Without the necessary background and experience, it can be difficult to understand how simple it can be to use powerful digital tools to boost your clinic’s performance as a business. Whether you need to update your business processes or you want to learn how to analyse and act upon all the data you have gathered, you often only really need a gentle nudge in the right direction. Here are some top tips we at Medesk would like to share from our experiences over the past decade working in digital health.
Systematic Approach
Permit a defined yet individualised patient journey
When you have the whole patient journey planned out in advance with the help of online booking, predefined consultation templates and automatically generated referral letters, prescriptions and invoices, you can be sure that the patient experience will remain fully customisable and yet totally predictable.
Utilise template-based consultation notes
Taking a standardised approach to recording consultation findings allows you to make sure that you’ve covered all your bases no matter what the circumstances. Whether you’re a general practitioner or a maxillofacial surgeon, the last thing you want is to get bogged down in paperwork when you could be treating patients with the attention they deserve.
Facilitate continuity of care
Continuity is one of the most crucial aspects of care that is all too often ignored because of time constraints or lack of proper planning. When you take a systematic approach to the care of each patients and use a practice management system with this principle embedded into its very core, continuity of care is easy to plan.
Actionable Analytics
Tag your patients, appointments and acquisition channels
Using colour-coded buttons to tag everything that goes on in your clinic, you’ll be able to collect a vast amount of actionable data with next to no effort at all. If you want to understand whether your marketing budget is being spent on the right acquisition channels, coloured tags and labels are exactly what you need.
Visual statistics and reports for easy understanding
A picture paints a thousand words and when it comes to getting to grips with your clinic’s performance, you’ll learn everything you need at a mere glance. Doughnut charts and bar graphs display all your tagged information in an easy-to-understand visual format.
Custom reports tailored to fit your precise pain points
If predefined visual reports aren’t enough to help you make your key business decisions, you can make your own reports based on just about any data you’ve plugged into systems like Medesk.
Continuity of Care
Leverage a comprehensive EHR available to each doctor in your clinic
Stay up to date with the latest changes to your patients’ cases when you have access to an electronic health record that ties the whole healthcare journey into one single page. Read up on past medical history, check uploaded files and scans, and give your patients the care they expect.
Coordinate directly with labs and referral partners
Leverage your professional network and get your fellow doctors to refer patients by booking them directly into your schedule. Transparency at this level is what turns potential new patients into definite ones.
Set specific tasks for all kinds of colleagues
Whether you want your secretary to book follow-ups or you need the practice nurse to draw some bloods once you’re finished with your next patient, setting a task that pops up on their screen is the most efficient way to get your point across.
Telehealth Transformation
Let external doctors refer patients to you directly
Giving a unique trackable web link to help other clinics book their patients in with you is a great way to maintain and grow your professional network. Plus, you’ll know exactly who to thank when your patient list grows like never before.
Link a patient portal for document requests, advice and appointment booking
By permitting your patients to get in touch with direct requests about documents, appointments and care plans, you’re putting their health in their own hands, ultimately making your work easier and more effective in one fell swoop.
Record phone consultations and improve your quality of care
It’s easy to help your receptionists get the most out of phone conversations with patients when you can record them and later review them together. Your patients are sure to thank you for your efforts.
Boost Patient Engagement
Develop a better rapport with the time saved by templates
When you’re able to drastically reduce the time spent scribbling down your findings or tapping away at the keyboard, you can revert your full focus back to your patients, ensuring they tell everyone they know about your practice.
Facilitate patient-centred care with a dedicated patient portal
Helping patients to help themselves is a key part of any healthcare service that’s worth its salt. Providing them with a dedicated area on your website via which they can request all sorts of information and support is a simple way to boost patient engagement.
Offer transparent appointment booking with live time slot availability
Since up to 50% of attempted appointment bookings are made out of hours, it only makes sense to give your patients a way to book when you can’t take their call. The holy grail is to offer a fully integrated booking system that plugs right into your schedule in real-time.
Resource Management
Tag every event as you go along for painless data collection
Gathering usable data doesn’t have to be painful when you reduce it down to clicking a few buttons every time a particular event takes place. You’d be surprised at how quickly you can start to act upon your findings.
Discover which patient acquisition channels are most popular
If you track your acquisition channels by asking each patient how they found out about you, you’ll know when it’s time to boost advertising funding or to cut your losses.
Match capacity to demand with scheduling and workload percentages
Examine workload percentages and work out whom to give your patients when their favourite doctor is fully booked. That way, everyone gets to keep their work-life balance just right.
Improvement and Learning
Free and continuous training to ensure no one gets left behind
When you’re using a comprehensive practice management system for the first time, some staff members are bound to be a little slower on the uptake than others. We make sure no-one gets left behind at any point.
Frequent feature development of new features and polishing of old ones
Our development philosophy is such that we grow as you grow. In other words, as you come to need new and improved features to run your clinic, we get stuck in and start developing them for you.
The more feedback you give, the more solutions Medesk provides
We actively seek constructive criticism from our users as we sincerely believe that this is the only real way to learn and improve as a team and as a service. If there’s something we don’t offer that you think we should implement, all you have to do is give us a call or drop us a line in the live chat.
For more information visit www.medesk.co.uk