Simply put, a workflow is the pattern and amount of work that comes in and goes out from your office and staff. The key to a good flow is to eliminate those tiny sources of inefficiency, such as inconsistent medical billing or collections, before they begin to inconvenience patients, disrupt your practice, and hinder profitability.

Even if your physician practice management is good, it’s easy for the workflow to become inefficient and bumpy, especially if your staff is over-multitasking. Small hiccups accumulate fast and can become obstacles that are hard to overcome.

Fortunately, it’s just as easy to rectify this and maintain a steady, efficient workflow, especially when you outsource jobs such as medical billing and coding to a staff of professionals.

Let’s examine 5 ways your practice may have workflow issues and how Coronis can help you turn it around.

Do You Have the Right People in Place?

In theory, this is as simple as having the right person doing the job for which they’re trained and have skills. But in the real world, this can go askew quickly.

When you add a nurse or doctor to your staff, office dynamics like office relationships or allocated responsibilities – sometimes even both – almost always change. That’s why it’s crucial to choose a new staff member based not only on qualifications but also on personality.

It’s also essential to make sure you even need to add staff; perhaps you should simply allocate job duties more judiciously. One way to analyze this is for each staff member to track how much time it takes to complete a given task, such as medical billing.

Does Your Staff Understand Its Responsibilities?

Once you evaluate what each staff member is doing and how long it takes, you’ll better understand how to designate duties. After all, if you don’t understand this, how can you expect them to?

This simple understanding of medical practice management will help you clearly delineate who does what and what is expected of each staff member. Otherwise, bottlenecks occur, which can be detrimental to patient care and cash flow.

Furthermore, by making sure each staff member understands his or her responsibilities, redundancies are eliminated. For example, if your patients keep saying, “I’ve already given you that information,” your practice may have workflow issues.

Does Your Staff Understand the Systems in Place?

Healthcare is trending toward paperless, and if you are, too, that helps make physician practice management much more efficient.

However, if your staff is not up to speed on technology and systems that streamline your practice, such as electronic health records (EHRs), running the office will not be smooth. Yet, training staff members on new systems or updating them as technology continues to evolve is expensive and time-consuming. Learn more about electronic health records systems at Wikipedia.org.

Does Your Staff Have a Set Schedule?

This entails not only the hours that your staff works each day and week but also what their daily or weekly tasks are as well as the time needed for completion.

Although the former is almost standard at most practices, the latter two are not – and it could be a major reason why there’s a bottleneck of work disrupting your physician practice management.

Are There Communication Problems Among Your Staff?

This goes back to having both the right people in place and a set schedule in place. Managing an office full of personalities, egos, and moods is no small feat. If you don’t have the right people, communication will suffer.

Although there is usually a definite hierarchy in any office, not allowing members of the staff, from the new front desk employee to long-time on-staff doctors, to be empowered to make themselves heard when problems arise is problematic.

Personality clashes can fester or affect staff morale, which in turn can adversely impact your patients’ experience and lead them to seek medical care elsewhere.

How Outsourcing Could Solve Your Workflow Issues

By outsourcing non-medical duties such as medical billing and collections, you’ll find that your workflow issues are alleviated, allowing your practice to run smoothly and more profitably.

Here’s how a professional organization like Coronis can help:

• The right people doing the right job. They know what they’re doing, how to do it, and when to get it done.
• Understand their jobs and responsibilities with no distractions.
• Professionals who address issues that improve medical billing and other workflow aspects so that your staff can do what it was hired to do – provide unparalleled patient care.
• Adherence to a regular schedule and take time to ensure that tasks are done once and done correctly.
• Trained to solve problems and communicate with each other as well as with you, allowing you and your staff to function well together and take care of your patients.