Automate Your Practice's Workflows with These 5 Tools

Most healthcare providers have hectic practices, and staff members probably wear many hats daily. Chances are they’re constantly jumping from task to task, ensuring nothing is overlooked.

Sound familiar?

To maintain patient satisfaction and regulatory compliance and reduce potential clerical errors while maintaining high productivity, you can ease your staff’s burdens by automating your practice’s workflows.

Consider utilizing these five tools to automate your practice’s workflows and empower your staff to do more in less time.

1. Online scheduling

Your staff is probably devoted to scheduling, rescheduling, and canceling appointments. This takes place as they’re frequently interrupted in what they’re doing to answer the phone to manage scheduling issues.

Phone scheduling can be frustrating for patients because it can only be done during office hours and often involves long wait times on hold for patients. If wait times are excessive due to overburdened staff, this may quickly lead to patient dissatisfaction. Automating your online scheduling system is a win-win for your practice and patients.

Consider these statistics:

• 67% of patients prefer booking appointments online.
• Over 50% of Millennials and Gen Xers say they’d switch healthcare providers for the ability to book online.
• 94% of patients say they’d be more likely to select a new service provider if offered online booking options.
• 41% of booking services are discovered by patients through social media.

Automating appointment scheduling is a great way to drive revenue while increasing patient satisfaction. Statistics suggest businesses that initiate online scheduling see revenue increases – anywhere from 27% to up to 120%.

2. Chatbots

Your staff likely dedicates a fair amount of time daily fielding patient questions, many of which the answers apply to everyone. Responding to these inquiries is highly time-consuming. An innovative solution is to provide ready-made answers through chatbots. A good strategy for seamlessly responding to patient questions is using chatbots to mimic human interaction.

Utilizing chatbots provides patients with great convenience while decreasing the time your staff spends answering generic questions. As AI rapidly matured, at least one study found chatbot answers to be high quality. These findings suggest that, with the right tools, your practice can quickly assimilate chatbots into patient interactions.

3. Appointment reminders

A majority of healthcare facilities utilize automated appointment reminders. Not only does it significantly reduce the time your staff spends confirming upcoming appointments, but it also substantially reduces the number of no-shows.

No-shows cost the U.S. healthcare system more than $150 billion a year. Automating appointment reminders can significantly impact your practice by increasing the number of patients keeping their appointments while reducing disruption of their healthcare treatments for missed appointments. It also frees up front office staff to dedicate time to tasks that require a human touch.

4. Patient satisfaction surveys

The majority of healthcare facilities send out patient satisfaction surveys. Sending surveys is time-consuming but necessary to gauge patient experiences and improve upon services if needed.

Unfortunately, it’s a task that often falls to the wayside since office staff is busy dealing with immediate issues patients need help with. Through automation, you can send out timely HIPAA-compliant patient satisfaction surveys and collect feedback with minimal intervention from your staff.

5. Social media automation

Like most practices, you probably use social media to distribute information and promote your business. Managing social media often falls on the back burner because there are only so many hours a day. Unfortunately, having a sparse or sporadic appearance on social platforms is a bad look.

Imagine a scenario where your practice can post routinely. By leveraging social media automation, you can make your brand stand out. While social media doesn’t boost your search engine optimization (SEO) per se, it can indirectly increase your visibility. Look at it this way: The more people visit your social media pages, the more traffic you direct to your website.

Automating social media is especially helpful because, aside from scheduling posts and other distributed information, you can view all your feeds in a dashboard rather than logging on to social media sites to check your profile and respond to followers.

Automation is an essential tool in modern healthcare facilities

If your practice isn’t leveraging technology to automate specific tasks, it’s time to catch up with your competition. The above five tools are designed to increase productivity and efficiency without forfeiting quality. Integrating more automation into your workflow has the potential to transform your practice.

Kyle Ryan is chief technology officer at Tebra.