Five Ways to Increase Care Team Efficiency

Providing a great patient experience results in more than just a happy patient. According to The New England Journal for Medicine, a number of studies found that better patient experiences-even more than adherence to clinical guidelines-are associated with better outcomes. ¹ However, with the rise of telehealth usage and patient expectations, care teams are quickly finding that at scale it's difficult to provide personalized care, and as a result, many clinical workers are increasingly becoming burnt out.

To help you better balance the challenge of providing a great patient experience, and care team burnout, we've put together a list of 5 time-consuming activities for managing patient relationships and how to improve them,

If you're looking to improve your care team's efficiency, reach out to learn how Tellescope's patient management platform can help by emailing us at inquiries@tellescope.com.

Challenges

1. Using phone calls for all patient inquiries and communications‍

According to a HealthAffairs study of 471 physicians working with over 750,000 patients, they spent three times as much time managing and performing telephone calls compared to fielding secure patient messages.²

2. Manually entering patient information

‍It's been found that clinicians spend approximately 5.9 hours of an 11.4-hour workday on EHR data entry- 4.5 of these hours taking place during clinical hours and about 1.5 occurring during off-hours.³

3. Having a fragmented scheduling system

‍Due to an inefficient scheduling system, Health Systems such as Phoebe Putney Health System, have lost over $9 Million per year due to an unoptimized clinical staffing process and time tracking.⁴

4. Using an inefficient task management system

‍While some brick-and-mortar practices still use rudimentary systems like sticky notes for task management, many digital health organizations try to use their EHR. However, for tasks in an EHR, it lacks visibility for all team members ⁵ which results in follow-ups being missed or time spent digging for actionable tasks.

5. Duplicate patient data entry

‍According to Healthcare Financial Management Association, one hospital found that for each patient that had duplicate information it resulted in an extra $96 in additional costs per duplicate. This number is reflective of the time wasted on patient registration, billing issues, unnecessary patient care, and lower patient satisfaction. ⁶

Suggested Improvements

1. Utilize asynchronous communications

‍In a 2021 Health System pilot by St. George's University of London that utilized an asynchronous IM system over more than 40 conversation hours as opposed to using phones or face-to-face encounters, found that they saved 20.1 minutes in task completion when using asynchronous methods of communication, reducing the time taken to complete tasks by more than 58.8% compared with synchronous methods.⁷

2. Allow patients to enter information digitally

‍Using a digital patient intake process allows you to ensure that your patient's information is up-to-date and helps save your care team time. According to an organization utilizing WebPT's digital forms, their staff was able to save 10-15 minutes per patient.⁸

3. Have a unified system for availability, time tracking, and scheduling

‍The Institute for Healthcare Improvement found that complex schedules that offer too many options for appointment times, types, and restrictions cause significant delays. They suggest only offering different options for appointment types such as 30 minutes for longer appointments like physicals and 15 minutes for consultations. Furthermore, to help make scheduling more predictable, they suggest having set days for specific types of appointments.⁹

4. Use a simple, centralized, and digital system for tasks

‍Having an efficient digital task management system allows all members of the care team to have insight into the current workload, ensure tasks are completed, and discover potential bottlenecks before they become larger issues. ¹⁰

5. Ensure that your systems talk to each other

Integrating systems such as your Patient CRM or Practice Management software with other tools like an EHR can help eliminate significant manual data entry. Additionally, by having your systems talk to each other it will usually mean that you have more accurate patient information which results in fewer mistakes and easier billing.¹¹‍