Becoming a paperless medical practice? Here’s how to prepare your patients and staff
It’s time to prepare for the future with paperless medical practices. Learn how to prepare your patients and staff before you become a paperless medical practice!
The ubiquity of computers and mobile devices offers new opportunities to improve the efficiency of patient care, yet many medical practices don’t realize the potential of technology in their practices.
And it makes sense. Going paperless can be daunting. Whether you’re a small or large practice, it’s a significant change and involves many changes in your administration and workflow.
Paperless practice solutions can be an excellent way to help streamline processes in your practice. Going paperless increases your practices’ efficiency, improves costs, betters your service to patients, and helps ensure compliance with vital regulations.
It’s essential to the success of your practice that you involve your staff and patients in planning all aspects of your eventual paperless medical office, including workflow redesign, charting processes, forms management, and training.
This article will give you a few tips on how to prepare your patients and staff and the reasons why you should do so.
Office staff preparation
The first step to making the paperless process feel seamless to patients is making it feel seamless to staff. Dedicate time to training so everyone understands the new systems. This is especially important if your practice is adopting a new software package for the first time.
Consider all of the back-end processes that can be eliminated, and implement new workflows accordingly. A good software partner will reduce scan and filing times, but also help you with things such as scheduling or eliminating manual appointment reminders.
Make sure to provide training resources for staff to be able to refer to. Build an (electronic!) document of process FAQs or better yet create screen recording videos of how to use the system — see ours for an example!
intakeQ has worked extensively with practices as they prepared to become paperless. The most effective of these practices involved their entire team in the redesign process.
Patient education for going paperless
It’s important to educate your patients on the benefits of the paperless system. While it may be an adjustment at the start, ultimately it will help streamline your practice…and thus improve their care.
Security
The most important thing to help them understand is how their information is being protected. Patient records, particularly in the medical and behavioral health fields, are sensitive. It’s vital that your patient forms and medical records are 100% HIPAA-compliant. Ensure your staff is able to effectively communicate this to your patients to set their minds at ease.
Prioritize ease
The key to getting your patients on board is to make it as simple as possible. Nothing is more frustrating than receiving a form and it being glitchy. Or not knowing how to sign it. Or not knowing how to send it back to you.
First, don’t enlist patients to download an app or new software. Ensure that the forms you send are intuitive and don’t require them to download additional software or apps.
Second, develop consistent messaging. With every form that you send, have a clean and easy-to-read template email with instructions for patient use. This also streamlines your practice on the back-end. So when you have a new patient, simply copy and paste your template with the relevant form, and hit send!
Leverage mobile
Patients want to feel cared for throughout their whole process — including the administrative components. When you partner with intakeQ, we help you set that tone from the start with fully customizable forms. We also provide you with secure text messaging portals, self-schedule widgets, and more. This gives you more time to focus on your patients and gives your patients more flexibility in how they engage with you.
Try it for yourself! We are currently offering a free two-week trial. Don’t miss out; get started today!
