In an ideal world, you’d have all the time to:
- Talk to your patient
- Establish trust and a good doctor-patient relationship to ask all the relevant questions for patient history and get an honest and complete answer
- Do a complete physical examination
- Order pertinent lab workups to confirm your diagnosis
- Discuss the plan with the patient and get his feedback and input, including establishing a pathway of care that would lead down the road to healing and complete recovery
But in the real world, you only have 15-30 minutes to face the patient and come up with a solution to their health problem.
Maximizing the Limited Time You Have
Faced with all these challenges, how do you maximize the limited time you have to make the most significant impact on your patient’s health and recovery?
These days, there is increasing pressure on providers to give value-added care. Value-based programs are on the rise giving healthcare institutions incentives to providers to give quality care and better experience to the patients.
Such programs use outcome measures to gauge your effectivity as a healthcare provider for example:
- Patient experience
- Process
- Patient safety
- Mortality and complications
- Health-care associated infections
- Efficiency and cost reduction
Using Technology to Benefit You
Sometimes you curse technology for giving you more problems and things to do. But should it be that way? Imagine what technology can do for you.
What if as soon as the patient is registered and scheduled, you can send your patient a questionnaire survey to give as much information about their symptoms before they come to you for a visit.
Imagine you having access to all his past laboratory reports, x-rays, and other images from his previous providers.
Providing Holistic Care
Imagine all the disciplines working together to give holistic care to this patient, from the physical therapist to the counselor and dietitian, and you having access to their notes. This is not too far in the future. Many organizations are already moving into this path of integrated care.
An example of this is the Care Pathways initiative whereby patient information and evidence-based knowledge are integrated into an electronic system, which enables the providers to:
- Give continuity of care
- Avoid duplication
- Involve the patient in their care in a personalized approach using evidence-based medicine
If your facility is on top of technological advancements, you’d be able to adapt to such advancements easily. With cloud-based technology, it would be easy to tap on existing resources around you. What’s keeping you from streamlining your process?
We Can Help
Don’t know where to begin? We can help. With our FREE analysis, we can guide you to the process of upgrading your front and back office operations and the in-betweens.
Don’t know what electronic health record software to use? We have a solutions package based on what specific area you need to improve. Unsure about outsourcing? Read our ultimate outsourcing cheat sheet for medical providers.
Streamlining your process is not just all about the money and increasing revenues—although you’d achieve that too. It’s about delivering the best patient care experience you can give and maximizing the resources you have.