Continuing Improvement in Medical & Dental Practices: Communicate & Automate
Medical and dental practices can drive their efficiency and consistency forward by automating their daily tasks and expanding their communication opportunities. These factors help create a streamlined process for attracting new clients and maintaining top-of-the-line services for current patients.
Why is continuing to improve your medical or dental practice important once you are out of the startup phase? As a practitioner and business owner, it is your job to make sure your practice continues to offer top services for your patients and employees alike. Two ways you can improve your practice lie in communication and automation. In fact, having poor communication or automation can damage your practice’s reputation and success.
Holmes’s report determined that within 400 corporations, communication barriers resulted in nearly $37billion of lost revenue. Good communication minimizes errors and significantly improves an entire company’s productivity. Aside from having good communication, automating the functions you can will allow you to create time for those you cannot. This will improve your overall efficiency, productivity, and accuracy, all of which are crucial to growing your practice. By working to improve your communication and automation, you will be able to minimize errors and significantly improve productivity.
Communicate
Communication is essential in every aspect of running your practice. It allows you to define the direction of your services and understand the needs of your employees and patients. By making sure that you have strong communication policies you can enrich patients’ health and avoid the negative impacts that would hurt them. In addition, good communication leads to saving on service costs and increases your day-to-day operating efficiency. Here are the top three steps for effective communication:
• Listen to the needs of your employees
Every employee will have their own unique motivations when working for your practice. By seeking to understand what these motivating factors are you can show your employees that you see them as more than just a worker. It will show them that they are a part of a community that shares one goal with your practice.
• Encourage your employees to speak up
No matter the business, employees will have their own opinions. By encouraging your employees to speak up and share these opinions you can boost their workplace confidence and motivate them to improve professionally and personally.
• Improve your workflow communication
Workflow communication should be well planned for every process within your practice to eliminate unnecessary mistakes. In fact, without effective workflow communication your practice will suffer from organizational and chain-of-command issues which will ultimately cause your practice to crumble.
Automate
Automation is the process of transferring tasks that typically require human labor and time into technology streamlined tasks. Within any medical or dental practice there are many day-to-day functions that you can automate to ensure that your employees are able to devote their time where it is most valuable- with your patients. There are two types of automation, internal and external. Read on to learn more about how you can incorporate each into your practice.
Internal Automation
Internal automation directly impacts your internal stakeholders and employees. This kind of automation has the greatest benefit for your employees since it generally lessens their repetitive tasks that pull them away from direct patient care. Increasing your internal automation will help improve your practice’s productivity and create room for growth. Here are some of the top ways internal automation will help your practice:
• Make life easier for your employees
Without a doubt, employees are the lifeline of any practice or business. They devote themselves to each task to ensure that your practice sees out the vision, mission, and goals daily. As a result of their work, your practice will continue to offer top-of-the-line services.
• Increase your employees’ productivity
Automation can increase productivity by making every process faster and easier to accomplish. For example, manually inputting data or searching for patient data takes quite a bit of time and can be simplified when done automatically. Overall, internal automation saves time for your employees and increases the quality of their patient care.
• Automated appointment scheduling
By incorporating automated appointment scheduling and reminders you can take pressure off your employees and even reduce unnecessary overtime. It can also improve your patient’s overall experience by helping them save time when easily scheduling their own appointments.
External Automation
External automation revolves around your external stakeholders, patients, and other investors. High-quality services make running your practice easier from continued technological advancements to streamlined appointment scheduling. Moreover, these high-quality services are the key to appealing to external investors. We have included two specific tips for improving your external automation below:
• Practicing telemedicine
Ever since the outbreak of Covid-19, telemedicine has been the new normal. It combines electronic information and virtual visit technology to offer safe healthcare services to your patients. It is an innovation where you can continue offering medical care services to your patients and also make their lives more manageable by saving them time in both traveling and booking appointments.
• Prioritizing patients’ safety through telemedicine
Automating key telemedicine functions, like secure appointment scheduling, shows how you prioritize your patients and their online safety. Telemedicine visits themselves are also areas to communicate your dedication to patient safety. They allow for continued social distancing practices to remain in effect for those who choose to utilize the option. The overall rise of innovative technology will help you continue to provide the best telemedicine services to your patients.
How can Streamsoft help?
Streamsoft’s professional practice services incorporate various tools designed to help you stay on top even against multiple competitors. From patient acquisition to long-term retention, Streamsoft has the tools you need to continue to succeed. Capitalize on this opportunity for your practice now by scheduling your free consultation. Head over to Streamsoft’s website to learn more and even book an appointment or complete a free assessment on ways to improve how you market your business online.
