Two focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. Medical practices are business. Doctors today likewise face the challenge of spending time with patients versus other matters related to the business. The following contributed post is entitled, What’s Taking Up the Time That Your Practice Should Be Spending on Patients.
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One of the greatest predictors of both patient satisfaction and better healthcare outcomes is the amount of time that doctors and nurses are able to spend with the patients that come through their doors. However, it’s not a lack of care that stops medical professionals from giving their patients the care and attention they deserve, as you likely already know. Instead, it’s often the thousand-and-one things you have to get done that take up that precious time. Here, we’re going to look at a few of them, at least, and what you can do to reduce how much of your day they take.
Poor Delegation
There are few things that can help you better manage your time than a great team. Physicians and other direct care providers often take on more tasks than they should, especially if they are also the business owner. While you might feel invested in doing everything right, training administrative staff and other team members to do it for you can help you handle tasks like routine patient queries and chasing paperwork with ease.
Inefficient Record Management
The proper management of health records in your practice is not only vital for operational efficiency, but it is necessary for regulatory compliance. Ensuring that you have a streamlined electronic health record (EHR) system and that your team is trained to use it, to regularly update it, and to be able to pull records on demand can help you prevent chaos. You want to make sure that patient information is readily accessible to all who need to be able to find it.
Paper Documentation
If you’re operating with paper documentation, whether it’s for patient information or for other processes, then you’re a lot more likely to experience errors and inefficiencies like lost documents. Paper documentation is significantly slower to produce and handle, not to mention prone to misfiling. Transition to digital documentation systems as quickly and as steadily as you can. Scanning and digitizing your existing records can make it a lot easier to run a business that is as paperless as possible.
Marketing
You want to make sure that your practice is the talk of the town and marketing can be vital for that. However, if you’re spending too much of your time acquiring and retaining your patients through your marketing plan, it can become a major time sink. This is especially true if you’re running ad campaigns, social media profiles, a blog, and more. Outsourcing your marketing efforts allows you to free up time while working with professional digital marketers who are able to ensure that your expertise is showcased in the way that best fits the market you’re trying to target. Aside from freeing up your own time, you can entrust your marketing to those who have the time to ensure it is as effective as possible, through metric analytics and thorough campaign planning.
Digital Administration
While documenting things digitally might be a lot more efficient than handling paperwork, it can still take a lot of time. If you’re wasting precious hours managing email inboxes, responding to queries, and maintaining digital schedules, then you might want to look into the help that a medical virtual assistant can provide. Many of the digital administration tasks on your plate need to be handled, they can’t simply be ignored. You can, however, entrust professionals to handle them for you and to interface with your needs on a daily basis to make sure that your own workload is never too heavy.
Billing and Invoices
You need to ensure that your financial paper trail is processed and recorded well at all times, but issues such as billing errors and delays in invoice processing can disrupt your cash flow as well as waste your time. Having to handle disputes can do it even further. With the help of robust billing software, especially one that integrates with your EHR software, you can automate routine tasks like sending invoices and reminders, or you can entrust it to a specialized service provider instead.
Waiting For Lab Results
Sometimes, delays are out of your hands. If you work with a lab that is frequently late in returning results, it can begin to create an overflow of inefficiencies. You might have a backlog of patients waiting for news, as well as staff growing more frustrated as they check for updates. When that happens, often, the best thing that you can do is partner with a different lab. You can also integrate labs with your existing EHR system to automatically update patient results as soon as results come in, and to ping your team when they do.
IT System Errors
Most medical businesses are run electronically, nowadays, but they’re also often run on inefficient and old digital tech systems. Not only are these systems likely to lose you time, but without modern security updates, they can be highly risky to keep operating. To avoid digital security threats, ensure that you’re updating your existing IT setup and keep it all running much more thoroughly with the help of an outsourced IT team. Having someone on call to address tech interruptions as soon as they happen can ensure you lose as little time with them as possible.
Poor Communication With Patients
You have to ensure that your team routinely communicates with patients to ensure fewer missed appointments, less confusion about treatment plans, and better overall satisfaction. Having to repeat information and clear up misunderstandings can cost you time, but using communication tools like patient portals to make the necessary information more readily available can help. Not only can patients check these up easily, but your team can look them up to make sure that they’re keeping the information they share and the terminology they use consistently.
Poor Communication With Your Team
Communication issues can plague your practice internally, as well. Misunderstandings and miscommunications lead to errors, redundant repetitions in work, and plenty of wasted time. As such, you might want to look into implementing a central communication platform that is used for all internal comms, replacing disparate emails, DMs, and meeting spaces. Having routine meetings can help you address high-priority topics as a group and give your team the opportunity to address any communication gaps. You have to ensure that you’re listening to your team, as well as trying to communicate with them better.
Low Health Literacy
This is unfortunately a problem more widespread than any one practice is able to fix, but there is a lot that you can do to fight poor health literacy in your community. Patients who have trouble understanding their conditions or treatment plans require more time spent communicating what they should be able to understand. Having the tools to educate patients more efficiently, such as with visual aids, plain language, and culturally appropriate materials (if you’re in an area with a high percentage of non-native language speakers, for instance) can help close that gap.
A Disorganized Workplace
The physical workplace itself plays a huge role in the efficiency and productivity of the people who are working in it. If they have to spend their time looking for supplies, being cramped due to overlapping schedules, and otherwise trying to work in a chaotic environment, it’s going to waste time and shorten fuses. Ensure that your physical space is organized, declutter and reorganize your storage spaces, and make sure that you don’t have more staff working in a given area than you need. Having a team member assigned to oversee and manage the workplace allows them to focus on straightening this out, while the rest can focus on patient care.
Poor Task Managemen
Sometimes, it’s not a wider problem that can waste your time, but poor habits in how you handle your work. This isn’t an intrinsic failure, however, but rather something that can be taught. Teaching your team (and yourself) clear systems for managing tasks can ensure that the most important work is being done most efficiently. This can include employing tools like time-blocking and scheduling some time in the day for those important tasks. Batching your work can see you doing similar tasks in one go so that you do not have to constantly switch tasks and switch gears mentally (which can slow you down.)
Unnecessary Interruptions
From phone calls to walk-ins, and worst of all, unscheduled meetings, frequent interruptions can be highly disruptive. They can also drastically damage morale and lead to errors as you’re continually having your focus broken. This can be handled by ensuring a protocol to prevent interruptions during patient-facing or focused work periods. You can designate specific times for internal phone calls and emails, and set up no-interruption zones for focused work, for instance.
With the tips above, you can make sure that you’re able to free up the time that your patients deserve to have spent on them. It will not only make your patients happier but your team will be satisfied knowing they’re able to do more to help each person that comes to your practice.
