Time Management Tips For Medical Practices

April 17, 2023

Time management is crucial to ensure that patients receive the right care at the right time. It’s also important to maintain efficiency at the practice. Here are some time management tips that can help medical practices:

Schedule appointments effectively.

Set aside enough time for each patient visit based on the type of appointment and the patient’s needs. Avoid scheduling too many appointments in a day, which can lead to rushed visits and delays.

Use technology.

Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems can help streamline administrative tasks, such as scheduling appointments and managing patient records. Use automated reminders to reduce no-shows and missed appointments.

Delegate tasks.

Delegate non-clinical tasks, such as administrative tasks and paperwork, to support staff to free up physicians’ time to focus on patient care.

Prioritize tasks.

Prioritize tasks based on their urgency and importance. Tackle high-priority tasks first, and delegate or schedule lower-priority tasks for later.

Use time blocks.

Set aside specific blocks of time for specific tasks, such as patient visits, administrative tasks, and professional development. This can help ensure that tasks are compelted efficiently and effectively.

Communicate with staff.

Communicate regularly with staff to ensure that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals. Encourage staff to share their ideas for improving efficiency and productivity.

By implementing these time management tips, medical practices may be able to streamline operations, improve patient care, and reduce stress and burnout among staff.

Some Ways MEDENT Can Help

Online Scheduling

Our Online Appointment Scheduling lets patients book their own appointments, which can help reduce the burden on staff. Practices can also customize the appointment reason, type, start slots and days to show, which will determine the available appointment times that present to the patient. This prevents overbooking and can even help practices avoid late or early arrivals that may interfere with other appointments.

Appointment Reminders

Our Directlink Appointment Reminder feature automatically contacts patients via call, SMS text and/or email based on preferences in the appointment reminder setup screen and the patient’s HIPAA form. Practices can customize reminders based on doctors, locations and appointment type…and even control the content of the reminder. Responses are recorded in Chart Central in real time and colored icons help staff quickly identify requests to cancel or reschedule.

Triage & Todo Messages

With MEDENT, users can flag triage and todo messages based on a rating system of Normal, Priority and Urgent. Urgent messages will highlight in red and priority triages highlight in orange. Both will appear higher on the user’s triage and todo lists. We recommend setting practice protocol to define what types of messages should be “bumped up” to priority and urgent levels.

Users can also assign tags to triages and todos to help filter, sort and search. Tags can be used in conjunction with reason codes as a way to further categorize and organize these messages and tasks.