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.

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

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

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

1. Automate Patient Data Management

You can automate your patients' data management to facilitate the process of sharing data among departments. With this intelligent 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 overall patient 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 better patient experience. 

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' health information in a CRM you can then automate patient communication with personalised messages for a range of reasons, including follow-ups or reminders.

Leveraging historical data ensures that these messages are timely and relevant. Your patients will receive these messages in real-time, and they will not look or feel automated. This type of personalised patient communication enhances quality care, builds trust in your healthcare facility, and reassures your patients that you care about them throughout the process.

3. Automate Your Patients' Interaction

Human 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 operational 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 tools 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 healthcare providers, the 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 healthcare tips according to each patient's unique need are a regular point of contact for your practice. Unfortunately, carrying out these follow-ups manually is a process that can be extremely time-consuming. 

Automation allows you to send healthcare tips to 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 administrative work for your team.

5. Automate Patient Intake Forms

The filing process for intake forms can be a headache for many healthcare 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 administrative staff.

Since the patient does not always know what to bring with them in regards to paperwork, the chances for delays are many. Some forms may require the patient to fill in 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 plans.