Most waiting room patient experiences can be daunting for anyone needing to see either their doctor or dentist. There are some ways in which the practice staff can help make it better and more comfortable for you. Things such as offering some tea or coffee, water or magazines and perhaps letting you take a stroll outside while you wait, can all make some difference.
The one that makes the biggest is the check-in process. When practices have a haphazard way of checking in patients on a first-come first-service basis, many can get antsy and the waiting can get frustrating especially in the cases where they call your number and you’re half-heartedly enthusiastic about it because perhaps the television in the waiting room is too loud and you are worried you may miss your number.
Turning this experience into a more welcoming and organized one is the best thing any medical business can do for itself and most importantly for its patients and keep them coming back regularly. A well organized, clean, and friendly place is one that needs a touch of the digital. Below we highlight the importance of having a new way of doing things more digitally.
Digital Patient Check-Ins, What Are they?
The addition of a digital patient check-in system has had many advantages to places that have already been doing it. Instead of waiting in line to get to the front of the counter and relay all your details to the receptionist Infront of a bunch of strangers, the digital check-in system is a more personalized way of filling in a form via an electronic device in the comfort of your chair, without the peering ears of others.
This electronic device will have a bunch of questions about your health, contact information, and such, that you can fill in and submit online and they will receive it within seconds. Plus, it saves a lot of paperwork for the practice staff as well. One does not need to be digitally savvy to use it and it is created to be made in the simplest form possible.
Streamlining any office operations, and not just the medical sector, makes a big difference to the overall model of the company, its brand, and reputation thereof. People will far prefer visiting you than the old-school traditional services of the manual office next door.
In today’s digital era, it is inevitable to still be doing things like they were hundreds of years ago. People are getting more digitally savvy, leaning towards the automation of technology and innovation that helps make for much better customer experience, if you don’t get with the times, you will get left behind.
The process is simple, once the patient arrives, the receptionist schedules them in, on her system, then hands them an iPad, which is specifically geared to that patient and they can sit down comfortably and start to fill in the page with their medical details. Some go so far as to take a picture of the patient and integrate all the information into the office data system where it is stored. A first-hand account of a clinical associate professors opinion on this can be found online here https://millennialeye.com/articles/2014-sept-oct/patient-check-in-is-it-time-to-go-digital/
Let’s look at reasons why this is a good idea to implement into any offices today.
Reasons to Get your Office A Digital Patient Check-In System
Enhancing Anyone’s Experience: This is the main issue for these, here. If it weren’t for these gadgets and this organized way of doing things, they would not exist. Improving a customer’s experience is what all businesses should be about.
Having this option in the waiting room is a quick and easy way of getting anyone checked-in without having to interact with them are standing in line. Sometimes the staff may be busy or taking a call or on their lunch-break (it can happen), and this just makes people more impatient.
With this check-in process, the overall experience improves and it is a win-win for both the clinic, the staff, and the customer.
Significantly Reduces Work Loads: In today’s world, we are trying everything we can to limit our waste and garbage. Not to mention the cutting down of trees for paper has become a vast issue and has been affecting the global environment negatively due to many forests being used for commercial purposes. Most modern technology providers such as Relatient are doing their bit to help preserve the environment as well as enhance the experience of most medical practices, and many should take a page out of their book.
When we go digital, it means many things, and one of these is no more paper and no more paperwork. With going paper-less, companies will join the fight against waste. One will not need to juggle between phone calls, checking in the patients, speaking to new patients. All this can add up in any workplace making it an impossible environment to work in.
The bonus is, you don’t need to stack files or folders anywhere, because everything will be on computers or laptops.
Sharing Is Caring: When things are done online, sharing information takes a matter of seconds. One of the big advantages of this system is that when records need to be shared between the staff and the medical practitioners, it is much easier than having to hand them a bunch of paper files and folders.
This can be one of the most advantageous aspects especially when doctors refer their patients to other practitioners and need them to look at their records. They can just send it to them within minutes. Gone are the days where they send the patient with their folder to the referrals.
Searches are also done in a much easier and quicker way online than having to go through stacks of paper records from years ago in a box somewhere behind a closet.
In conclusion, the advantage of having this simple yet effective device cannot be stressed enough.
