Introduction
Digital assistants and automation have taken over our life. From asking “hey siri, what’s the weather today” or “Ok google turn off the lights”, technology has truly taken over our lives and made it easier. The efficiency with which we get our tasks done with digital assistants can truly solidify their relevance in these times.
That being said, healthcare practices should not shy away from embracing healthcare automation and technology. It has the potential to make the entire operation smoother and improve efficiency. Automation in the office is one of the most important trends for practices to consider as healthcare automation presents an array of possibilities.
But first, what is automation?
According to IBM, in simple words, Automation is a term for technology applications where human input is minimized.
What is Healthcare Automation?
Automation in healthcare or healthcare automation helps improve patient outcomes. Technology and automation is used to make operations easier in a healthcare practice and improve the quality of patient care. Healthcare automation can be used in many areas, some of which are patient interaction and patient experience. By making use of automation in healthcare, the process can be optimized for better patient experience. What exactly can you automate to make this happen?
Healthcare Automation – What to Automate?
Next, you might ask, where can you minimise human input in your healthcare practice? This is where we can help you out! Read on to find out how healthcare automation can increase efficiency in your dental practice.
Intake Forms
Most patients find the process of entering a dental practice and filling the intake form on a clipboard really tedious. This time-consuming process can be significantly reduced by providing the patients an option to pre-fill the form digitally before coming into the office.
Not only will it help in reducing errors in the form, but also be able to integrate with your PMS if required. The entire patient onboarding process can be made smoother for both you and the patient.
Digital forms are going to pave the way for future patient information intake, this healthcare automation will be here to stay!
Treatment Plan Follow-Ups
A patient is more likely to stay engaged if they are in constant communication with you. Automated treatment follow-ups are a great way to show the patients that you care.
What are they? Once the patient’s appointment is over the doctor may hand a list of instructions that the patient needs to follow until the next visit. Along with a printed copy of the instruction received on the day of the appointment, you can also schedule automated follow-ups via email or SMS that can be personalized accordingly.
Along with helping you keep the patients engaged, it will most importantly also help the patient to keep their health in check.
Get Your Patients Back Into the Office with Recall Lists
Regular check-ups timed out properly are quite important to make sure that the patient is in perfect oral health. But as you know, getting people back to your healthcare practice can be tricky. For example, a patient came to your practice for a cleaning. Six months later, they probably need to get it done again, but these things patients tend to not be updated about. What can you do from your end then? Remind them!
With healthcare automation recall list capabilities, you will be able to set a reminder for the next visit as soon as the patients step out
Automate Reminders
Patients undergoing a specific treatment need to ensure that they keep up regular visits. How will you keep them informed about those? You use healthcare automation such as automated reminders.
By using automated reminders you will be able to schedule reminders to go according to the time period you set. This means that you can set reminders to go a week before the appointment and or a day before, an hour before etc.
These reminders will keep the patients engaged and make sure that they don’t miss out on the appointment.
Automated Payment Collection
Another area where you can use automation is payment collection. Even before a patient is done with their appointment or a complete treatment you can schedule automated payment messages. These messages can contain a link to the payment.
Improve Patient Experience Through Surveys and Forms
mprovement comes when you get to receive feedback on your current performance
Obviously, every practice aims to provide the best to their patients. This not only ensures that they return to your practice but also helps bring new patients. So, how should you go about it?
You ask your current patients about their experiences. This process can be tedious to do manually, and this is where automation comes in. Through automation you can select a list of contacts you want to receive feedback from and schedule text or email messages with survey links or forms asking for their input. The responses collected can be viewed with a software like Emitrr.
Sending the messages and tracking the metrics all of it can be done under one platform.
Automate Marketing Campaigns
Whether it is an announcement of a new service or a referral program you can automate the whole marketing process. Simply type in the message, whether it be email or text, select a list of contacts you wish to send the campaign to, and finally schedule the message to be sent according to your choice.
It not only stops here, you can also schedule follow up messages to be sent after the main message. All of this can be done through automation. Sweet deal isn’t it?
All the time that would have been spent curating messages for different channels can be done through one single Software like Emitrr.
