Physician Efficiency Strategies to Make Your Practice Run More Smoothly

Everyday inefficiencies plague healthcare – particularly primary care. Big pictures changes cannot happen overnight but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any smaller scale solutions. If you find your practice struggling, here are a couple of strategies that independent primary care physicians can use to make their practices run more efficiently.

Creating the “A Team”

By training “a teams” consisted of a diverse set of health professionals from physician assistants to therapists, this team has then extended physician capacity. “There are a lot of routine needs that don’t necessarily require a physician,” says Edward Salsberg, MPH, a research instructor at The George Washington School of Nursing.

Incorporating health professionals like nutritionists, occupational therapists and social workers into the teams can improve a patient’s health and ability to function while allowing a more efficient delivery of preventive care that helps keep patients healthy and away from the hospital.

Using technology to your advantage

Investing in an EHR system for independent primary care physicians can give your practice complete flexibility in how you deliver care, help you automate data entry to maintain a more comprehensive and longitudinal patient record and help you drive phenomenal patient outcomes.

This technology can aid you in focusing more on your patients than on your screen. Coordinate care efficiently and automatically share updates directly from your Clinical EHR to other providers so they can take action based on the most up-to-date clinical information.

Taking this step further to investing in an Interoperable EHR system; meaning that the electronic sharing of patient information between different EHR systems and healthcare providers can happen.

Get help for your admin duties

According to PwC Health Research, a major source of inefficiency in primary care practices is that physicians have to spend more than a third of their time and significant resources on administration duties.

Using an EHR system that is integrated with a practice management software can save your practice time when doing the necessary administrative duties, leaving you with less screen time and more patient facing time.

Elation Health’s Clinical First EHR can help you efficiently manage the operations behind your practice and reduce the burden of day-to-day administrative tasks by easily managing appointments, check-ins, and copays; sending and receiving electronic faxes, and tracking your practice’s performance, clinical quality measures, and meaningful use criteria measures all in one place.