When working in a medical office, the question of improving the workflow of what you do can often come up. This can happen for a number of good reasons, including a genuine desire to see patients more effectively and a simple need to cut costs wherever possible. As a medical recruiting team, we understand that it’s important to improve the workflow of the most necessary tasks while also avoiding any level of decrease in patient care. Let’s discuss key ways to do that.

Introduce skilled team members

The introduction of new team members can sometimes be just what an office environment needs to ensure that the work is being done as effectively and efficiently as possible! A great addition to almost any medical office is a medical scribe – a practiced professional who has the ability to understand medical conversations and take detailed notes. With time, they will become key cogs in the machine, allowing more face-to-face doctor-patient interactions and enhancing the records that you have behind the scenes.

It’s also important to bear in mind that these new team members can have compound skills. For instance, a medical scribe can do much more than just scribe! In some organizations, they are responsible for a number of admin tasks, as well as some basic patient-focused tasks like data gathering or sending out texts and emails.

Eliminate redundancy

In every single business in the world, the way that they do things is typically built upon a foundation of many tiny decisions and alterations that have charted the course for their current standing. While doing things in this way is a wonderful way to ensure your team is evolving, it can also retain some elements from an initial workflow that are no longer desirable.

To ensure your healthcare setting is as efficient as possible, it may be a good idea to evaluate a number of workflows and look for places in which they overlap. It’s exceedingly rare that a task needs to be done twice, so you can eliminate one of those practices to ensure the overall patient experience is much more efficient.

Make use of modern tech

While making use of hyper-modern technology can sometimes feel a bit daunting, it’s also important for ensuring that every element of your technical systems is up to date. This is something of a given for medical tools, but consider how an online scheduling and intake form could cut down on the work your staff have to do.

An online scheduling and intake form could allow your patients to do some of your work for themselves. Plus, it allows for better transparency about what times you and your organization are available, which typically leads to a mediation of patient expectations, and an improvement in general patient satisfaction.

Improving workflow in a medical office can be vitally important to ensure the work continues at the pace needed. Consider some ways in which you may have formed bottlenecks in workflows, and how you might be able to alter or remove them.