Posts Tagged website

image_pdfimage_print

13 Ways to Energize New Staff or Re-energize the Long Timers

13 Ways to Energize New Staff or Re-energize the Long Timers
Sometimes a job just gets a little old, and even the best employees need a little something to get them re-engaged and excited again. Try one of the ideas below at your practice and let me know in the comments the ways you keep your staff energized and engaged!

1. Provide a career track and offer multiple levels of learning jobs. For instance, break the receptionist job into steps (see below) and set time lines for attaining those goals. You may want several steps to be accomplished at 90-days, more at 6-months, and more at 12-months. There may be monetary awards, honor awards, or qualifications for other acknowledgements.

  • Pre-registering patients by phone – demographics
  • Making appointments & mini-register for new patients
  • Registering patients face-to-face – demographics
  • Understanding insurance plans and registering their insurance
  • Taking photo ID or taking photos
  • Collecting co-pays
  • Answering basic patient questions
  • Answering advanced patient questions
  • Reviewing the financial policy with patients
  • Reviewing the Privacy Policy with patients.

2. Offer certifications and credentials – support staff emotionally, time-wise and financially so they can attend face-to-face or online courses.

(more…)

Posted in: Human Resources, Leadership

Leave a Comment (0) →

The Social Media Conversation

As social media matures and more healthcare groups gain experience using it, we understand more about it and the role it will play in the future of healthcare.

Last week, Abraham and I gave a program called “Starting the Conversation: An Introduction to Using Social Media In Healthcare” to a group of healthcare managers. We discussed social media’s potential to influence patient satisfaction, which is expected to influence reimbursement.

(more…)

Posted in: Practice Marketing, Social Media

Leave a Comment (4) →

9 Ways Managers Can Change Healthcare in 2011

Kindly turn off cell phones & pagers

Healthcare is changing.  It is changing to eliminate waste of money, time and resources.  It is changing to make more care available with less providers.  It is changing to empower patients to participate in their own care.  How are you changing with the times in 2011?  Here are 9 ideas.

  1. Make your website interactive, clean-looking, interactive, friendly and interactive.  Think of your website as your digital receptionist to your practice.  If all your patients can do on your website is look up your phone number, you’re wasting everyone’s time.  Patients want to register, make appointments, pay their bill, get their test results, chat online with a staff member, access their personal health record (PHR), watch videos and listen to podcasts you make or recommend.  They do not want to wander around your phone tree or wait on hold.
  2. Give your patients information, information, information. According to a MedTera study conducted in September 2010, 95% surveyed indicated that they are looking for more comprehensive information about disease management, and 77% said they hadn’t received any written information about their illness or medications directly from the physician.  See more details about what patients want here.
  3. Understand that people have different types of learning styles and offer your practice and medical information in different ways. Offer information via written and digital documents, videos, and podcasts.  Offer support groups and group education for the newly diagnosed. Help patients build communities around your practice.
  4. Take down all those signs asking people to turn off their cell phones.  Cell phones are going to revolutionize healthcare so go ahead and bite the bullet and embrace them.  For all you know the person on the cellphone when you walk in the exam room is texting “gr8 visit til now, wil i <3 doc?” (Great visit until now, will I love the doctor?)
  5. Eliminate the Wait. Patients have much better things to do than wait in your practice.  It doesn’t matter why the provider’s late – you’re cutting into the patient’s ability to make money and get things done.  Text them to let them know the provider is running late.  Text them to let them know an earlier appointment is available. Give patients an appointment range (between 10am and 12N), then text them when their appointment is 20 minutes away.
  6. Use a patient portal to take credit cards, keeping them securely on file and stop sending patients statements. Use the portal to deliver results and chat and email patients.
  7. Stop fighting the tide and let your staff use social media at work – for work.  Involve everyone in Facebook, Twitter and your website and blog. Using social media for communication and marketing is not a one-person job.
  8. Form a patient advisory board and listen to what specifics your patients want from you.  If people don’t have time to attend a face-to-face meeting, Skype them in.
  9. Think about alternate service delivery models, both in-person (group visits, home visits) and digitally (email, texting, Skyping, avatar coaches, home monitoring systems.)  Emotional technology studies show that people can improve their health by accepting and utilizing technology in healthcare.

What do patients want in 2011?  They want information, communication and a real connection with you.  Use social media and technology innovations to make it happen.

Photo credit Image by gumption via Flickr

Posted in: Innovation, Social Media

Leave a Comment (2) →

13 Ways to Energize New Staff or Re-energize the Long Timers

Group of nurses, Base Hospital #45

Image by The Library of Virginia via Flickr

Sometimes a job just gets a little old, and even the best employees need a little something to get them re-engaged and excited again.  Try one of the ideas below at your practice and let me know in the comments the ways you keep your staff energized and engaged!

