Managing patient waitlists can be one of the most time-consuming parts of a busy clinic – that’s why we’re sharing some ways to better handle this process.
💡In this post, you can see how a few simple things can create a better experience for your patients and clinic teams.
With business technology, you can configure it completely to your needs and sometimes its not easy to figure out exactly how you need your waitlist forms set up to make it as easy and as informative as possible. Delivering the best healthcare can start with a good experience and first impression for the patients by signing up and submitting their information easily.
Here are a list of things that business technology can do to improve your process and workflow.
In doing this, submitting patients’ personal information will be automated and easier to manage as once configured to your preferences. Choosing a secure database ensures personal and confidential information aren’t floating around in a public use app on the web and have proper protection.
As times change, so may procedures and information. Employees and management will need to know how to adjust the form so that the questions asked reflect these changes. Providing training and documentation for everyone to understand how to use the software is crucial; this will help in delivering your best care to your patients. Having the right tools and knowing exactly how to use them to your benefit is fundamental.
A good example of standardizing and letting patients know the wait times is the BC government’s surgery wait times page. There isn’t a form to submit information and apply for a specialist but they ask their questions in such a way that quickly narrows down to what procedure and specialist you may want to see, as well as their individual wait times. This brings us to the next section.
Asking for too much personal information can come across as suspicious and invasive. In an age where everything is moving to the digital world, cybersecurity concerns and breaches are growing everyday. Ease your patients by limiting your questions to just enough for you to get their personal identifying information (full name and contact information) and understand their medical situation and concerns.
As mentioned previously, standardizing questions and clearly explaining processes helps the patient understand what it is they are looking for in your form and automatically figuring out the level of complexity of their situation helps you quickly sort and categorize them.
As your list grows, more and more notifications will need to be sent out. Making notifications and emails by hand is inefficient and can be automated to save yourself a ton of admin work. You can customize the automations to send different kinds of emails for different situations and conditions. This will save Medical Office Assistants (MOA) a load of time that would have been spent on sending those emails individually or semi-manually with assisted mass email sending. With this time saved, MOAs can use that time to help patients and deliver better healthcare.
We’re working with clinics to help make their work easier and better by developing applications, databases, forms, **with Airtable, Glide, Make, Zapier, Notion, Office 365, and more while ensuring compliance with health data privacy regulations.
We hope to move people away from simpler applications (Excel and Google Sheets) into the latest tech tools. These tools are going to offer smarter ways for you to efficiently manage both our data and key operational processes.
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