Modernizing Your Patient Intake Process: Expert’s Guide
In today’s digital world, the way of accessing healthcare has drastically changed a lot. The ways illnesses are identified and treated with the help of digital tools are continuously evolving. But still, most of the healthcare practices are working with the manual intake process.
If you walk into any healthcare clinic, you’ll find that patients will be working seriously b filling out the forms, looking into their wallets for insurance cards, and more.
His kind of old patient intake process may seriously affect the growth of the healthcare practices. Staff places a curious role here. They need to take care of patient intake procedures, also organize treatment rooms and wait for patients to complete their forms. If this wasn’t done on time, the entire day’s schedule will be delayed. At last, this could result in denied claims, delayed pre-authorization, and increased wait times.
So modernizing and improving your patient intake process does wonders for your practice by maximizing patient satisfaction and increasing practice productivity.
How to modernize your patient intake process?
1. Satisfy your patient’s expectations right from the first schedule
The actual patient experience begins before a patient enters the waiting room. From the very first time, they call your practice to schedule their appointment; patients expect good and quick services from their healthcare providers. So, if you wish to modernize your patient intake process, try to satisfy your patient’s expectations from their first appointment scheduling call. Provide various scheduling options to your patients, so that they can easily book online or over the phone – based on their comfortability.
Once they book their appointment, help your patients to say reminded about their appointments – by sending appointment confirmation messages and reminders through email or secure messaging. By doing so, your patients can feel very safe and engage with your practice, which ultimately reduces your number of no-shows.
2. Lesser wait time leads to more happy patients
Of course, everyone wishes to have a quick consultation with their physicians, and nobody likes to wait at the doctor’s office. But, in most healthcare clinics, patients are forced to wait for long times in the waiting room and the consultation room. So, by modernizing the patient intake process, you can surely reduce the bad experience for patients and staff alike.
So how you are planning to reduce your patient wait times? Going digital will be the perfect choice for you. By using the digital process of intakes, your front desk staff will get enough free time to focus more on the patients waiting to be seen. By doing so, your daily procedures will move quicker and can also achieve better patient outcomes.
RELATED: 3 Secret Ways To Improve Patient Intake Process
3. Reducing wait times reduces front-desk staff burden
Reducing administrative wait times gives doctors and nurses more time to spend with patients. It also allows front desk staff the freedom to dedicate their focus to daily operational duties. Patient intake is perhaps one of the most important parts of the modern healthcare experience, but it’s often delivered by stressed-out, overworked administrative workers.
We’ve all dealt with a brusque medical receptionist at some point or another. These folks are often completely overwhelmed by all that’s on their plate. Their frustration spills out into the patient experience, jeopardizing practice growth and potentially threatening the organization’s public reputation. The solution? Take inbound calls off their to-do list and watch the entire facility’s stress levels go down. Patients may not be able to put their fingers on precisely what has changed, but with fewer calls interrupting front desk staff, the impact will be palpable.
4. Greet Patients Upon Walk-In
Do you offer patients an immediate “hello” as they walk into your office? If not, you should. Ignoring patients sends a confusing message. Patients who aren’t greeted upon arrival may start to wonder if they had their appointment time wrong since no one seems to be expecting them. In other cases, patients may not feel welcome at all. Many may feel like an inconvenience to the front desk staff’s day.
Your initial greeting sets the tone for the entire appointment. As you train your staff, encourage them to greet each person as they enter. A friendly hello goes a long way to welcome patients to your practice.
From there, instruct each person that walks through the door on what they should do next. Should they visit the front desk? Sit down? Fill something out? Front desk employees should also collect patient intake packets, offer patients coffee or water (when available), show them where to sit, and inform them of how long they can expect to wait to be seen. Patients will feel immediately more comfortable and get the sense that your team truly values their time.
It’s time to upgrade your patient intake process!
Vozo offers you the best EHR and practice management solutions for your healthcare practices and specialty clinics. Make use of our patient scheduling system to modernize the way your appointments are scheduled. Schedule a quick demo with our Vozo expert team to find out how we can help you in upgrading your patient intake process.
About the author
With more than 4 years of experience in the dynamic healthcare technology landscape, Sid specializes in crafting compelling content on topics including EHR/EMR, patient portals, healthcare automation, remote patient monitoring, and health information exchange.
His expertise lies in translating cutting-edge innovations and intricate topics into engaging narratives that resonate with diverse audiences.
