?), technical methods must be developed in order to ensure equality of Service Discovery.

Factor 3:   Provider Independence Fuels Complexity 

The world of qualified Service Providers is populated with millions of experienced, educated and highly capable individuals, each with their own success strategies and aspirations, as well as the entire spectrum of work-life balance styles. As a result, most Providers are also careful to  maintain control over the scheduling of their skills, regardless of the specialization. In simple terms, this means that rigid ‘rectilinear schedules’ of the old manufacturing world variety cannot possibly serve the practical daily needs of the vast majority of these Providers. 

Cross-Provider Scheduling strategies must take into account and easily facilitate the sometimes intensely independent nature of Providers. For many this means that scheduling of their Services must become a sort of collaboration between Customer and Prvder. Cross-Provider forums need to be capable of facilitating highly flexible logic and direct dialogs (often highly regulated and secured) between Customer/Patient and Provider in order to support and address changes in availability, individual preferences and last minute interruptions experienced on the part  of both parties. 

There is no “Sign Up Sheet” in Cross-Provider Scheduling!

Factor 4:   Human Misbehavior is Inevitable

Regardless of the Service being sought or provided, or any of the technologies to support it, the human nature of the Customer-Provider interaction has always been fundamental to all societies and carries with it a host of subtleties that cannot be ignored.  Here’s a smattering of familiar examples:

• Providers must seek growth through continuously adding New Customers, leading to a juggle between retention and expansion of their customer base.
  
• Customers are driven to ‘finding the best deal’ for themselves, inducing a level of suspicion of Providers and their agendas.
  
• The concept of ‘Comparison Shopping’ transcends all service domains and can feel in direct conflict with Cross-Provider Scheduling facilities (especially if they are perceived as being insufficiently transparent to Customers).
  
• Humans on both sides of the relationship are also driven by societal desires, norms and expectations which can foster various misbehaviors, even if entirely unintentional in nature:
  
  • Consumers Gaming-The-System for some real or perceived personal advantage is perhaps the most common of these misbehaviors.
    
  • Providers are also driven to game systems as expressions of competitive prowess,  the pressures of financial or economic hardships or ambitions, and.or trading healthy longer term behaviors for seemingly opportunistic short-term choices, usually with disregard for collateral effects.
    

This is by no means a condemnation of the human condition nor general cynicism over the otherwise massive benefits available by fostering commerce in all the services. Rather, it’s simply an acknowledgement that these factors, albeit mostly ‘edge cases’ by definition,  must also be addressed as an intrinsic part of the Cross-Provider Opportunities and Scheduling domain in order to protect and preserve the goodness of such systems and forums for the vast majority of Customers and Providers who stand to benefit significantly from them.

Factor 5:   In The End - It’s Also About Payment

Despite the ubiquity of payment methods these days, the act of payment for these services rendered, in a Cross-Provider environment, is another complexity factor that must be wrestled with. When making Cros-Provider Services readily discoverable, the salient parameters of the services must be communicated clearly, fairly, and transparently at all times. 

These parameters include not just the metadata of descriptions and explanations of benefit of the Services, but also all of the practical logistics as well, what’s the format?, where is the service rendered?, how long will it take? How often is it needed?, and critically, how much will this cost? (and who will actually pay for it?).

Maintaining a clear financial path for the scheduling, performance of, and charging for the services must be a seamless and coherent a process as the scheduling itself, regardless of the fact that in truly Cross-Provider ecospheres, every Provider is likely to have their own Scheduling and Billing systems, methods, partners, rules, policies, etc., etc. The Cross-Provider harmonization of all these gradients adds complexity and regulatory baggage to all Cross-Provider Scheduling activities.

How These Factors Collude to Thwart Traditional Scheduling

Stepping back and putting the entire list of complexity factors above into context, it’s easy to see why achieving scalable success in Cross-Provider Scheduling is so difficult. Each of these factors carries its own set of thorny issues associated with specific types of skills, services and facilities requirements, as well as the added complexities of the B2B and B2C interactions required at the individual human level. Taken as a whole, the constraints can be very daunting and have been the bane of many failed scheduling solutions of the past. What may have once worked well for scheduling of services of specific types simply fails to pass the test now, once all the factors are combined into one problem space. A more holistic approach is required in order to effectively address all these factors simultaneously, continuously, and scalably. 

By envisioning a suitably flexible metadata framework through which to construct relationships between these factors, it becomes possible to tailor logical, deterministic, scheduling process workflows which can operate autonomously and interact with simplified User Experiences well-suited for today’s Mobile-First user expectations, while maintaining the mandatory regulatory compliance and traceability mandates that predominate most Cross-Provider business domains (Health & Wellness, Financial, Legal & Professional Services, with regional requirements as well). 

With decades of experience in the architecture, development and delivery of complex scheduling solutions across the landscape of Financial Services, Healthcare, Wellness, Beauty and Professional DServices, the Tech-Azur Team is uniquely qualified to assist your organization to reach its goals in this domain. Beyond the skills and experience, Tech-Azur has developed a suite of its own proprietary Solution Components and associated Operational Excellence best practices which can be applied to accelerate and optimize solutions for your needs, while achieving compelling ROI objectives. Contact Tech-Azur today.