Gift Yourself a Happy Practice This Holiday Season
The End of Year Rush
If you’re a specialist provider, we know there is often one thing on your mind as the holidays approach, and it’s not brown paper packages tied up with string. November and December flood your practice with patients. Deductibles have been met and patients are ready to move forward with treatment. Generally speaking, a surge in patient volume is a great thing, an indicator of success. However, for many of you, the anticipated volume triggers anxious visions of chaotic waiting rooms and endless administrative tasks. The fears are well-founded because, on some level, every practice is operating with dated systems that rely heavily on paper for patient data and payment collection, a multistep process involving manual input and scanning by administrators. Given the vital role administrative staff play in allowing your practice to run smoothly, a 20%-30% increase in traffic at holiday time is crippling. So how do you remove the end of year anxiety about operational overload, so you can focus on providing excellent care to the patients you serve?
Healthcare Staffing Challenges
Traditionally, practices have handled the increase in workload by hiring additional staff. However, the COVID era has presented new challenges to relying on this brute force solution. During the height of the pandemic, as clinics transitioned to lower patient volumes and telehealth, many healthcare professionals found new employment. Now, with patients back in full force, some of this workforce is returning, but much of it is not. This has created a staffing crisis — administrative medical professionals are in short supply, turnover rates are high, and the overhead costs required to recruit and onboard new staff can be prohibitive. Where, then, should you turn?
Technology Wins the Day
The only real way out is to lean into patient-facing technology that truly eases the work of clinicians, expedites care, and drives patient satisfaction. However, it’s rare to find an operational leader in healthcare who hasn’t been burned by clunky interfaces, disconnected solutions, and overly enthusiastic tech salespeople. It’s easy to get lost in the noise, so how should you navigate the complex web of digital platforms that all promise to ease the crushing administrative burden of US healthcare?
Choosing a Patient-Facing Solution
First, it’s key to see the solution in action. Consumer technology has come a long way in the last 10 years, so note how easy it is for patients to interact with the solution you are considering. Is there an app download required? Do they need to create a username and password? Can they easily interact with the tool on their own device? On devices you may provide in-clinic?
Next, it’s important to determine the comprehensiveness of the solution. There’s certainly some slick patient-facing interfaces out there but is the one you’re considering well-integrated with your current PM/EMR? If not, it may do little to ease your administrative overload. Also, you should consider if it’s a point solution, or if it could be used to solve multiple pain points across your practice. There’s certainly compounding benefits — in both pricing and workflows — to choosing a more comprehensive toolset.
Finally, it’s useful to consider how well the company and technology intuitively understands your pain points as a specialist provider. Does the tool seem designed with your specialty in mind or does it take a “one size fits all” approach? Does the sales team understand your specific pain points and relate it to similar practices they work with? The more closely aligned the solution is with your specialty, the fewer hiccups you’ll see along the way.
Clinic Q by Health Here
At Health Here, we’ve taken care to build our Clinic Q solution suite in a way that truly offers productivity benefits for specialist practices. Our easy-to-use patient interface has enabled greater than 90% adoption rates on digital intake for many of our partner practices. We’ve built a robust integration engine to power a real-time, bidirectional flow of information between our platform and the systems most critical to running your practice. Finally, we’ve focused exclusively on specialist providers, so our company and product tightly aligns with our customer.
For our customers, we believe that end of year anxiety doesn’t stand a chance against Clinic Q. Happy holidays, everyone. Take cheer in knowing that soon the operational headaches will be a thing of the past.