What Does the Clinic of the Future Look Like? 9 Questions to Ask
Care is leaving the hospital, so the safety, visibility, and operations that support it need to move with it. Today, outpatient clinics are increasingly important to both health systems and patients; their share of gross patient revenue has grown from 35.8% in 2014 to nearly 43.7% in 2024. In addition, because more hospitals see sicker, more complex populations, outpatient clinics fill an important niche, taking the burden off EDs and serving as a front door for ongoing care.
As a result of this thematic shift, the idea of “The Clinic of the Future” has grown in popularity, but remains an ill-defined concept. Ask 10 leaders, whether they’re VPs of Ambulatory, COOs, or CIOs, about what the Clinic of the Future holds, and you’ll get 10 different answers based on each leader’s individual experience and clinic circumstances.
To better understand what the ideal clinic should look like, let’s start with what patients and providers need in order to receive and deliver the best care possible. On the patient side, they can book appointments easily, with minimal scheduling lag and without having to wait an extended time for an opening. Once in the clinic, their experience should be as smooth as possible; navigating to the clinic and exam room and seeing a provider with little delay.
For providers, there should be minimal operational friction. Clinical staff are able to quickly find and retrieve portable equipment, such as blood pressure monitors or ultrasounds; there are reminders for infection prevention to sanitize their hands regularly and frequently. The clinic staff are valued and their safety is prioritized; staff have the means to send out duress alerts in threatening situations.
So how far away is your clinic from embodying “The Clinic of the Future”? Read on to answer these questions, and determine just how close your clinic is to this state.
Access and Throughput
The below questions thematically uncover gaps between fixed resources versus variable demand. This stems from the difficulty in matching variable patient demand and services with a fixed pool of providers, rooms, and equipment. For instance, some patients will require less (or more) time than their allotted appointment slot; other patients may not show up or arrive late, forcing clinicians to wait, cutting into their admin time, impacting clinic productivity and lengthening appointment times. All of this affects the performance of a scheduling system.
How easy is it to book an appointment?
Despite online platforms making scheduling more accessible, booking an appointment has never been harder. A 2025 study found that scheduling lag, or the time between the date an appointment is booked and the actual date of the appointment, has grown across 15 major metropolitan areas by 19% since 2022 (and 48% since 2004). The largest jump was in OB-GYN clinics, where patients had to wait an average of 42 days (a 33% increase from 2022), followed by Gastroenterology, where patients waited an average of 40 days for appointments.
Any Clinic of the Future must include technology that can optimize scheduling templates in real time, reconciling the scheduled versus actual length of patient appointments, provider capacity, room space, and equipment needs.
How long do patients wait to be seen?
Even after patients book appointments and arrive at the clinic, they often spend the majority of their time waiting for providers. A 2022 study concluded that patients spent almost 60% of their time at clinics waiting to be seen; that equates to an average of 24.4 minutes in waiting rooms, and 41.2 minutes in the exam room.
If patients already had to wait weeks for an appointment, waiting almost another hour once in the clinic is intensely frustrating, and will impact the patient experience. In the ideal clinic, a patient moves from check-in to a provider with little idle time in either room. When a patient does need to wait, that delay is surfaced to clinic staff, so they may touch base with the patient, set expectations, and perform some proactive service recovery.
How long do appointments actually take?
Currently, there is a big gap between the scheduled and actual length of an appointment. One study at a large cancer clinic found that on average, patients occupied rooms for 94.8 minutes, even though standard appointments were booked for 58.2 minutes, or a discrepancy of 40.3 minutes. Patients waited 34.9 minutes for the oncologist, and the oncologist spent 29.0 minutes in the room. This disconnect leads to downstream delays and disruptions in clinic flow.
Traditional templates already set visit length by visit type (such as new or return patient, transplant visit, etc). In the ideal clinic, templates still use visit types, but each visit length is adjusted to how long providers actually need to see their patients. After all, appointments finish early, run late, or sometimes never even happen at all. Accomplishing this requires technology, such as RTLS, that can track the duration of various appointments.
Are your exam rooms being utilized to their maximum capacity?
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, this rate has dropped; from our own research, we’ve found that the utilization rates of exam rooms peak at around 33% during business hours.
Empty exam rooms equate to lost revenue. If templates cannot correlate scheduled and actual room time, then they cannot predict when a room will sit idle. In the ideal clinic, leaders see room occupancy as it happens, and dynamically assign patients to optimize their existing physical space.
Are you monitoring unused capacity? How much does that cost?
Few clinics track how many hours their exam rooms sit empty, so few know what those hours cost, or how many patients they could have seen. One cancer center estimated its exam room cost at $55 per hour; given that patients were occupying rooms for an average of 43.7 minutes longer than scheduled, they estimated that they were losing roughly $40 per visit. The same math works for idle time: multiply unused room hours by the hourly cost of the room. Every single dollar lost is also a missed appointment.
In the ideal clinic, leaders see unused room hours in dollars and act on them. They ensure that their clinics use this space effectively, so that patients can be seen more efficiently, and thus, have better access to care.
Equipment and Supply Tracking
Many hospitals already use RTLS devices to track valuable assets and monitor biologics for temperature excursions, yet this equipment is less commonly used in ambulatory settings. If a blood pressure monitor leaves its room with no record of where it went, or a refrigerator fails overnight, then staff spend time searching or verifying.
Can staff find key equipment right away?
Although clinics don’t possess the quantities or diversity of equipment that hospitals do, they still have significant assets, from mobile ultrasounds to blood pressure monitors. Tagging and tracking this equipment will reduce the time that providers spend looking for assets, and instead, enable them to spend more time with patients. In the ideal clinic, staff locate any device using the tools they already have (such as EHR interfaces).
Are biologics stored safely, and can you prove it?
Refrigerated biologics and vaccines are valuable and expensive to replace. An overnight failure may go unnoticed until the next round, leaving staff to decide whether the contents are safe to use.
In the ideal clinic, a temperature excursion triggers an alert at once so that technicians can act quickly; in addition, records are audit-ready and easily accessible to aid compliance and reporting.
Staff Safety and Hand Hygiene Compliance
Whether it’s hand hygiene or staff safety, monitoring, preventing, and reporting incidents is much more difficult by hand. An incident in the parking lot and a hand wash skipped between rooms both depend on someone noticing, reporting, and recording. But the ideal clinic will also proactively prioritize patient and staff safety in real time, instead of only working reactively.
Are your staff protected throughout your clinic?
From parking lot to patient room, providers need to be able to work without fear, feel valued, and believe that their leaders care about their safety. A systematic review of outpatient physician clinics found that up to 62% of nurses in outpatient settings reported being the subject of violence; verbal abuse from patients or visitors ranged from 42.1% to 94.3% across studies; and physical assault from 0.5% to 15.9%, though most studies used convenience samples.
The ideal clinic will ensure that staff have a way to call for help wherever (and whenever) they need it.
Is hand hygiene compliance measured?
Manual audits depend on observers, and observers change behavior. The Leapfrog Group reports that only about 10% of hospitals use technology to manage hand hygiene, so most audit by hand. In one study of 15 outpatient facilities in New Mexico, observers recorded 63% compliance with recommended hand hygiene practices.
In the ideal clinic, every room entry and exit is counted automatically and staff see their own results.
If you scored your clinic against these nine questions, where did it fall short? KIO Clinic is our approach to purpose-built technology for the clinic of the future.
