3 Ways to Save Time With Your Practice

You’re already busy, and there’s an increasingly longer list of daily requirements that are taking up more of your time. Finding time to create a great patient experience becomes more difficult as your spare time becomes less and less. You may be surprised to find that there is a lot of extra time being wasted throughout your day, though. So, how do find that wasted time? Utilizing the automation of care!

With today’s innovation, there are dozens of opportunities to automate frequently repeated tasks that are taking up a large part of your, and your staff’s, day. Automation of care gives you more time and helps you create an even better patient experience.

So, today, we’re sharing with you 3 easy ways to utilize automation and instantly save time with your practice. Saved time for you means more time to create an excellent patient experience.

With dozens of apps and software available at your fingertips, managing day-to-day communication with your patients has never been easier to do with the automation of care. There are tons of email management software options that you can use to schedule out weekly and/or monthly email newsletters to your patients. You can write and schedule these emails in advance, saving you needless time sending them on the day of. You can also automate reminder emails to patients for surveys, after-appointment follow-ups, day-to-day communication, and more.

If you don’t already have an online presence, you should. 86% of patients conduct a health related search before booking a doctor’s appointment. Many physicians choose not to create online profiles because managing them requires more time that they don’t have. But managing your online profile and social media accounts can be automated, too, requiring very little time. Online social media management platforms like Hootsuite and Buffer allow you to schedule your social media post days, weeks, and even months in advance. With this ability, you can spend a few hours planning social media for an entire month, rather than spending time each and every day.

Chances are, you’re not utilizing patient feedback to it’s fullest potential. Patient feedback is vital to creating a great patient experience. It not only gives you credibility, but it also helps you find areas for improvement. You should be requesting feedback from patients after each and every visit. That can add a lot of time to your already full schedule, though.

So, how do you automate the feedback process? You can use an email management software to schedule emails that are automatically sent to patients following each appointment. You can easily create a short survey that is included in the email. Surveys can provide you with a wealth of information. However, to get the best value from a survey as possible, and increase feedback, text messaging outforms email. With text messaging, you get higher response rates, are able to view feedback in real-time, and are able to respond to patient concerns quickly.

We understand the need for patient feedback, and the demand for text messaging from your patients, so we created our Reputation Management product to save you even more time and provide you with you unprecedented insight into what your patients are saying about you and how they feel after seeing one of your providers. We automatically gather feedback on your practice, driving happy patients to Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other sites to rate your practice positively. This helps build your online profile and presence. We also give unhappy patients a private forum to express their concerns, keeping negative reviews off the web, but ensuring you have the feedback you need.

The biggest complaint we hear from providers is how time consuming it is to manage their schedules. Your staff spend hours calling to confirm appointments only to receive no response. Patients cancel at the last minute due to busy schedules, and you’re left with empty slots in your calendar and aren’t able to reschedule fast enough. With amazing new tools, you can now automate nearly every aspect of managing your schedule, from confirming appointments to managing your wait list and easily rescheduling cancellations … all without picking up the phone.

After speaking with dozens of clients, we quickly realized they were all really unhappy with the services they were currently using to manage their schedules. So, we created our Waitlist and Reminders products to help practices fully automate the management of their schedules – easily!

Our waitlist product easily integrates with your EHR/PM system and is simple-to-use. It allows you to automatically contact patients on your waitlist to fill your schedule. Once a patient confirms they want an appointment, we automatically book the new appointment in your EHR/PM’s schedule. In their first week of using our Waitlist product, this Luma Health customer filled 5 appointments, and they filled 15+ in the first month!

Our Reminders product allows you to send customizable reminders to your patients wherever they are: text, phone, or email. It provides you with real-time confirmations, tracking, and message logs. It also allows patients to confirm or cancel an appointment via a simple text message. It’s easy-to-use and you can see who confirmed, cancelled, or didn’t respond in a real-time dashboard. After implementing our Reminders product, this Luma Health customer cut their no-shows by more than 50%, with over 70% of patients responding to the messages.

Your responsibilities aren’t decreasing. The demands on your time aren’t getting any less. These simple automation of care switches can save you and your practice a ton of time!

Get started with Luma Health today! Luma Health works with many of the leading EMRs and PMs, offering automated waitlists, cancellation management, appointment confirmation texts, referral management, patient recall, and more. We’re ready to help you save time!

Tashfeen Ekram, MD, is a radiologist, self-taught coder, healthcare innovator and Co-Founder of Luma Health. Contact him on Twitter at @tashfeenekramMD.