By starting your own medical practice, you are ensuring that your patients receive the best care that you’re able to give. But in order to keep giving patients the best care, you need to improve your medical practice to make sure it is running as smoothly and efficiently as possible, perhaps one of the most important factors in the success of any medical practice is the patient flow and contentment. A medical office that can successfully smooth out the peaks and edges in its scheduling tasks, can see more patients walking through the door, reduce wear and tear on office staff and physicians and boost up your patient and cash inflows effectively.
To help you with that, we have gathered several ways so that you can improve your practice. Try and put them on your practice.
1. Focus mainly on your patients
To help achieve the
bottom line for your practice, you should be spending at least 37 hours a week
on direct patient care. Of course, if you’re running a group practice, 37 hours
is certainly feasible, but fear not solo practitioners. A solid patient base
can help you meet this goal. But remember, don’t wear yourself out. Practice
management includes keeping the workflow realistic.
2. Improve patient flow with an efficient schedule
Use a strong and
secure browser-based medical office appointment scheduling system to get as many patients in and out
the door as you can – but stay realistic. A family physician can typically
complete four visits per hour, but if you find this to be too overwhelming,
then adjust your patient population. Utilize an online presence with a
computerized scheduling system to make sure you have no schedule gaps and to
measure user traffic. With everyone online nowadays, your tech-savvy patients
will thank you for the incredible option. For multiple patients or other
patient communications, delegate patient scheduling to your front office
manager or another staff member. Altogether, with good scheduling, you can
energize your practice productivity and patient flow by two or more patients a
day, which translates into more net income for your practice and welcomes
potential new patients.
3. Reduce overtime
Are you getting annoyed by all the extra hours you are working on? There is no reason to work overtime and get on your nerves. In fact, it often happens from the staff’s poor organization or performance or from a disorganized physician. Measure the reasons for your overtime. You might find that it is really for convenience, not necessity, and can be eliminated by reassigning duties. Don’t get to the point where employees expect overtime as part of their regular compensation.
4. Improve Patient Communication
As the healthcare
landscape shifts toward a focus on value-based care, patient communication is
becoming exceedingly important for medical practice productivity. Communicating
with patients saves time, and streamlines communication. A few ways to
implement a better patient communication strategy include incorporating
automated telephone messages, implementing secure text messaging and
introducing a patient portal. Automated emails and text messages allow a
practice to easily send appointment reminders, practice updates and even
welcome messages to new patients. Implementing a patient portal can take
communication a step further, giving patients the ability to pay their bills
online, check into their appointment status when they arrive at the office and
easily view all their medical records. When implementing a patient portal,
making the most of the portal is also important, and can result in reclaiming
time that medical practice staff can use to focus on other tasks as well.
The best way to look at how medical practices can improve is either you have to develop your top line patient inflows or your bottom line revenue inflows. Cutting costs and overheads and increasing bottom-line efficiencies and when it comes to top-line increasing new patients, retaining current patients, etc. These two go hand in hand. Most practices do not have sustainable growth because they choose between one or the other. The best way ahead for growth is to keep the focus on the top and bottom line and achieve both.
