Whether you are running a private practice or managing a healthcare, team a better patient experience is essential to both your business's survival and your patients' successful treatment!
We all know that patients who have a great experience are more likely to come back (if they need it) and recommend our health business to their friends and family.
Helping your team focus on the patient's experience can lead to more enjoyable relationships and boost overall patient satisfaction!
Moreover, patient feedback can help your business grow by making it more consumer-centric.
The Three Golden Rules
Firstly, let me share the three big rules that every private practice team should live by!
GO above and beyond
Every great clinician I know goes above and beyond for their patients. This, of course, should be the aim of every healthcare professional. Unfortunately, it's common for people to lose sight of this mission over time as they burn out or become overwhelmed by responsibilities in their role.
If someone on your team isn't living up to this standard. Take some time to understand what may be driving this behavior. Perhaps they are doing too much or are overwhelmed with other aspects of their role.
BE respectful to patients and potential patients
Working in healthcare can be challenging at times. No matter how rude, impatient, or demanding patients can be, it is vital to remain calm and professional in every interaction.
Sometimes these challenges are not even with patients. It's with potential patients—those who are on your waitlist or trying to find a practitioner to help them.
A quality practice manager will handle patient complaints, queries, and/or requests with patience and class!
LISTEN to your patient
I guarantee that most patients are happy to tell you about their needs, wants, likes, and dislikes with healthcare. It's essential to make them feel as though they can share their opinions with you. It also helps you to get insight into ways your practice can improve.
Practitioners should quickly follow up on feedback and keep patients in the loop. It's a great way to build agency and trust with your patients!
Once you've developed a practice culture that prioritizes patient service skills, it's crucial to provide them with the tools to increase efficiency and build lasting relationships with patients. 🙂
The Private Practice Tools We Use
Carepatron
There are tons of practice management apps out there. Doesn't matter. Carepatron is by far the best.
Once signed up, Carepatron will reduce unnecessary email, simplify delegating tasks, and manage clients from one central system.
Carepatron is excellent for delivering a better patient experience as it provides patients and your team with a single workspace, as well as integrating with an excellent patient portal software. It streamlines collaboration, security, and service delivery.
How our team uses Carepatron:
First, we create a record for every patient and store all of their documentation in this one place. This information is then available to our team anytime, anywhere.
We schedule our client appointments on the platform. This helps keep everyone up to date on what is happening. It also creates a culture of transparency and accountability in our practice.
Our team assigns tasks to staff and clients within Carepatron. This streamlines the handover of work or homework, helping us to make sure nothing gets missed.
We provide telehealth sessions utilizing the built-in capability. We find this super helpful in reducing the time needed to coordinate and problem solve telehealth calls. We also really like the additional security and HIPAA compliance of this feature.
We use Carepatron to create a shared workspace with our clients, their families, and other care providers. The platform puts our practice at the center of a client's healthcare journey by bringing everyone together in one place.
The automated reminders are a game-changer for us. They have reduced our Did not Attend by 76% while removing hours of work every week. Our team loves it, our clients love it.
Carepatron helps to deliver better collaboration between our practitioner team and clients. Ensuring we provide immersive healthcare experiences while reducing our operational work by 2 hours per day.
Watsapp is basically an instant messenger on steroids!
You can create groups with your clients and team as well as private 1 on 1 chats.
Watsapp is known for being easy to use and highly secure. The best part of all is that almost everyone already has it on their phone.
How my practice uses Watsapp:
Our team is obsessed with Watsapp! We could go on and on about how we use this fantastic app.
There are too many examples to list. I'll just tell you one way that it has helped our clinical team. We create a group chat dedicated to each client and, where appropriate, their family (normal mums/dads or husbands/wives). We then use this tool to share updates or resources. Sometimes it is as simple as an inspirational quote, a video, or podcasts.
These groups create two-way communication between our clinicians and their clients. It helps us to keep them engaged and facilitate some of the logistics behind their treatment.
If a client messages in with an inquiry, Watsapp makes it easy for anyone in our team to quickly respond. If it's out of your practice hours, you can also set automated responses to let clients know when you will be likely to respond.
Miro
Miro is quickly becoming a favorite practice app across our clinic with our healthcare team and their patients.
We use it as an online collaborative tool. It enables us to bring everyone together in a central environment to digitally interact, from brainstorming with sticky notes to planning and managing treatment plans.
You can also invite a client's other healthcare providers so they can contribute.
Many of our younger patients cannot get enough of this tool. We strongly recommend you check it out for yourself.
How my team uses Miro:
We mainly use this tool with patients with complex needs or disengaged from treatment in the past.
We invite them to a private board in Miro. Sometimes we also ask their family members (parents of younger clients) or other providers (social workers, GP's, or even teachers) to join.
We then host a brainstorming session focusing on specific problems or barriers to treatment. Each participant creates a digital post-it note.
Each participant then presents their solution ideas back to the group. At the end of this process, the group agrees on the best ideas to apply. We then update the treatment plan within Carepatron. If the solution does not deliver the results, we jump back into the same exercise, reexploring alternative solutions.
Trust me, this digital experience is loved by our patients, our team, and the healthcare community.
Canva
In this tool, practitioners can design and create professional healthcare resources. It's easy to use and free.
We know patients engage with resources best when they are beautiful and easy to consume. It can be difficult to find existing material that meets this standard. Where it exists, this material is often too expensive.
To solve this problem, our team just made our own.
How my team uses Canva:
Canva is a no-brainer (literally)! We use the platform to develop and design loveable resources for your patients.
Recently we decided to update our group therapy resources. The groups sometimes lacked engagement; our patients often did not understand the handouts we were providing them. They were often difficult to follow and boring to look at.
We created a design for our practice from the template library. Only took 30 mins and looked terrific. We then took our existing material content and copied it across. We ended up rewriting a bunch of it, focusing on simple language.
In the next group program, we tried the new material. Asking the patients for feedback and comparing the program's performance against previous
It's was great to get direct feedback from those using it. We then made a few final updates to the templates.
We often change some of this content for specific audiences or programs. Canva makes the updating process easy and quick.
Looking for more ways to be productive? Check out this helpful guide.
Do What Works For You
These tools are not a complete solution to creating an excellent patient experience. However, they're a great place to start.
Your practitioners are best placed to decide which patient experiences you need to focus on. Whether it's streamlining processes, build lasting patient relationships, or generating more patient referrals.
Our clinicians use these apps in different ways in their own healthcare practice. What tools do you use to make your private practice stand out?
Manage your growing practice, Automate your transcription, and write better progress notes.
So if you want a truly 'great' tool, get Carepatron for free today!👋
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