Streamline Your Patient Scheduling Workflows With These 3 Steps

Whether you run a large clinic or a small practice, optimizing workflows should be top of mind.

Making sure you’re utilizing your staff’s time and your practice’s space efficiently can lead to improved patient outcomes, the ability to treat more patients, and, therefore, increased profits. However, most practices are drastically underutilizing their space and resources and aren’t able to reap these benefits.

Read on to learn more about how to streamline patient scheduling workflows with the right technology and equipment at your fingertips.

Defining the Patient Workflow

To optimize patient workflows, you first need to know what it encompasses. The experts at HIPAA Journal define it best: “ Patient workflow is the sequence of administrative, mental, and physical tasks that must be performed by multiple members of staff to provide clinical services to patients.”

A patient workflow begins the moment an appointment is made until a patient is discharged or receives aftercare. A patient scheduling workflow is one integral part of the overall care experience.

Proper patient scheduling can make or break your practice. By optimizing patient appointment scheduling, your practice can improve efficiency and patient safety, reduce waste and costs, and boost profits. On the other hand, an inefficient patient scheduling workflow can lead to poor resource utilization, staff burnout, and longer wait times (and frustration) for patients.

Clearly, streamlining patient scheduling should be a priority for your practice.

3 Ways to Streamline Patient Scheduling Workflows

How to schedule patients effectively is easier said than done. Here are a few steps you can take at your practice to optimize the patient scheduling workflow.

Collect and Utilize Data for Faster Decision-Making

When it comes to streamlining patient scheduling, data is one of your greatest assets. According to Midmark, a lack of data about operations often makes it difficult to make

informed decisions to improve clinical workflows.

The right data can help streamline the scheduling process by optimizing appointment times, reducing the time spent in waiting rooms and staff burnout, and overall improving patient satisfaction. One way to achieve this is through insightful, automatic data collection throughout the workday.

The right medical exam furniture can help with this seamless data collection. For instance, the Midmark Ritter 224 Barrier-Free Examination Chair can come with an automated vital signs device like Midmark IQvitals® that empowers your staff to bring more to the point of care, saving time. The data is automatically transferred to the EHR to save time both in the exam room and when it comes to organizing this essential data.

Automate a Patient Scheduling System

Communication with patients is also essential to streamlining patient appointment scheduling. Today, there are many ways to automate appointments and send appointment reminders to help optimize this process.

Appointment scheduling software can be beneficial for keeping track of appointment slots throughout the day and mitigating staff burnout. It can also help to prioritize appointments for patients who need to see a professional quickly versus patients who may benefit from telehealth services that could save your practice time and resources.

Along with the right software, you can also utilize automated appointment reminders to improve patient engagement and reduce the number of no shows. According to one study, HIPAA-compliant SMS text messages can reduce no-show rates by up to 50% to improve your bottom line.

Choose the Right Medical Exam Furniture

Finally, we can’t forget to mention how the right medical exam furniture and layout can drastically improve your patient workflows. The experts at Midmark reported that typical exam room utilization is only 33%. By optimizing your space, your staff can treat more patients efficiently.

Here are a few pieces of exam equipment that can help optimize your medical office:

Midmark 630-010 Humanform® Procedure Chair: This high-quality medical exam chair is designed to save you time and your back as the benchmark in patient and provider-centered performance. It is designed to complement the human body with more natural movement and enhanced positioning capabilities that make it easier for your staff to reach treatment sites without taking up too much space.

Midmark Ritter 225 Barrier-Free Examination Chair: The Ritter 225 is designed to offer low and high positioning heights so you can provide the best care to all patients, whether treating the elderly, expectant mothers, or patients with disabilities. It helps your staff position patients efficiently while prioritizing their safety.

Midmark 626 Barrier Free Examination Chair: This exam chair empowers your staff to take accurate blood pressure measurements with precise patient positioning. Additionally, the Midmark IQconnect® framework allows you to operate all of your devices and transfer data to the EMR from your computer screen to streamline patient workflows.

Ready to enhance patient scheduling workflows at your practice? Get the right equipment today from ExamTablesDirect that can help your practice effectively treat more patients safely while improving your bottom line.