Scale Your Practice with Automated Patient Education
Each week, we’re bringing providers information on building and scaling the perfect health and wellness practice. We call it the Better Practice Roadmap™– 13 Things You Must Do to Grow Your Dream Health and Wellness Practice.
Today, we’re going to cover how using Automated Patient Education can help you stop repeating yourself and grow your practice.
Let’s jump right into the problem. You’re busy. High-quality care takes time.
You’re passionate about delivering the best possible care to your patients. But you don’t have enough time to explain to each patient what their health issues are, how you can help, and what they can and should do about it when they leave your office and return to daily life.
You’re not alone. Every provider is feeling this.
You’re not making enough money for your time in the current healthcare models to begin with, especially if you have to explain the same thing to patients over and over again. You find yourself spending hours educating each patient on lifestyle changes, treatment options, and preventive measures—time that could be used to see more patients or expand your services. Or maybe just take a day off from work.
These hurdles are especially difficult for growing practices. As more patients come through the door, the time you have for one-on-one support decreases. Without a system in place to streamline this process, patient education can quickly become a barrier to effective care and growing your practice.
There’s no way to make more time, but you can make better use of it. And if you do, you’ll make a lot more money and help more people. Let’s unpack how.
The Solution: Automate and Scale Your Time with Reusable Care Plans
Reusable care plan. What’s that?
If you’re going to educate patients individually and tell the next patient the same thing you told the previous patient, and so on, your day is going to be gone before you can blink. How many patients can you spend 30 to 60 minutes with in a day? The answer is clear: not many. And you don’t have to.
In-depth, in person, hands on, thorough education and support takes time. No matter what you charge for your time, you’re still just trading time for money. You can’t scale revenue that way. And you won’t help as many people as you want to.
So how do you continue to deliver quality care at scale without burning out and and still grow your practice?
It’s actually pretty simple.
Do what thousands of other successful providers do. Keep a library of ready-to-go care plans and instructions at your fingertips at all times. Certain care topics are commonly repeated in your practice every day. Why reinvent the wheel with every patient when you can have educational content programs ready to give patients each time these topics come up?
See 30 + patient education topics you should have on autopilot.
Practices with a systematized approach to care that involves a repeatable set of instructions in a care plan typically have at least 5 times as many patients as the practices who don’t. BodySite Statistics as of July 2024
Here’s why this works:
Even though every patient is unique, most of your patients have very similar needs. Of course you’ll have some patients who have a really invidual condition or really need a very specific protocol or care plan. But if you take a close look at the last 100 patients you saw, 80 of them those patients fell into a one category or several common categories.
Here’s one example of one very large patient commonality you’re seeing every day – weight management. Right now, fully 75% of adults in the US are overweight.
That means that 75 of your last 100 patients have a problem you can help solve. For the vast majority of them, you don’t need to create a special program from scratch or a different program for every single patient. (Odds are you have been starting from scratch most days. Be honest).
Putting aside a handful of people with food allergies or very specific health problems that prevent them from eating certain foods or taking certain medications, the patients you want to help lose weight could all follow one version of your approach to how they should lose weight. You’re giving all of those patients the same instructions about their medication or their supplements, or what they should eat, etc.
Why not reduce all of that to a program that you can use over and over again – a reusable care plan?
Picture this. When you see your next patient who needs to lose weight, you’ve already got a 12-week program of digital content, ready to go. The program is already set up to digitally guide the patient through your weight loss program in an app the patient accesses every day to view their daily care instructions, reminders, exercise and eating tips, videos on the topic, downloads of helpful information.
Keep in mind the program could be about leaky gut, pain management, mindfulness or any topic, but let’s stick with the weight loss example for a moment.
Maybe you like to recommend a functional medicine, whole-foods based weight management program. Maybe it’s medication-focused weight loss. Maybe you have a few different approaches, each depending on whether this patient needs to lose 10 pounds compared to 100 pounds or has a need for a different approach.
