Traditional workflows simply aren’t sustainable if you want to grow your practice. After all, when all your time is spent managing paperwork or calling patients (which, let’s face it, typically ends in unsuccessful games of phone tag), you have less time to focus on actual patient care and other revenue-generating activities.
The numbers speak for themselves
- 3 hours is wasted per staff member per day on phone tag alone
- 50% of physicians’ time is spent on paperwork with only 27% on actual patient care
- Busywork costs physicians an average of $50,000 in revenue each year
Needless to say, when you streamline your workflows, you’ll be more productive and be able to cultivate a stellar patient experience — one that keeps patients coming back and revenue in your pocket.
With that, here are eight ways medical practices streamline their workflows
- Digitize patient communication: Stop relying solely on phones. Not only do patient phone calls waste your time, they’re not what patients want. Instead, patients prefer texting and other digital and asynchronous forms of communication.
- Automate routine patient outreach: Schedule automated messages to your patients across their entire journey, from appointment reminders and instructions to follow-up care and more.
- Collect patient information digitally: Instead of asking patients to fill out paperwork and submit insurance information at their appointments, digitize the collection of it and have your patients submit before they come in.
- Easily collaborate with care teams: To keep your staff and other care teams (like pharmacists and lab techs) on the same page, consolidate communication in one place, assign tasks to specific people, and more.
- Offer online scheduling: Similar to how patients want to communicate with you digitally, they also want to schedule their appointments digitally. Adding an online or mobile scheduling option will go a long way in helping you secure more appointments.
- Automate billing: Avoid billing errors or delays with medical billing software that helps automate billing cycles and workflows, increases payment turnaround, and more.
- Assess current tech stack: Take a look at the technology platforms and/or software programs you’re currently using to see a) if they’re actually helping you save time and money, b) if anything can be improved. For example, if you’re using a lot of siloed systems that are actually creating more work for you team, consider consolidating to one or two platforms that do more for you.
- Properly train staff: To ensure your workflows run smoothly, make sure your team is properly trained on your processes, systems, etc.
At the end of the day, “busywork” is necessary for any practice — for example, you need to communicate with patients to ensure they show up for their appointments, you need to collect patient information and consent forms in order to provide actual care, and more. Fortunately, solutions like Klara exist to help you streamline, digitize, and automate inefficient patient workflows so you can focus on a great patient experience.
