Top 5 Ways to Manage Staffing Challenges Using Automation in Your Practice
No matter what type or size practice you’re in, there’s a good chance you’re experiencing the same challenge that’s affecting all of healthcare in 2022 — a lack of talented medical personnel to staff your business. A high demand for healthcare coupled with a low supply of healthcare workers has led to a shortage of labor in practices big and small (1).
In addition to the staffing shortages among healthcare workers, all businesses around the country are experiencing wide reaching labor shortages too. As a result, it’s even more difficult for medical practices to hire non-medical adjunct roles such as receptionist positions, marketing professionals, and/or other clerical roles. (2)
Providers and patients alike feel the pressure that comes with short-staffed facilities. Good care takes a back seat and providers who try to work harder to bridge the gap often find themselves victims of practice burnout. One way that providers have found to ease the burden of staffing shortages is through implementing automation in their practice.
What is Practice Automation?
Automation in your medical practice means setting up systems and processes that work for you without your constant intervention. In other words, using technology that automatically gets work done and allows you to care for more patients with less effort.
The key to success in your practice when you’re short on staff is to plan and schedule a number of easy to set up automated systems that can often perform the work of multiple employees. As an extra bonus, using automation and technology can lower the overhead costs of running your practice at the same time.
Here are 5 ways you can implement automation in your practice:
1. Automate Patient Care and Support
Automating patient care means you are delivering care instructions to your patients everyday automatically using a content management and delivery system. An automated patient education engine allows providers of any vertical of medicine or healthcare to assign daily care plans and instructions to patients without reinventing the wheel with each patient.
Using patient education technology, practitioners can assign care plans that may range from simple meal or exercise plans, like a Basic Walking Plan, to more detailed plans that help patients manage chronic conditions like diabetes, hypertension and more. For chronic conditions like the ones listed, providers might use a plan that can guide patients through a Mediterranean Diet for Diabetes or a Dash Diet. Having a library of care plans consistent with your verbal instructions that you’re giving out over and over already, allows you to pick a plan that’s right for each patient, but with no effort.
Using this approach, providers also ensure that every day, a patient has access to written instruction, tasks, and resources such as documents, videos, questionnaires and more, but without the provider needing to manually compile this information again. Instead, a platform can drip the appropriate content for each patient, automatically.
By deploying an automated patient education plan to patients, providers know that their patients are being given the same instruction they would receive in-office, automatically every day at their patient’s fingertips. And patient’s appreciate the additional touch, which leads to better patient engagement and better outcomes.
2. Automate Remote Patient Monitoring
For many conditions, providers need to keep track of a patient’s biometrics. It’s not always practical to get patients in the office to gather biometric information as often as would be desirable. In the place of in-person measurements, practices should use remote connected health devices to reduce the number of in-office visits (4).
For example, patients who struggle with cardiovascular disease or diabetes may be visiting their provider in person more often than necessary to check their blood pressure. This is also frequently true for pregnant women for whom blood pressure abnormalities can signal problems with the pregnancy.
But, if patients utilize at home remote connected monitoring devices, such as a Withings blood pressure monitor, an activity tracker like Fitbit or Apple Watch or a body composition scale, they can assess their blood pressure by themselves, and sync that data with their BodySite account where the provider can view the results remotely and make appropriate care decisions based on real time health data.
3. Automate Intake Forms Online
Requiring patients to fill out extensive paper work in your office and having your staff manually input this data into your system is cumbersome for all parties. It’s often redundant, creates security and privacy issues and doesn’t create a great experience for the patient. In order for the provider to review manually created information, it has to be processed by staff and then provided to the reviewing provider.
An automated alternative is using online intake forms that patients can complete securely in a HIPAA compliant platform. As a provider, you would easily assign your patients an intake form that’s already configured in one digital document and get notified as soon as patients complete it. Intake forms can be administered in seconds with just a few clicks. You can also customize each question to your office’s specifications. This one automation tip alone can save you hours each day that would otherwise be devoted to paper work and de-duplication of data.
4. Leverage Telehealth Solutions
Telehealth services like telemedicine are an effective way to ease the burdens on in-office personnel. Patients can check in online, reducing the need for staffing to manage incoming patients, and patients can visit you from the comfort of their home. Using telehealth solutions, providers can even assign an intake form or a care plan to a patient during the telemedicine visit and chart encounter notes about the visit in real time in the same platform where the encounter took place.
By making some of your visits telehealth-based, you’ll be able to auto-accept appointments without having to require your patients to schedule over the phone or visit in person. Ideally, your automated telemedicine solution will have a built-in scheduling calendar and a way to charge patients for the visit when appropriate.
5. Automate Your Communications
Your office might also benefit from utilizing automated messaging to field certain questions about your practice. The automated patient education that drips care and wellness instructions on the patient as described above can have the effect of answering a lot of the questions the patient may have by pre-educating the patient before the question arises.
When the patient does have questions, your automated platform can provide the patient with a place to ask questions and interact with you and your staff in a HIPAA-compliant and secure location right in the same platform where their education, tracking and telemedicine live. You can have your staff answer these questions at your convenience because unlike inbound phone calls, online messaging is asynchronous. And that paradigm also allows patients to ask questions day or night because unlike phone calls to the practice, they can simply log on to the platform at any time, and send a secure message about their care or care plan.
The Importance of a Centralized Practice Automation Tool
No one tool or platform has everything that providers need to run a successful business. However, it’s worth noting that using a different system for every aspect of the business can become expensive and overwhelming.
Cutting down on the platforms and systems needed to automate your practice is essential to saving your staff time and creating a convenient location for you and your patients to connect.
To learn more about how BodySite provides healthcare professionals with an integrated toolkit of patient and practice management functions, an automated patient education system, telemedicine and HIPAA-compliant remote patient monitoring tools, all inside one platform, check out our demo.
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