But you don’t need 75 different weight loss plans for 75 people. You might only need 2 or 3 plans that reflect various approaches you like to recommend. Find the common denominator and then create reusable plans for those 2 or 3 approaches. Then, when you see a patient who fits that mold, assign the plan to that patient that is appropriate for them.
And the same is true for your patients with a leaky gut, hormone imbalances, diabetes, chronic pain and more. Most of what they need to learn about from you is common to all patients with the same condition. And when you automate the common denominator stuff, you also have time for the patients who really really need specific guidance from you.
How to Build a Library of Reusable Care Plans
What’s in a reusable care plan?
Before digital content management platforms and apps, you might have handed out pamphlets or sent patients a link to learning materials in your EMR or from a CRM. You might also send patients links to websites with info about their condition. That’s not going to solve the problem.
Your library of reusable care plans should be digital, automated programs or “courses” that guide a patient through a month, or several months of a treatment plan that actually addresses how to solve the condition they’re dealing with.
Ideally, the plans in your library should educate the patient about their condition but then provide a daily or weekly roadmap of what to do for the length of that program, whether it’s a week or 10 weeks.
A well thought out program should include tasks to complete to maximize patient engagement and ensure patient compliance. Additionally, the care plan content should be filled with helpful and inspiring videos, images, recipes and exercise guidance when appropriate, documents for downloading useful information like grocery lists, do’s and don’ts, etc.
You don’t have to build the plans yourself.
In an efficient practice, you should have available to you a robust content management system (CMS) or what’s often referred to as a learning management system (LMS), that already has on board dozens of templates of care content.
Your CMS should provide you with hundreds or thousands of ready to use images, videos, recipes, exercises, tasks, to do’s and intake forms so that you can customize your content. But more importantly, your CMS should have dozens of care plans laid out and already curated for you as pre-built courses.
Having a set of automated patient education programs, in an easy to assign content management system that is already preconfigured with your plans let’s you put all of this on autopilot within minutes. Your practice, your patients, your significant other, will all thank you for this upgrade to how you’re currently practicing.
You can provide comprehensive patient education without spending hours building it.
This is the approach that we adopted at BodySite to help providers shortcut hours of plan creation. To help practitioners stop repeating themselves and also make it easy to get started with an automated approach, we built a content management system for patient education that already includes over 85 care plan templates on common topics, like:
– Clean 28 Weight Loss: and a dozen other weight loss or dietary protocols to helps patients adopt better eating habits.
– Sleep Hygiene: A comprehensive plan to help patients improve their sleep patterns.
– Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP): A guide for patients at risk of diabetes to make critical lifestyle changes.
– At-Home Fitness Plans: Ranging from beginner workouts to advanced training for patients looking to get fit.f
Plans like these provide instant value for patients and require zero additional effort from you. In just a few clicks, you’re able to provide personalized education, enhance patient care, and build trust—all while saving time.
By leveraging a library of automated plans, you can provide patients with all the resources they need to manage their health—while freeing up time for your staff to focus on patient care and practice growth.
Customize Care Plans to Suit Your Practice
Of course, not all patients fit neatly into a pre-designed template. Sometimes, you may need to personalize education and care materials to fit the specific needs of your patient population. Your CMS should allow you to modify existing plans or create new ones from scratch with easy plan builder that allows you to literally drag and drop or click and drop content into program content or easy content management.
This is the approach BodySite took when building a plan builder for practitioners. The platform allows providers to maintain a stock library of educational media that include videos, photos, PDF’s, recipes, exercises, re-useable blocks of text, surveys, questionnaires, intake forms and tasks with reminders. These are all interchangeable so that it’s possible to build a plan completely from scratch or just make small tweaks to existing templates.
Within the content libraries, practitioners can use thousands of already available videos, photos, exercises and recipes but also upload videos and photos directly. It’s even possible to add videos from popular third party hosts like YouTube, Vimeo and Wistia. In this way, a provider has full control over the content, timeline, and structure of their own care plans library.
Whether you need to tweak a nutrition plan to suit a patient’s dietary restrictions or add additional resources to an exercise program, tools like this make it easy to customize education to practice and have plans ready for individual who need a certain care plan type.
