Welcome back to the Sikka Podcast! Here at Sikka we are passionate about bringing you tools and solutions that benefit your patients AND your practice.
For a small healthcare business, a doctor may also be the business owner, which makes doctors’ daily work quite challenging. Recent surveys show that many doctors are complaining about the limited time spent with patients and the growing burden of busywork generated by their electronic medical record system or EMR. According to a survey of 142 family doctors, conducted by Annals of Family Medicine, doctors spent more than half of their work time on average dealing with administrative work. As the procedures costs and the amount of patient data constantly grow, many doctors find it really hard to properly manage their practices, which can be directly reflected in the rising dissatisfaction and complaints from patients.
A survey from Modern Medicine Network suggests that the things patients complain the most about a practice are: rudeness, reproach, and rushing experience, and a real scenario could be:
- To be kept waiting for every appointment
- Appointment being interrupted by other staff
- Unexpected booking changes or unrealistic scheduling
- Feeling not being listened to by the doctor
- Not having adequate time to have a complete conversation with a doctor or staff
These problems are often caused by inadequate streamlining of work processes and poor solutions for doctor-patient communication. An effective way to solve these challenges can be to introduce a mobile app to your practice. Why?
First, embrace the inevitable mobile trend of the healthcare market. Your competitors might be ahead of you already: In the 2015 HIMSS Mobile Technology Survey, 90% of respondents said they use mobile devices to engage patients during the healthcare process. 57% are communicating with patients via secure texting mobile applications. And don’t forget that the biggest prospective consumer group in healthcare will be millennials, and they work, play, eat, chat, sleep with their mobile apps.
Second, a well-designed practice mobile app works as a personal business assistant for a doctor and help the doctor become an all-round leader in many ways. Let’s take Sikka Software’s Practice Mobilizer as an example.
Practice Mobilizer provides all the information you should know about your practice performance and your competitors on daily basis. With the app, you don’t need to open your computer and spend tons of time generating reports with Excel or give this burden to any of your financial staff. Practice Mobilizer takes over all these workloads. Every morning, it welcomes you back to the office with a clear daily tasks and goal summary, telling you how many appointments you will have, the estimated production for the day, and how close you are to the monthly production goal. In the evening, it delivers a wrap-up closing report, telling you how much production and collection you have achieved, and the number of no shows or new patients.
Market trends is another element you need to pay attention to as a leader. Because of Sikka’s seamless connection to 96% of retail healthcare data, Practice Mobilizer is able to offer one of the most valuable resources: a benchmark for your services and product pricing. It also helps you understand your competitiveness by evaluating multiple KPIs from your practice relative to your peer group. This enables you to find out where your strengths and weaknesses are. The Fee Optimizer function allows you to acknowledge the regional fee schedule with reference data down to five-digit zip codes, which gives ideas about how much the other practices charge in the same area, and how you should adjust your charge. In addition, audio interaction is currently available. By partnering with Amazon Echo, Sikka launched Practice Assistant for Practice Mobilizer, the only voice-driven dental practice tool in the world right now. You can get actionable answers regarding reports, schedule, finance, etc. from any Amazon Echo device you interact with, and communicate with it like a real person!
Third, an effective mobile app securely synchronizes and shares information with the practice team in real time, which makes doctors’ work a lot easier, and teams’ work a lot smoother. For example, Practice Mobilizer enables doctors to freely schedule and reschedule appointments with patients. Sometimes a doctor’s schedule can be arranged in a very unrealistic or unreasonable way. This may cause a rushed appointment with a patient, or frequent interruptions during an appointment. With Practice Mobilizer, a doctor can quickly identify the visit purpose for each patient and change their schedule accordingly to ensure a patient is given enough attention and optimal care. The change thus will be immediately updated with the team, reducing administrative burdens.
Thanks for tuning into the Sikka Software podcast, where we give you tips and strategies to improve your practice’s performance. Until next time.