Collect and Monitor Reviews
Reviews are the backbone of any successful practice. They show prospective new patients that your practice is the best and can be relied upon. So religiously collecting reviews and also monitoring and responding to them should be of utmost importance.
But hold up! There are so many review platforms out there, how can you ensure you gather sufficient reviews across all these platforms?
For example, with Emitrr you will be able to
1) Increase your reviews, by sending out review requests through automation. These review requests can again be in text or email form and can contain the link to the relevant platforms where you wish to obtain feedback/reviews.
2) Monitor and respond to reviews that you receive across all platforms under one dashboard. Responding to negative reviews is as, if not more important than responding to positive reviews.
Benefits of Automation in Healthcare
Time Saved
Perhaps the most glaringly obvious and useful benefit of healthcare automation is the amount of time saved. As more and more important tasks are automated it leaves your staff with a lot of time to pay attention to the patient sitting in your clinic. Patient experience will see an upward tick as now without the worry of the automated tasks, more room is left for human interaction.
Reduced Costs
Through automation, tasks are completed quickly and efficiently which means your practice’s staff is no longer needed to stay extra hours to complete emergency tasks. This manpower need is easily eliminated with healthcare automation and thus helps the practice save a lot in revenue. The scope of errors is also reduced significantly, which means no extra amount will have to be spent to cover up the errors.
Better Privacy
A very essential part of running a healthcare practice is protecting your patients’ medical records and private information. Healthcare providers need to comply with HIPAA to safeguard protected health information or PHI. While using software for automation you need to make sure that they comply with HIPAA. Most automation software’s come with HIPAA compliance and offer better privacy.
Increased Patient Satisfaction
As discussed above, automation helps save time and improves efficiency. The direct result of this is improved patient satisfaction. Patient satisfaction depends on a number of criteria. Starting from browsing your website, scheduling an appointment, checking in, filling out patient intake forms, giving feedback, etc to name a few. As discussed in one of the sections above, all these stages can be automated. This automation will help get these tasks and formalities get done easier and hence provide a sense of ease to the patients thus resulting in improved patient satisfaction.
What are the Benefits of Healthcare Automation for Patients?
While automation clearly helps a healthcare practice in its operations, it also provides great benefits for patients apart from patient satisfaction. Some of these benefits are:
Enhanced Communication
Automation in services such as communication can do wonders for a patient’s health. Let’s take, for example, a software like Emitrr. Emitrr provides a feature called ‘Text Campaign’. This feature can be used by the doctor to schedule treatment plans for his/her patients. It can also be used to send reminders about a patient’s upcoming appointment. Being able to communicate these with a patient will instill an onus in the patient to keep their health in check. Regularly attending the appointment and following treatment plans will inadvertently help improve health outcomes.
Improved Participation and Management
As patients are now more engaged with the help of automation, it provides them with ease of access to their own medical records, billing payment dates, appointment scheduling, etc. In short, automation makes sure to give more ownership to the patients in terms of their engagement with their healthcare providers. Better health outcomes can thus be expected from this increased engagement and management.
Quality Care
Automation empowers healthcare providers to provide quality care to their patients. Patient information and retrieval are made easy to access and communication with patients is simpler and more engaging. These help the healthcare provider to monitor patient health closely and hence guarantee quality care.
Frequently Asked Questions
Automation bias can lead clinicians to place too much weight on AI’s diagnosis or recommendations, which might make them miss situations where AI could be wrong.
Healthcare automation can allow your staff to get more work done in the same amount of time by serving more patients and increasing the workload capacity. Additionally, AI can also help in automating and taking care of repetitive or manual tasks, allowing practitioners to focus on patient care.
While AI can help in reducing repetitive or manual work to a good extent, they are unlikely to replace the kind of role nurses play in the healthcare system.
Conclusion
Automation has the ability to make all spheres of operation in a healthcare practice extremely easy and efficient. Healthcare automation will help your staff perform better, save tons of time and help deliver the best patient experience.
There are tons of tools out there that can help make your practice operations simpler and more effective, you just need to know what you are looking for. We might be biased but we suggest looking into Emitrr as a starting point, it will definitely help your practice grow!
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