For instance, if you’re working with a patient who’s struggling with multiple chronic conditions, you might customize a Low FODMAP Diet care plan to address their gut health issues, while adding supplemental education on managing diabetes or weight loss. With BodySite’s Plan Builder, you can seamlessly integrate multiple resources into one cohesive educational experience.
This flexibility ensures that you’re always able to provide personalized, automated care that meets your patients where they are in their health journey. You can reuse and adjust these plans for future patients, making it easier to scale your efforts without increasing your workload.
Automation is Essential for Scaling Your Practice
Here’s why it matters:
1. Free Up Valuable Time: When patient education is automated, you and your team shouldn’t spend hours explaining treatment plans, lifestyle changes, or wellness tips. The educational process should be streamlined, freeing up time to focus on what matters most—patient care.
2. Ensure Consistency and Quality: Automation ensures that every patient receives high-quality education, no matter how busy your practice becomes. That way, you don’t need to worry about key details or skipping important follow-up steps—the plan is already thought out in advance and the care plans deliver comprehensive education, every time, on a schedule and predictably.
3. Boost Patient Engagement: Automated care plans help patients stay engaged with their health journey outside of the clinic. By receiving daily instructions, tips, and reminders, patients are more likely to adhere to their treatment plan and see better outcomes.
4. Scale Your Practice Efficiently: As your patient load grows, you can easily scale your education efforts without hiring additional staff or increasing your workload. Automation tools let you expand your reach and see more patients without sacrificing care quality.
5. Personalized Care at Scale: Even though the process is automated, BodySite’s Plan Builder lets you customize education for your patient patient base or even for each patient if needed. This allows the delivery of customized, relevant content without spending extra time on manual follow-ups or one-off patient education sessions.
If you’re not using a platform that helps you automate patient education, take a look at BodySite to get an idea about how this approach can elevate your care, save you time and make you more money, all at the same time.
How BodySite Can Transform Your Practice
To illustrate how BodySite can impact your practice, let’s take an example:
You run a busy practice, and many of your patients are managing chronic conditions like diabetes, obesity, or heart disease. These patients need continuous education about lifestyle changes, nutrition, and exercise. But between seeing new patients and handling other tasks, there’s little time left for follow-up education.
With BodySite, in just a few clicks you can assign each patient a care plan that’s tailored to their condition. For a patient with diabetes, you might choose the Mediterranean Diet for Diabetes plan, which provides daily tips on managing blood sugar levels through diet and lifestyle. The system sends these materials automatically, and you can monitor the patient’s progress remotely, saving you time and increasing patient engagement.
For patients who don’t have a chronic condition, you could provide them with more generic education—such as the exercise recommendations from the High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) care plan. With BodySite, it only takes a few seconds to deploy weeks worth of personalized, high-quality education that meets your patients’ needs, all without adding extra hours to your day.
Once patients are on a program, they’ll be provided the tools and the prompts to track their progress through entering their biometric data, what they’ve eaten, their activity level, or any action that is specific to their care plan (i.e. report blood sugar levels). When you have the spare time, you can click onto their patient profile and see how they’re doing.
Want to follow up with them in between visits? You can send them a quick message for encouragement or support via our HIPAA compliant in-app messenger.
Scale Your Practice While Delivering Better Care
BodySite provides a full provider to patient feedback loop. You place patients on an automated care program, they report their progress, you monitor their progress and follow up if needed. Patients have your daily support right in the palm of your hand, even if you’re busy elsewhere.
Providing high-quality care shouldn’t mean sacrificing your time or limiting your practice’s growth. With BodySite’s automated, reusable care plans, you can deliver comprehensive, personalized patient education without the administrative burden. By automating patient education, you’ll have more time to focus on growing your practice, improving patient outcomes, and doing what you do best: caring for your patients.
Ready to automate and scale your practice? Start today with BodySite’s innovative tools for automated patient education, and see how easy it is to grow without compromise.