Manager of Scheduling Operations

Department: Operations

Reports To: Chief Operating Officer

Location: Corporate / Hybrid (travel to clinic and ASC sites as needed)

FLSA Status: Exempt

Position Summary

The Manager of Scheduling Operations is responsible for standardizing and optimizing patient scheduling across all clinic locations and ambulatory surgery centers. This role owns the design, governance, and continuous improvement of provider scheduling templates, call center scheduling protocols, and appointment flow standards enterprise-wide. The Manager partners closely with Regional Directors, the Call Center, Practice Managers, and physician leadership to ensure scheduling practices support access, provider utilization, patient experience, and revenue goals, while allowing appropriate flexibility for local clinical needs.

This is a centralized policy and standards role: execution of day-to-day scheduling remains with local practice and call center teams, but the templates, rules, and protocols they follow are built, maintained, and enforced by this position.

Key Responsibilities

Scheduling Template Design & Governance

• Own the enterprise-wide framework for provider scheduling templates, including visit types, slot durations, block time, and buffer standards.
• Partner with Regional Directors and physicians to build templates that balance patient access, provider capacity, and subspecialty needs (e.g., cataract, retina, glaucoma, optometry).
• Establish a standard process and approval pathway for template changes, ensuring consistency across locations while accommodating legitimate local variation.
• Maintain a master template library and version control so changes are documented, auditable, and rolled out consistently.

Call Center Scheduling Protocols

• Develop and maintain scheduling scripts, decision trees, and protocols used by the call center to book, reschedule, and triage appointments.
• Work with the Call Center Director to train staff on protocol changes and monitor adherence.
• Define escalation paths for scheduling exceptions (urgent visits, physician-specific rules, referral prioritization).

Appointment Flow Standardization

• Standardize policies for new patient intake, follow-up scheduling, recall/reactivation, and no-show/cancellation management (e.g., overbooking rules, confirmation workflows) across all sites.
• Identify and eliminate variation in scheduling practices that drives inefficiency, patient leakage, or inconsistent access.
• Establish standard operating procedures (SOPs) for scheduling workflows and ensure they are documented in the operations manual.
• Performance Monitoring & Continuous Improvement
• Define and track enterprise scheduling KPIs (e.g., template utilization, time-to-third available-appointment, no-show rate, panel/provider access ratios).
• Partner with BI/analytics to build dashboards that give Regional Directors and physician leadership visibility into scheduling performance.
• Run regular reviews of underperforming or high-variance locations and lead root cause analysis and corrective action.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Serve as the primary point of contact for scheduling-related questions from Regional Directors, Practice Managers, and physicians.
• Collaborate with RCM, Marketing, and Physician Recruiting to align scheduling capacity with growth initiatives, new provider onboarding, and marketing campaigns.
• Support new location openings and go-lives by building initial templates and scheduling protocols.

Qualifications

Required

• Bachelor's degree in healthcare administration, business, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 5+ years of experience in healthcare operations, patient access, or scheduling management in a multi-site ophthalmology practice.
• Demonstrated experience building or standardizing scheduling templates and protocols across multiple locations.
• Strong analytical skills; comfortable working with scheduling and access data to drive decisions.
• Excellent communication and change-management skills - this role requires influencing physicians and regional leaders without direct authority over them.

Preferred

• Familiarity with EMR/PM scheduling modules (e.g., NextGen, Nextech, Modernizing Medicine).
• Six Sigma, Lean, or other process improvement background.
• Experience managing or partnering closely with a centralized call center.

Key Relationships

• Call Center Director – protocol design, training, adherence monitoring Regional Directors – template rollout, local exceptions, performance review Practice Managers – day-to-day scheduling execution and feedback loop Physician Leadership – template design input and buy-in
• BI/Analytics – KPI reporting and dashboards
• RCM – downstream impact of scheduling on collections and denials

Success Metrics (First 12 Months)

• Standardized scheduling templates deployed across all locations with a documented change-control process.
• Reduction in variance of key access metrics (e.g., time-to-third-available) across regions.
• Updated call center scheduling protocols in place with measurable adherence.
• Documented SOPs for appointment flow integrated into the enterprise operations manual.