In our blog posts, we’ve touched on a number of ways that your practice can use technology to enhance your workflow and improve patient engagement – but where are you supposed to start?  In order to plan for the future state of your workflow, you need to begin by defining the current state.

“No-shows.”  They’re the bane of every healthcare practice.  Although the rates may be negligible in high-volume, high-demand clinics, a typical practice may experience a 5-10% no-show rate – and no-shows can make up as much as 50% of the daily schedule in some specialty settings.  

In such a situation, the impact on a practice’s bottom line can be staggering.

As we continue to explore opportunities to improve patient engagement at various points in the workflow, let’s consider the patient’s actual experience at your office or facility.

So far, we’ve considered how patient engagement can be enhanced by improving your workflows for scheduling, pre-registration, and access to results. 

But what about the patient eligibility and patient payments processes?

In a recent blog post about patient engagement, we told you that patient portals are not the answer to the patient engagement problem.  

Still true – but they are an important component of a well thought out engagement strategy that also includes patient workflow kiosks, patient payments, and patient notifications.

Many practices think implementing a patient portal is all they need to do to improve patient workflows or patient engagement, but you end up with a failed patient engagement strategy and confusion on how everything went wrong.

After all, your legacy technology vendor said all you needed was a patient portal to drive your patient engagement strategy, right?

“Patient engagement.”  In healthcare, we use this term constantly – but what does it really mean for your patients and your practice?