EHR’s and their role in patient satisfaction
Electronic Health records (EHRs) are the way to go in this day and age of technology. How you can make an EHR work for you and your clinic in improving your patient satisfaction will depend on certain features in your EHR and how you use them. This article will discuss which features and how to put them to best usage. If used correctly these features can improve your clinic reputation and bring more patients over a period of time and thus payback multiple times the cost that you are paying for these features.
Practice Management Software is what you need for your clinic. Most of the EHR providers should have a suite of features built-in which should make it easier for you to manage your practice and thus improve your patient satisfaction. What are the features you should be looking for when choosing your software?
Online appointment booking, Patient Portal, Automatic surveys to patients are some of the features your EHR should have as a must. A lot of companies will charge you separately for these features and may not be included in the basic package. So it becomes paramount to check if your EHR will provide these features and if so is there any additional cost.
Online appointment booking and rescheduling.
This is an important feature that not only will make you and your front desk’s life easier but also will make your patients happy. You or your staff don’t have to put the patients on hold over the phone to schedule an appointment. Also it makes rescheduling appointment much easier and results in less “No Shows” and improves clinic productivity and efficiency.
Automatic email reminders.
Your EHR software should have the ability to send automatic email or text reminders to your patients at a predetermined time before their scheduled appointment. It should also have the ability to send the patient a link that they can use to reschedule their own appointments online thus preventing no shows and improving the clinic productivity.
Patient Portal.
Having a patient portal built in into your EHR software is becoming more and more important these days as that way patients can review their information and bills online. This helps in preventing delay in providing the patients the information they need which keeps them more satisfied. Also this frees up more time for your front desk staff to do other things for the clinic.
Automatic Surveys.
Another important feature in your EHR is the ability to send automatic patient satisfaction surveys after every clinic visit. This way you are able to get more surveys back than you would normally be able to get. If your EHR company is able to help you post these to Google, Yelp or your website, that is like a silver lining.
In summary choosing the right EHR could make all the difference in improving your patient satisfaction and as a byproduct also increase the efficiency and productivity of your clinic. Asking the right questions when choosing an EHR is becoming more and more important as the number of software providers are increasing.
