Improve it or lose it! Today’s medical practices face many challenges and obstacles affecting their ability to deliver the service patients expect. Being able to improve the patient experience to improve satisfaction levels means you need to be working as efficiently as possible to reach the high standards set by yourself and your patients and ensure nothing is overlooked.
With more patients than ever feeling less than satisfied with their medical provider, improving efficiency is paramount to help you overcome any issues and ensure the highest patient satisfaction possible.
Implement The Right Admin Technology
If you need to streamline how you operate, then you need to improve your admin processes, and this requires you to invest in technology to help you improve the booking system and automated appointments to allow you to free up staff members, avoid mistakes, and improve the way appointments are booked. By automating these, you are allowing patients an easier option to book. They aren’t always waiting for someone to answer the phone. Bookings can be made in person or online, allowing you to effectively utilize appointment slots and bring in more patients per day.
Manage Effectively
Not all doctors or medical professionals are managers, and that’s okay. Still, if you cannot manage effectively, you need to bring someone on board who understands how you need to operate and can cover this for you. You can also implement medical practice management solutions that enable you to operate without dropping the ball on seeing your patients and ensure everything is taken care of, from collecting payments to identifying issues. Implementing the correct software can help you overcome challenges and make the improvements required to manage your practice.
Delegate
You need to ask yourself do you really need to complete these tasks, and if not, why are you doing them? You need to be delegating to allow you to reduce the impact on your ability to see patients. Suppose your manager or senior admin staff aren’t able to delegate effectively. In that case, you need to look at everyone’s responsibilities, what needs to be carried out each day, and make sure that everyone is being given jobs appropriate to their position and skill level if you don’t need to, get someone else to do it.
Give Patients More Control
This requires you to invest in technology to allow patients to take control of booking their own appointments, checking in for appointments, and accessing other medical information such as test results themselves. You will need to implement an excellent website to help you upload and store the data for access by the patient and retain security and privacy levels as directed by regulations and federal government pertaining to data protection laws; however, by giving them the power to make these decisions, you can free up time and wasted resources and improve customer satisfaction in one fell swoop.
Prioritize Copayments
You must ensure you collect payments as soon as the appointment ends, if not before you need to. This means your billing process needs to be ready to process the information instantly and accept the payment. You need to address how effective this is currently and where you can improve. In most managed care settings, the copay is obligatory, meaning most patients will be paying this fee, so ensure you collect and avoid patients skipping out after they have been seen because they are busy and need to go without paying.
Focus on Patient Care
It goes without saying that you need to give your patients the time they require to help them with their health concerns. Rushing through patients or not having the focus to pay attention to what they tell you will impact your patient satisfaction scores and damage your practice.
Instead, by implementing the suggestions mentioned, you can take away some of the more managerial aspects of what you do to allow you to focus on your patients and what they need there and then. While most patients see around four patients per hour with correct scheduling, if it doesn’t work for you, you need to find the right appointment length to give your patients what they need and expect and ensure that you deliver where you need to and put them first.
Improving your efficiency as a medical care provider means putting patient care at the heart of your decisions and deciding what would work best for them. All of the changes in the post allow you to make positive changes that will benefit the patient, improve how you operate, and let you do what you trained all these years to do.
