Covid-19 has brought challenges and new opportunities to the healthcare industry. On the one hand, it forces healthcare providers to reimagine their businesses and find new and creative ways to attract patients and develop their practices. But it also exacerbated many of the challenges they faced before the pandemic, including profitability and financial stability, how to provide consumer-oriented healthcare, and doctor burnout caused by increased paperwork and inefficient workflows.
As providers emerge from the pandemic and look to the future, they have three main priorities: improving patient outcomes, increasing patient satisfaction, and increasing profitability — while making life easier for those who have been overworked for a long time.
Although this may seem like a daunting task, these goals are not mutually exclusive. They can be achieved by evolving into paperless practices to eliminate unnecessary and redundant management tasks.
The cost of pushing paper
Healthcare paperwork can burden practice in a variety of ways:
A lot of time and money was wasted in the practice of relying on paper. Even in small clinics, staff often answer hundreds of calls every week, remind patients of their appointments, fax them to insurance companies, and update patient records by manually entering notes into electronic health records (EHR). As the clinic’s patient roster increases, so does the administrative work—forcing employees to work longer hours or requiring the hiring of new employees, leading to uncertainty about whether data and notes are captured in full and accurately.
Take the practice of rheumatology on the West Coast as an example, which includes a nurse practitioner, three full-time employees, and three part-time employees. The practice serves 9,000 patients and receives 20-30 new patient requests every week. Each new patient spends about 10 minutes on the phone to collect information, which requires staff about 5 hours a week, and more time to manually enter the paperwork information filled out at the first appointment and update patient records.
In order to improve efficiency in busy practices, the doctor who led it abandoned many paper-based processes in favor of electronic faxing, filing, and forms that worked with EHR. The result is dramatic. This approach saves more than 500 hours on administrative tasks each year, enabling employees to be more efficient and spend more time dealing with patients. This switch is also more convenient for patients who can provide a detailed medical history electronically. They can spend time at home filling out forms more accurately so that they can access their information more easily.
Throwing Paper: Towards Digital Practice
If your practice faces the same challenges, it can be helpful to develop into a paperless practice. Here are three methods:
#1 – Beyond EHR – Most practices now implement electronic medical records to make it easier for providers and patients to access and manage medical records. However, to achieve the efficiency you want requires more digitization of documents that are not normally stored in the EHR. Practice must digitize all documents (including records, signed consents, claims and payments) to fundamentally improve workflow, efficiency and productivity.
#2-Share more data – The shift to a value-based care model has made meaningful use and MACRA/MIPS reporting requirements more prominent. With the launch of ONC’s final rules for 21st Century Cures, providers must re-examine their policies and procedures regarding data access to ensure that patients, other providers, and regulators can gain greater accessibility. Relying on paper documents will find compliance with new requirements more challenging-but moving to digital documents will make data sharing and regulatory compliance easier and faster.
#3 – Improve the overall virtual care experience – Covid-19 forces providers to receive telemedicine to continue treating patients. Telemedicine is the first step in many virtual care strategies, but patients are now looking for more convenience, including a paperless experience. To meet this need, practice can implement smart intake solutions that allow information sharing and direct integration into electronic medical records, use appointment reminder emails or secure texts, and electronic bills and reminders. These types of solutions not only increase patient engagement, but can also reduce absenteeism and call tags—and ultimately increase billing speed and cash flow, save employees time and frustration, and reduce missed revenue opportunities.
Paperlessness can free practice and employees from the daunting piles of paperwork, providing them with tools to increase productivity, increase profitability, increase patient satisfaction, reduce burnout, and focus on patient care.
Photo: RapidEye, Getty Images
