8 Ways to Automate Healthcare Practices

Medical care is often critical, rewarding and the reason you own a healthcare practice.  The admin side however, can sometimes be tiresome and time-consuming if done manually. From billing, to patient data collection, your admin team can often get bogged down, especially when dealing with many patients on a daily basis.

Thanks to automation, your medical business can simplify patients' appointment scheduling, streamline insurance claims and most importantly, reduce the risks of human error. Automation can also cut out excess paperwork and allow your staff to concentrate on treatment and caring for patients, as opposed to manually filing endless forms and charts.

The trick is to embrace automation without compromising the personalised care and attention you give your patients.

Here are eight ways how you can automate your processes in your healthcare practices. 

1. Automate Patient Data Management

You can automate your patients' data management to facilitate the process of sharing data among departments. With this automation, patients will only need to provide their names and other basic details at the reception of each department they are visiting. 

Since the reception staff knows where the patient is headed next, all patient information from a health practice wide database will be sent to the lab or any other department that the patient wants to go next.

In this way, your patients experience is seamless and cuts out the need for more forms, receipts and referrals. An enhanced data sharing process will be streamlined, which means easy communication between departments for your team and a far greater customer experience for your patients. 

2. Automate Personalised Messages

Gone are the times when you had to send physical cards to patients with birthday wishes or get well soon notes post surgery. With the help of technology, you can save yourself the hassle of writing manual cards and posting them.

By collecting your patients' details in a CRM that can then automate personalised messages for a range of reasons you see fit. Your patients will receive those messages in real-time, and they will not look or feel look automated. Receiving communication such as personalised messages builds trust in your health care facility and your patients will know that you care about them in the process.

3. Automate Your Patients' Interaction

Face-to-face interaction between healthcare professionals and patients is essential but not always possible. Assuming that you deal with many clients from many regions of Australia, it would be hard to interact with each patient one on one.

Why not automate to improve efficiency and accuracy? You can automate your customer care service department, which is the first place your patients reach out to whenever they need your services. Automation can help you offer the appropriate online based appointments and consultancy to attend to your patient concerns in real-time, without the need for travel and delay. 

4. Automate Health Tips

As a medical firm, your core responsibility is to keep every patient satisfied. One way to show greater customer care for your patients is to ensure follow-ups that provide the right health care tips according to each patient's unique need are a regular point of contact for your practice. Unfortunately, to carry out these follow-ups manually is a process that can be extremely time consuming. 

Automation allows you to send health care tips for all your patients with ease. Provided that you have the patients' data in your database, you will be sending timely follow ups with health tips that provide great value to your patients with minimal admin hours for your team.

5. Automate Intake Forms

The filing process for intake forms can be a headache for many health care facilities. Even when the patient has booked an appointment and visits at an agreed time, he/she still has to fill out more intake forms, which consumes more time for the patient and admin team.

Since the patient does not always know what to bring with them in regards to paperwork, the chances for delays are many. Maybe certain forms require the patient to fill in the information regarding their past health issues and attach reports. Or maybe, the patient has to call their other Doctors and physicians first, to remind them of their medications' names and past treatment.