It’s every physician’s dream to have an excellent reputation for managing a fine-tuned healthcare center with maximum efficiency and productivity. However, this is easier said than done. Doctors and physicians must proactively find ways of improving services at their medical offices, lest they end up with serious issues: not making enough money to keep the practice afloat or not adequately meeting the needs of patients.
Carefully managing your medical office maximizes productivity. Not only that, but well-organized healthcare centers are statistically more profitable than their less-efficient counterparts. Improving physician office productivity requires evaluation and planning. If you’re always running behind schedule and chaos is a standard operating occurrence, these steps can help you get your practice running more smoothly.
- Implement a Patient Flow
Patient flow represents the ability of a healthcare facility to serve patients quickly and efficiently as they move through stages of care, from the time they enter the medical office until they leave. When the system works well, services flow smoothly, meaning that each step is completed with minimal delay.
The best way to create better patient flow is to perform a complete assessment that begins with scheduling appointments and how patients are received when they arrive for their visit. Assessing how patients check in, how long they sit in the reception area, and the amount of time they must wait in the consultation room for the physician are vital elements to consider when developing a patient flow.
Eliminating clutter in the patient process can seem daunting, but here are a few helpful ways to improve patient flow and boost your time management and proficiency:
- Make it easy: Ensure signs in the parking lot, lobby, and facility are easy to spot and understand so that patients can quickly find the right building, floor, or office.
- Prioritize scheduling: Long wait time isn’t good for your patients. When designing your appointment schedule, avoid overbooking, and consider the number of exam rooms a physician can handle at once.
- Direct traffic: When patients cross paths with one another, for instance, while checking in and checking out, it can increase patients’ frustration and reduce patient flow. If you can, have separate check-in and check-out areas.
- Automate Everything in the Office
Upgrading your medical office with technology is one of the best ways to improve work efficiency at your practice. If done right, automated systems can eliminate errors, improve patient access, and save time.
Use technology to automate the most time-consuming tasks such as appointment reminders, bill paying newsletters, and prescription refills. For answering services, click here to know more. You should always keep an eye out for emerging healthcare tech trends that help physicians practice and schedule their treatments smarter.
It’s also vital that nurses, physicians, and other medical officers be fully trained and mentally on board with any new tech at the practice. If not correctly implemented, technology can actually slow things down.
- Use an Online Scheduling Tool
Online scheduling is another excellent time-saving strategy for a physician’s office. For instance, it takes an average of eight minutes to schedule an appointment. That time adds up quickly, and many healthcare service providers spend way too much time throughout the day scheduling appointments.
Services such as consulting from TempDev through NextGen will help your medical office in implementing real-time digital scheduling tools. This software allows patients to schedule their appointments on their own time easily. Adopting a scheduling tool will cut back the time wasted in scheduling and rescheduling appointments over the phone. Your patients will appreciate the convenience of booking appointments on their own, while medical staff will enjoy spending less time on administrative tasks.
- Clearly Defined Roles and Proper Training
Properly assigning tasks is essential to maintaining a well-managed physician office. Medical managers should be clear on what work goes to whom and ensure it gets to them on time. You should also assign work to individuals according to their strengths. Having undefined roles will only lead to confusion, miscommunication, and, ultimately, an unorganized medical office. Moreover, you should ensure you have enough qualified professionals to utilize their unique skills where they’re needed the most.
- Get Organized and Stay Organized
There’s never enough time to do everything at once, so the best way to create order from chaos is to set priorities and tackle them first. In other words, you have to triage your workload.
Jotting down a daily to-do list, whether electronic or handwritten, can help you stay organized. It’s easy to look at your list and do easy tasks first, but it’s a better strategy to attend to the more critical tasks at the beginning of the day. It’s also helpful to rearrange your office and remove clutter by cleaning up and putting everything in its designated place.
Achieving High-Quality Care
Your goals as a physician should be to serve as many patients as possible while providing high-quality care. These objectives are achievable, but to do so, you need to adopt and implement numerous systems that will make your clinical office run more efficiently.
