Posted:
Thursday, June 18th, 2009
Category:
Healthcare
When it comes to health care innovations and improvements, one of the most popular areas that needs, and is getting improvements as of late, is patient care and waiting times. Many offices are seeing higher numbers of patients than ever before, which is leading them to seek new ways to manage patient care and provide quicker and more efficient service without compromising the quality of the care that patients receive. Utilizing your training in the health care industry, such as, Nursing Continuing Education, Dental Continuing Education, Radiology CME, and Respiratory CEU as well as your common sense skills of how to develop a plan for improvement and follow it through will help you to figure out what comes next. Here are some other tips:
1. Never overbook and depend on cancellations. When your schedule is full, it’s full. Have a physician’s assistant on staff to help out with the full schedule days and limit the amount of time that doctors and nurses spend with patients. This is not to say that you should sacrifice patient care. However, someone who just needs an after-illness checkup doesn’t need as much of the doctor’s time as someone who has a serious concern or illness that needs tests and thorough examination.
2. Focus on creating a flow through the office that is more efficient. For example, if a patient normally goes from the waiting room to a triage area in the clinic, this might not be necessary. If they already have an appointment and a purpose for being there, send them straight to an exam room and save the triage space for those walk in patients or those who don’t disclose the reason for their visit upon scheduling the appointment.
3. Never have more patients in rooms than you have doctors and nurses to tend to them. One doctor should never have more than 3 exam rooms for patients to wait in, and spending an average of 20-30 minutes with each patient should be all that is needed. This is where double booking can create longer waiting and unnecessary clogs in the system.
Utilizing your skills in management and handling scheduling will allow you to streamline the process of patient care and make it more effective so that you can see more patients with less hassle and carry on with a successful medical practice. Therefore, training your staff in Nursing Continuing Education, Radiology CME, and Respiratory CEU is very important. It might seem like you’re trying to rush through patients, but until there are doctor to patient ratios in the country that average 1:1 or even 1:2, the need for efficiency is at an all time high.
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