Automation Leading the Way in Healthcare

Automation in Healthcare…

Leading the way to improved office efficiency

There’s no denying that everything in life is becoming automated. If you buy the same product regularly, the ability to set up a subscription service rests at your finger tips. As a result, your laundry detergent, paper towels, or diapers automatically get delivered to your door step. Do you find it hard to take the time to sit down and pay your bills? No problem; set up automatic payments and your bank account does the work for you. Automation touches every area of our lives and healthcare is no exception. Between the need to improve performance and patient satisfaction to the pressure of reducing costs and eliminating waste, there are a lot of reasons that automation in healthcare remains an attractive prospect. Here’s a look at some of the best ways to harness automation in your practice.

Patient Portal

How much time does your staff spend on the phone scheduling appointments, providing lab results, and relaying messages for the providers in your practice? Now think of a better way to utilize that time. Sounds attractive, doesn’t it? With a patient portal, all of those time-consuming tasks become automated, leaving your staff the time to focus on more pressing matters. Today’s portals allow your patients the ability to request or schedule appointments online. Also, patients can view lab results published straight from the EHR, make referral and refill requests, and message their providers directly.

MicroMD offers Henry Schein Secure Chart Patient Portal, a flexible, comprehensive, efficient resource focused on improving the patient/provider relationship. Also, Secure Chart Patient Portal saves your practice time, money, and allows your staff to spend less time on the phone completing tasks manually.

EPCS

Most clinicians utilize electronic prescribing, but many continue writing paper prescriptions for Schedule II through V controlled substances. This takes up more time than electronic prescribing, provides less security, and opens the provider up to possible fraud. With Electronic Prescribing of Controlled Substances (EPCS), you can prescribe all drugs, including controlled substances, from your EHR’s eRx workflow. This not only increases safety and prevents fraud, but also allows you the opportunity view vital cost information for prescriptions. You, the provider, choose what will help your patient’s condition, and fit into their budget. Perhaps most importantly, EPCS can provide you with life-saving drug interaction information before you write a prescription.

MicroMD offers EPCS Gold, a robust solution that fully integrates into your MicroMD EHR eRx workflow and allows you to safely and efficiently prescribe controlled substances while reducing the risks of drug abuse, prescription diversion, and doctor shopping.

Automated Appointment Reminders

Reminding patients of their appointments can take all day with staff members fitting calls in between other pressing duties. Often, these reminder calls are somewhat fruitless- for example, when a patient can’t be reached and the appointment is left unconfirmed. Due to this, staff members remain unaware of whether the scheduled appointment will be attended. This can lead to double-booking in order to protect the bottom line, which can backfire quickly. With automated appointment reminders, you allow the technology to do the legwork for you, utilizing automated phone calls, text messages, and emails. Your patients choose a preferred contact method and respond quickly and easily with their responses filtering directly into your PM schedule.

MicroMD offers AutoRemind, a fully integrated, customizable tool that sends emails, text messages, and phone calls to confirm patient appointments. AutoRemind also sends reminders, and records confirmation status directly into MicroMD PM, saving you time and money.

We’re living in a world of automation. Sometimes it feels like we’re missing out on the human connection, but when used appropriately, automation improves efficiency. Automation can free up time spent on manual processes to allow us more one-on-one personal interaction. Many moving pieces are necessary to keep a medical practice going; therefore, why not automate the tasks that require the most time and steal the most focus? Automation helps you concentrate on the reason you became a doctor in the first place – the business of healing.

For more information on MicroMD’s Marketplace and how these tech tools can help you harness the power of automation in your practice, visit micromd.com or call 1-800-624-8832.