Pre-Visit Steps That Are A Must
for Healthcare Providers Before
a Patient Appointment
A healthcare provider’s long-term viability and profitability depend heavily on patient satisfaction and the quality of services you offer. Conversely, poor patient experiences can affect your company’s growth, profitability, and capacity to retain patients. Therefore, you must continually improve the patient experience to deliver the finest care possible.
Providing a reliable and effective appointment system is one of the best ways to meet the needs of your patients and ensure that they receive the highest quality care. In addition, pre-scheduling appointments are an excellent way for medical offices to ensure that their patients have a safe and positive experience.
Whenever feasible, appointments should be booked in advance. Before meeting a patient, medical professionals must complete all the pre-visit steps specified in the following list.
Review Patient Data
There are many benefits to using an Electronic Health Record (EHR) to streamline the process of gathering patient information when they come in for a visit. This could save you a lot of time in the long run. What is EHR? EHRs are real-time, electronic patient records that are accessible to authorized users.
Electronic health records (EHRs) allow authorized physicians to collect and maintain patient data in a digital format that can be shared with other healthcare professionals. EHRs can contain your patient’s medical history and diagnoses, as well as their medications, treatment plans, immunization dates, and test results.
You can collect patient data via your website or mobile app. Access to a patient’s medical records will benefit the patient and their physician. In addition, registering new patients will be much easier if you already have their personal information on file when they arrive. This gives your clinic the ability to adapt its operations to the requirements of its patients and even to offer additional services in situations when those services would be appropriate.
Verify Insurance Benefits and Coverage
Health insurance is necessary for physical and mental well-being since it offers access to essential medical treatments. In addition, it can help cover the high costs of medical care in the event of a serious accident or illness.
Unfortunately, in 2020, 8.6 percent of the population, or 28.0 million individuals, lacked health insurance. However, private health insurance coverage remained more popular at 66.5 percent, while public coverage was just 34.8 percent of the population.
Therefore, examining the patient’s insurance benefits and coverage at every visit is essential. It is currently standard practice to check a patient’s insurance benefits and eligibility numerous times during each patient visit to prevent having denied claims.
An eligibility verification solution can increase the cash flow and improve the client experience. In addition, it can lessen the likelihood of having a claim rejected by your insurance company.
Establish and Communicate Social Distancing Protocols
To prevent the spread of infectious diseases, medical practitioners must take every measure to limit the time patients spend in close proximity to one another. Therefore, protocols for social distance need to be discussed in advance to clear any misunderstandings that may arise before the appointment. It would be best if you also looked into pre-arrival and zero-contact check-ins.
It would be best to use a digital solution to pre-screen your patients for symptoms, collect patient data, and verify eligibility before scheduling an appointment. This ensures that patients do not have to check-in under unsafe conditions and that waiting rooms are not overcrowded. In addition, regular patients should not be kept in the same facility as patients with highly contagious diseases.
Identifying any bottlenecks in the workflow is essential to improving the efficiency of the patient registration process. In addition, as a healthcare provider, you ensure that your patients have a positive experience when they register.
Create an Arrival Culture
It would be best if you cultivated a recovery-friendly culture to make your facility more welcoming to patients. When dealing with patients, ensure that your personnel demonstrates genuine concern, professionalism, and warmth.
All your employees must work toward fostering a caring and compassionate atmosphere throughout the whole practice. The delivery of compassionate nursing care is the primary factor in ensuring that patients receive high-quality medical attention.
Provide the Best Possible Service
You must consistently deliver the best possible service to maintain customer satisfaction and develop patient loyalty. Customers should not have to wait for significant periods for pre-visit procedures. Automated systems can handle the scheduling of appointments and the sending of reminders, ensuring that everyone arrives on time and that the clinic runs well.