1.  Provide a career track and offer multiple levels of learning jobs. For instance, break the receptionist job into steps (see below) and set time lines for attaining those goals.  You may want several steps to be accomplished at 90-days, more at 6-months, and more at 12-months.  There may be monetary awards, honor awards, or qualifications for other acknowledgements.

  • Pre-registering patients by phone – demographics
  • Making appointments & mini-register for new patients
  • Registering patients face-to-face – demographics
  • Understanding insurance plans and registering their insurance
  • Taking photo ID or taking photos and explaining the Red Flags Rule
  • Collecting co-pays
  • Answering basic patient questions
  • Answering advanced patient questions
  • Reviewing the financial policy with patients
  • Reviewing the Privacy Policy with patients.

2.  Offer certifications and credentials – support staff emotionally, time-wise and financially so they can attend face-to-face or online courses.

3.   Offer specific responsibilities and the title of lead person for that responsibility – don’t assume you know what staff are or are not capable of – they might surprise you!

4.  Meet every 6 months or every quarter to set goals.  A job can be a drag if there’s nothing new to learn or to accomplish.

5.  Set up process improvement teams to work on problems that everyone complains about – give them the responsibility to come up with solutions and try them out.

6.  Involve them in social media marketing of the practice.  Make sure they understand your social media plan ( you do have a plan, don’t you?),  give them guidelines to work within and let them work on your website, your blog, and your Facebook page.

7.  Install a wiki (many are free) and have them work on loading all the practice knowledge into the wiki.  Have different staff responsible for different parts of the wiki and set goals for adding all the information that runs your practice every day.

8. “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” – this is also great for getting the clinical and administrative staff to understand each other better.  Have the staff shadow each other and take turns seeing parts of the practice they don’t know much about.  I recently participated in this at my hospital and shadowed a nurse (and asked a million questions) for about an hour.  It was wonderful!  I felt better equipped to work with my hospitalist service after having been on a patient floor for just a short time.

9.  If you are a practice that receives referrals from others, have staff responsible for regularly touching base with staff from referring practices and asking how service can be improved.  Teach staff about relationship building and remember that it’s the staff that often choose where the patient is referred to instead of the provider.

10.  Have staff take turns going with you to meetings, seminars and local events where you represent the practice and introduce them to everyone.

11.  Forward listserv discussions to employees and have them monitor the discussions and bring things to you that they want to know more about.

12.  Encourage employees to become the practice expert in a payer, an employer, a referrer, a process or a protocol and help them learn about their topic by sending them information from the web or your professional organizations.

13. Have the staff put together an internal or external newsletter and help them with concepts of internal and external marketing.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Posted in: Day-to-Day Operations, Human Resources, Leadership

Leave a Comment (1) →

Electronic Medical Record Guru Rosemarie Nelson Reveals Best EMR Product on the Market Today

Okay, okay, so I shamelessly lured you into reading this post by telling you Rosemarie Nelson would reveal the “best” EMR product on the market, and she really does, only not in the way you wish she would.  Read on to the end of this post for her EMR advice.

It was my pleasure to talk with Rosemarie Nelson after she had given her third presentation (!) at the North Carolina MGM Fall Meeting at Pinehurst this past October.  As we visited, I realized I’ve been listening to Rosemarie talk about electronic medical records for at least 10 years.  If you don’t know Rosemarie, she’s a running fanatic, an EMR guru, Principal Consultant with Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) and she has 15 years of consulting in operations and technology under her belt.

When I asked her why it’s so hard to implement electronic medical records in a physician’s office she said: “Medical practices are a home-grown industry, really a cottage industry, so every single one is different.  There are specialty differences and workflow differences and many EMR vendors don’t know how to address this.”

Rosemarie particularly enjoys helping groups to fix poorly implemented systems and often finds that vendors have not carefully looked at the way the client physicians work before selling them a system.  She has experienced the many unique ways that practices operate, and why they operate that way, and has been able to bring EMR success to over 300 practices during her tenure.

Rosemarie recommends that practices take electronic records a bite at a time.  She suggests that groups start with one component, maybe ePrescribing, or messaging or electronic test results, and get it working really well. Although vendors might prefer that a group follow its timeline, there is no reason that a practice cannot set its own timeline.  Finding out if a vendor will be flexible to a group’s unique needs and timeline is a must-have question when developing a RFP (Request for Proposal.)

The dichotomy of the physician (“make it so”) and the administrator (“take it slow”) is another challenge medical practices face.  Many physicians want EMR to happen quickly and painlessly with no interruption of workflow. Rosemarie suggests to these physicians that they should “refer their business to a specialist (her), just as they would refer their patient to a specialist.” Working through the process takes time.

