ABSTRACT
Introduction: The COVID 19 pandemic increased the need for rapid and accurate diagnostic testing for COVID. When testing became available, a systems response was needed to efficiently accommodate the high-volume flow of patients who needed testing. Self-scheduling of COVID testing was developed to help patients safely and efficiently schedule their COVID testing online or with a mobile app. Methods: We captured the counts of COVID test appointments, time patients spent in scheduling COVID test appointments, appointment lead times, and no-shows for COVID test appointments. For 17 months of self-scheduling, we retrospectively compared self-scheduling with the concurrent staff scheduling of COVID tests. Results: From November 2020 through March 2022 there were 619â 104 scheduled appointments for COVID testing with 22% (136â 252) being self-scheduled. For asymptomatic self-scheduled COVID tests, accounting for 10.3% (63â 605/619â 104) of total COVID tests scheduled, median time to self-schedule was 3.1â min, interquartile range (IQR) [2.4,4.7]. For symptomatic self-schedulers accounting for 11.7% (72â 647/619â 104) of total COVID tests scheduled, the median time to self-triage and self-schedule was 5.8â min, IQR[4.3,8.9]. Self-scheduled COVID appointments increased to 44% (42â 387/97â 086) of the total COVID appointments during the peak month of January 2022. Median appointment lead time for symptomatic self-scheduled COVID test appointments was 6.6â h compared to 2.9â h (P < .0001) for symptomatic staff scheduled appointments. However, adjusting for the 24% (32â 194/135â 252) that self-scheduled during hours when testing was unavailable, the median appointment lead time for symptomatic self-scheduled patients dropped to 3.6â h. No-shows were 2.5% for self-scheduled appointments compared to 3.0% no-shows that were staff scheduled (odds ratio 0.83, P < .0001). Conclusion: COVID testing was self-scheduled for a large percent of scheduled COVID tests, taking patients only a few minutes to complete. Self-scheduling use increased over time, associated with a decreasing use of staff scheduled appointments and lower no-shows.