An efficient office workflow makes it possible for your practice to see more patients without decreasing the quality of care. As an added bonus, you reduce the amount of time a patient spends in your practice letting them get back to their day. Unfortunately, traditional methods for managing the patient’s journey through your practice could be causing congestion in your workflow.
Below are a few tips for increasing efficiency in your practice by streamlining your office workflow.
The Keys to Streamlining Your Office Workflow
Reduce Check-in Times
An inefficient patient check-in can set the entire office workflow up for failure. The amount of time a patient has to sit in the waiting room before the exam starts can even deter a patient from returning. It could also result in the patient writing negative reviews.
Reduce the time it takes to check a patient into your practice by giving patients access to a secure patient portal where the patient can fill out pre-exam documents. Using a cloud-based EHR and practice management solution, you can automatically pull that information in and update the patient profile. Doing this will greatly reduce check-in times and help keep your office busy and moving with patients.
Decrease Hand-offs
Unnecessary patient hand-offs complicate your office workflow. Streamlining your optometric practice requires taking a look at the each task involved in an exam and reducing areas of needless inefficiencies. Common areas where inefficient hand-offs loom are between the hand-offs from the tech to the OD and from the OD to the optician.
Expedite The Exam
Providing quality care for your patients is vital, but that doesn’t mean the exam should take a while. Having an EHR that is synced with the practice management system helps staff review patient information more quickly than having to log into a different system or review paper charts. Additionally, using an EHR with clinical decision support can help you accelerate the exam by populating diagnosis, treatment, orders, testing, and patient education material based on a single entry during annotation.
Our practice efficiency ebook has everything that you and your staff need to know. Download it for free.