Here are some other observations from Rosemarie:

  • “Apply the EMR as a tool to the operations, it is not an end to itself.”
  • “Accept the incremental benefits” of the electronic medical record.  “All or nothing is a losing propostition.”
  • On the Stimulus Money for implementing EMR: “Do it because of the benefits and if you qualify for the stimulus, all the better.”
  • On preparing an RFP (Request for Proposal): “Define the deliverables, the timeline and the money and focus on your practice’s absolute needs.”
  • On scanning old paper records into the EMR, she says “Only 25% of documents stored are ever used again.”
  • On savings using ePrescribing (besides the Medicare bump): “ePrescribing can save each FTE provider $15,000 per year on average.”
  • On using electronics to make the medical practice more efficient, “A typical primary care practice might get 85-100 patient calls per day.  Try to offload 30% of those calls per day to electronics – ePrescribing, patient secure messasging, electronic lab results, appointment requests, etc.”
  • On her favorite client story: “A cardiologist who did not want to do ANYTHING differently, saw me two years later and told me that EMR was the best thing that had ever happened in his practice!”
  • Her favorite tip: “Add your website address to your appointment reminder calls!”
  • And…her most asked question ever – Tell Me Which EMR to Buy, to which she replies, “There really is more than one good product out there.  Buy the one that matches your needs and your workflow the best, and it will be the right one for you!”

You can reach Rosemarie Nelson here: RosemarieNelson@alum.syracuse.edu

Posted in: Electronic Medical Records

Leave a Comment (1) →

Open Your Mind: 29 Uses of Twitter for Medical Practices

© Tiero | Dreamstime.comI know many people are having trouble understanding how Twitter could be relevant to a medical practice. Here’s a list that might help.

1. Tweet patients when doctor is running late.

2.  Tweet doctor when patient is running late.

3. Tweet staff to remind them of staff meeting Monday morning.

4. Tweet patients to remind them of appointment.

5. Tweet when physician is giving a talk somewhere.

6. Tweet patients that medical report is available.

7. Tweet patients to call to make next appointment for vaccine or treatment series.

8. Tweet patient to complete patient questionnaire so payer will process claim.

9. Tweet patients to remind about NPO, golitely, drink water before test.

10. Tweet staff to remind of lunch event at work (forget the brown bag or remember your potluck offering.)

11. Tweet patient that medical records are ready to be picked up or have been sent.

12. Tweet patients that auto payment will be drafted tomorrow.

13. Tweet patients to take meds (especially meds that change: z-pack, coumadin.)

14. Tweet staff to turn payroll in, managers to look over payroll.

15. Tweet lab tech to go to exam room # for lab work.

16. Tweet x-ray tech to go to exam room # to escort patient to x-ray.

17.  Send notice to patients when new info is on website.

18. Tweet patient that earlier appointment is available when patient no-shows.

19. Order lunch for physicians.

20. Announce new services, physicians, locations.

21. Let patients know when flu shots are available.

22. Remind patients about drugs (interactions, refills, take meds.)

23.  Remind patients to take blood sugar, blood pressure.

24. Alert patient ride that patient is ready for pickup.

25. Alert referring physician that new test reports are available for them via the web.

26.. Tweet staff to give them inclement weather update.

27. Tweet patients to remind them of support-group meetings.

28. Tweet patient that last payment in payment plan is less or more due to EOB notice.

29. Tweet patients about drug recall.

What great ideas do you have for Twitter?

Posted in: Innovation, Social Media

Leave a Comment (4) →

Online Surveys Help You Find Out What Everyone is Thinking

I am about to use SurveyMonkey again.  The first time I used SurveyMonkey was to ask the staff questions about benefits.  I knew that we were facing some big health insurance premium increases and I wanted to know what employees’ priorities were.  SurveyMonkey walked me through the process of designing a simple survey (10 questions) and compiled the results for me.

I presented the results of the survey at my first quarterly staff meeting and discussed what my challenges were in trying to meet the needs of the employees and the needs of the organization in choosing a health plan.  The use of the survey tool and my discussion of the results let the staff know that their feedback counts.

Now, we’re designing a new office and I am soliciting information (not anonymous this time) about what people value in a workspace and what their needs are for technology and comfort.  Feedback from the staff is that they like being asked what they think and enjoy the surveys.  Feedback from me is that SurveyMonkey is easy to use and at $20.00 per month for unlimited surveys, it’s a tool that delivers the value.

Here are some other ways you might use surveys:

  • Put a survey on your practice website.
  • Put a survey on a computer monitor or tablet in your reception area.
  • Send a survey to patients via email.
  • Ask the staff or docs at referring physician practices to complete a quick survey about the service you provide to their patients.
  • If you’ve sent patients for tests, therapy or surgery, have them complete a survey about their experiences.
  • Have a computer for surveys at health fairs asking visitors to participate for a chance to win a prize.
  • Add a link on all marketing materials to a community survey.

What are your survey ideas?

Photo credit: Dmitry Maslov | Dreamstime.com

Posted in: Innovation

Leave a Comment (1) →