Patients are losing patience in the waiting room while your clinic’s receptionist is still processing the files of the first patient of the day. There’s nothing wrong with your software, you did your research and invested in NextGen EHR software to manage your clinic and your patients’ records. However, you still don’t see much improvement in your clinic’s efficiency and productivity.
In fact, your employees are more frustrated than ever because they had high expectations for this new piece of software. If the software is award-winning and recommended by many clinics, could the problem be that you’re not using it properly?
What is NextGen Software?
NextGen software is a clinic management software that’s made to help you automate and streamline the tasks of running a clinic. It covers various aspects of your clinic from managing patient Electronic Health Records (EHR) to setting up patient appointments, viewing patient portals, and scheduling your employees’ visits.
NextGen software is conveniently cloud-based. That means you don’t need to upgrade your clinic’s hardware to use it on your devices. You’re also not responsible for regular maintenance. All you and your staff need to do is log in online and use the software on any supported device.
Scheduling
Scheduling is a necessary part of running a clinic. However, scheduling and rescheduling can be time and energy consuming with your patients’ busy and unpredictable days. Not to mention, scheduling appointments manually could result in errors where two appointments clash while a long period remains free.
With NextGen software, you can use a centralized calendar to manage all of your patients’ appointments, cancellations, and rescheduling and align them with your staff’s shifts and schedules. Scheduling isn’t just about efficient time management.
You also need to make it easy for your patients to manage their appointments. This could be in-person with your clinic’s receptionist, over the phone, or online through the patient portal. It’s important to learn about NextGen software scheduling capabilities to make the most of it.
Optimize Billing
Billing in the healthcare industry is exponentially more complex than any other industry. And not just for you, but also for your patients. Luckily, you can use NextGen software to optimize your clinic’s revenue cycle and automate the billing process. This ensures mundane tasks are automated, and billing errors are flagged and dealt with early on before they cause major issues for you or your patients.
Using specialized billing software properly reduces the average billing and payment wait time, resulting in a more efficient and faster revenue cycle for your clinic. You won’t have a long list of overdue payments that your staff are yet to start processing manually.
Improve Workflow
Your clinic’s workflow is how your staff conducts repeatable yet critical business operations, from systematically organizing your resources and restocking inventory to providing medical services and processing patient information and payments. Optimizing your clinic’s workflow consists of assigning tasks to the right employees and monitoring their progress for any delays or inefficiencies. However, this can be challenging without the help of your clinic’s main software.
NextGen software can help assign tasks to the right employee, considering their shifts, skill set, and overall availability. It also helps your staff members work as a team, knowing when each one of them is busy with an important task and when they’re free to handle an emergency visit or unplanned occurrence.
Gather Analytics
An indicator of a successful clinic is how much it improves over the years. In order to improve, you need to treat your clinic both as a healthcare facility and as a business. The best way to make sound decisions that result in positive results is to rely on data. You can use NextGen software to automatically track and tag clinic processes, from staff productivity and patient satisfaction to billing accuracy and inventory.
Analyzing the data your software collects provides many benefits. You will be able to make semi-accurate predictions of future circumstances and prepare for them. You’ll even be able to present your findings to insurance companies, research and survey facilities, and acquire certificates of compliance.
Ask for Help
Making the most out of advanced software can be challenging. Don’t worry if neither you nor your staff is tech-savvy, and you don’t have to be. Don’t hesitate to reach out to your software company for specialized help to best use their software. You can even request specialized training for your staff, ensuring they know their way around the software and what to do in case of a technical emergency.
