Juggling knives. Walking the tightrope. Taming lions. Those are all pieces of cake compared to running a successful healthcare practice.

Practice management is not just a matter of treating patients. Instead, you must grapple with a variety of responsibilities, such as staffing issues, scheduling demands, reimbursements, and the ongoing drumbeat of competition.

Ladle on constant changes and upgrades to clinical technology and it could mean sleepless nights as you wonder how to even tread water, let alone thrive.

It’s a familiar problem to Nick Spanakis, Head of PNC Healthcare Business Banking. “Over the years, we’ve cultivated strong trust among our healthcare clients. And those clients have often asked for our help working through business issues. At PNC, we’ve invested in the expertise beyond dollars and cents, providing wisdom and practice solutions that yield true business advantages both in profitability and working environment.”

Spanakis is optimistic about the future. Why? Because help is now here in the form of workflow and process automation.

“There is an incredible range of tools available today that help boost productivity, keep schedules full, and speed up cashflow. Even more importantly, these solutions make the life of the provider, the practice manager, and the office staff a great deal easier.”

So, with investment of time and capital, your practice could reap both short- and long-term rewards. How is automation making your prospects better, and how can you cash in on the benefits? Here are just a few of the ways:

Patient Scheduling

When it comes to gauging your practice’s health, no symptom is more ominous than an empty waiting room. Yet, it’s time-consuming for staff to field appointment requests or call with reminders for upcoming appointments.

Instead, automating your appointment scheduler means your staff won’t spend untold hours juggling the calendar and keeping your examining rooms full. Instead, patients can schedule their own appointments online. Or, you can automatically check-in with those who haven’t visited your practice in a while.

Intake

Insurance forms, patient histories.  emergency contacts, and preferred pharmacies. These all take up a lot of time for patients and staff alike, affecting overall patient satisfaction. The amount of time patients spend in waiting rooms has gone up significantly in recent years, with increased demands of intake largely to blame.

A digital intake system lets you retire the clipboard once and for all, allowing patients to provide crucial information before arriving at your offices. Even better, it eliminates the need for staff to  manually enter patient information into your system, both freeing up time and reducing the chance of error.

Recordkeeping

Paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork. Printing, translating, transcribing, filing, and protecting confidential information is an ongoing headache for any practice. So, what’s the antidote?

While electronic health record platforms have been of enormous benefit since their introduction, they often still require the manual entry of data across multiple systems. This inefficiency is leading to burnout among staff—not to mention creating the potential for costly errors.

Yet workflow automation, complete with data syncing and interfacing among systems, can help eliminate the need for manual data re-entry. In turn, that creates greater efficiency in your staff, and sharply reduces frustration and the chance for mistakes.[1]

Patient Contact

If you had to diagnose where most of your practice staff spends its time, our experts say everyday patient interaction would loom large. Yet, when it comes to routine phone outreach, automated text messages and voicemail transcription are ideal ways to streamline much of your phone traffic.

In fact, scheduling and confirming appointments, pre-visit instructions, and intake questions can often be performed with automated text messages. And many patient calls can be more efficiently managed with voicemail transcription.

Staff Communication

Successful treatment hinges on collaboration. This requires effective communication and seamless handling of information, whether within the same practice or between different healthcare systems. Workflow automation helps create better communication and care team coordination, reducing the day-to-day friction of missed communication or—even worse—crucial patient data falling between the cracks.

Patient Payments

You love treating patients. But, you need to be paid, too. With automation, you have the potential to bill faster and collect faster.

“Ask any of our healthcare clients, and the problem of timely billing and collections usually tops the list of their problems,” adds Spanakis. “Billing errors, late customer payments, reimbursement issues with insurers, and the potential for fraud are all areas where workflow automation can make a big difference.”

How does it pay off? By offering a variety of payment options such as online or where a patient can link to a portal by text to make payments, you can accelerate collections. “In fact, with those systems in place,” Spanakis points out, “You don’t even need a staff member to post many of the payments. Instead, those payments are simply transmitted into your office and automatically noted in your practice billing. Even at 3 a.m. I don’t know what could possibly be more efficient than taking payments when no one is even in the office.”

At the same time, automation reminds those who might have forgotten to remit, leading to a far more efficient collections process.

Now You Can Focus On The Patient

At a time when practices struggle to reduce patient wait times, keep cash flow current, and ensure a steady flow of patients, the benefits of workflow automation really begin to add up.

Yet there’s another reason to make the leap: Improved patient experience. Because the less time you focus on the mechanics of keeping the practice humming, the more time and energy you can devote to creating the right patient experience.

“Automation is an investment to be sure,” Spanakis offers, “In time, money, and training. At the same time, the practice’s return on investment is what matters. As a company who specializes in healthcare financial operations, PNC Healthcare is adept at helping clients determine the right financial moves. And for many of those clients, the rewards of automation are definitely there.”

Are you ready to create a better experience for your patients, your staff, and yourself? Then maybe it’s time to have a conversation with the professionals at PNC Healthcare. And see how workflow automation could mean a healthier income statement for your practice.