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One of the hottest buzzwords in practice management is workflow optimization...

...and while it may sound complicated, it’s really nothing more than finding ways to get things done faster and more reliably around your office.

For example if you run a healthcare practice, the process of treating just one patient may require 10, 20 or even more different steps, including insurance verification, scheduling tasks, treatment procedures, documentation responsibilities and of course all the chores involved with billing, claim submission and collection. Every one of those steps is an opportunity: either to streamline the workflow process, or to gum it up. The way your company approaches each step of the workflow process will affect both your profitability and the quality of service you provide.

The ABCs of Efficient Workflow

Here’s a simple “ABC” approach you can use to analyze and enhance the flow of work in your office. You’ll also find tips on how to use SpectraSoft's AppointmentsPRO, DocuPRO and Streamline to make your office more efficient.

Automate the Task

This is the easiest aspect of workflow management for most people to understand. By automating tasks, you get things done faster and increase your productivity. AppointmentsPRO and other SpectrtaSoft products can automate many of the tasks your front desk now does manually. Some examples:

• Track insurance-covered visits.
• Reduce repetitive data entry by allowing schedulers, practitioners and the billing department to share the same patient data.
• Automate patient reminders by phone, email and letter. (Read more)
• Retrieve patient data and find any past or future scheduled appointment with just a few keystrokes.
• Generate 60 practice management reports with a click.
• Eliminate the need for transcription (DocuPRO)
• Automatically transmit billing data to your billing service each day (Streamline)

Automating tasks not only saves your company time and money. It improves the quality of service you provide by freeing staff to spend more time with your clients. It also improves the working environment, eliminating the most tedious and least rewarding tasks from an employee’s work day.

As you assess the cost of automating tasks, be sure to factor in not only the boost in productivity, but also the improvement to your company’s service quality and to the work environment.

Bypass the Inbox

One of the main causes of inefficient workflow is the time lost while tasks linger in the “inbox.” Clients sit in the waiting room because the practitioner hasn’t grabbed the file …documentation can’t be sent to a physician because the dictation tape is sitting in the transcriptionist’s inbox…and denied claims cannot be appealed until the request for documentation is processed.

Accelerating the handoff of tasks from one person to the next is a vital way to enhance workflow. Work with your staff to emphasize the importance of checking their inboxes and to-do piles on a regular a basis. Then establish standards for what is a reasonable amount of time for a task to to be addressed.

In many cases, you can speed the handoff of tasks by moving to electronic communication whenever possible. If a staff member can find all their pending tasks in one email box or electronic queue, they can address those tasks ina more systematic, efficient fashion.

This is another way SpectraSoft can help you enhance workflow. For example, therapists and schedulers using AppointmentsPRO and DocuPRO can exchange important information about the next steps regarding a client by adding a pop-up note to the system rather than writing a paper note that can easily be misplaced. Or when the front desk uses the check-in feature to note that a patient has arrived, a practitioner at the other end of the office knows the patient is ready to be seen by looking at the PC without having to check at the front.

Close the Loop
Another obstacle to smooth workflow is omission. With all the workplace distractions that take place in a typical day, it’s not uncommon that even the most professsional staff member will occasionally forget to complete a job, forward a file or allow a critical task to "fall through the cracks."

There are a number of ways you can use AppointmentsPRO to "close the loop" in the workflow process -- alerting office members any time a step in the process has not been completed. For instance, you can set up the system to notify you with a pop-up window when a patient is approaching their maximum authorized number visits, eliminating the need for someone to remember to check this manually. AppointmentsPRO also lets you create reminders that pop automatically when a patient checks in, such as alerting staff to get missing insurance information that they may otherwise forget to request.

You can further close the loop by combining AppointmentsPRO with DocuPRO. SpectraSoft's documentation software grabs scheduled visits from AppointmentsPRO and places those visits in the practitioner's documentation queue, where they stay visible until documentation on that visit has been completed and signed. This ensures every scheduled visit (even a no-show) is documented and billed.

Conclusion
By identifying opportunities throughout your workflow process to Automate tasks, Bypass the inbox and Close the loop, you will find you can increase your office productivity dramatically, even with just a few seemingly minor changes.

Let us know if this article was helpful -- write us at newsletter@ssoft.com.