Technology has come a long way in enabling quality healthcare, and therapy and rehab providers have many reasons to be grateful for these advancements. In fact, with a projected $19.9 billion dollars spent on electronic health record (EHR) technology by 2024, it’s more difficult these days to find a healthcare organization that isn’t already taking advantage of a virtual practice management solution!
While your own practice may have already taken steps to streamline daily operations with a robust electronic medical record (EMR) system, sometimes it’s easy to forget about the small optimizations that serve as the glue that holds everything together. Join us as we look at seven digital EMR tools all therapists and rehab professionals, no matter their specialty, should be thankful for, including:
- User-friendly dashboards
- Configurable templates
- Digital lead tracking
- Automatic patient follow-up
- Automated messaging
- Survey automation
- HTML content builder
EMR/EHR Systems’ Clinical Documentation Efficiency Tools
Whether its managing critical data for quality assurance monitoring, identifying patient trends, or tracking staff key performance indicators (KPIs), it goes without saying that clinical documentation is the foundation for any therapy and rehab practice. But to be successful, you need an EMR that is not only easy-to-use and intuitive, but most importantly, therapist-friendly. Here are two clinical documentation efficiency features that your therapy and rehab practice should prioritize in order to streamline daily operations as well as reduce therapist burnout.
1. User-Friendly Dashboards = Less Documentation Time
Software design isn’t often mentioned when looking at desirable EMR features, which is all the more reason to show our thanks for it now! An intuitive user interface with a low learning curve can completely transform your practice’s clinical documentation processes for the better. By reducing the time your staff members spend documenting evaluations, you can give them the gift of more time to focus on improving patient engagement and personalizing visit experiences – without the burden of navigating complex software.
2. Optimize Healthcare Delivery with Configurable Templates
If you utilize an all-in-one EMR, you already know that having highly customizable features facilitates collaboration efforts and data sharing between HIPAA-authorized groups.
But did you know that it’s also possible to configure specialty-specific templates? While the concept of a template that’s specifically created for a certain therapy and rehab specialty lends itself to the idea that it can’t be modified, that misconception risks your practice with plenty of inefficiencies! That’s why it’s important to learn about and take advantage of the full range of configurable features your EMR offers.
Automation in Lead Tracking Software
Lead tracking not only offers actionable insights that can improve care delivery but it is also one of those metrics that can enhance marketing strategies. So which lead tracking capabilities are you taking for granted? Check out the benefits of these two automated lead tracking features that can help your practice grow!
3. Optimized Digital Entry Points
While there are many ways to track leads manually, this depends heavily on users inputting information by hand. What’s more, lead tracking is one of those rare processes that really doesn’t have any way to notify or remind users that a new patient lead needs to be recorded. That’s why we’re thankful for the advent of virtual entry points!
By giving patients the ability to contact your practice through virtual means, whether it be via a web form, patient portal, or even through an electronic referral, you’re setting up your practice to accurately track leads up to the point of conversion and beyond – all automatically!
4. Automatic Notification for Patient Follow Up
Hand-in-hand with digital entry points comes notifications that can trigger when a lead has entered the next part of their patient journey. With the right EMR in place, this automation can go even further than a simple internal notification system – it can perform patient outreach on your behalf! In fact, a therapy practice that employs an automatic patient follow-up system, either by email or text reminders, has proven to reap the benefits of improved conversion rates and better patient satisfaction.
The Best EHR Supports Your Patient Engagement Strategy
While automated patient outreach gives therapists a lot to be grateful for, effective communication doesn’t end upon a successful conversion! Patient engagement post-lead generation goes a long way in increasing the overall patient experience. Here are three tools you can use to improve patient engagement and strengthen provider-patient relationships.
5. Automated Communication Such as Blast Messaging
Meeting the level of engagement expected by your patients, especially newly generated leads, is no easy task since 82% of consumers want an immediate response. Thankfully, you have the power of automation to manage patient expectations and improve feedback by combining automated communication channels, such as blast emails and texts, to serve as reminders in post-outreach follow-up.
6. Automated Follow-Up Surveys
With 70% of patients expecting follow-up within 48 hours of first contact, it’s essential that your office staff reaches out in a timely manner. For busy practices, this is no small feat! Fortunately, there are tools to help alleviate the stress on your staff as well as boost patient engagement and satisfaction rates. By enabling automated follow-up surveys, patients that opt to receive communication over email and text can be sent a quick link to provide their feedback on the quality of your clinic and services.
Furthermore, this allows automatic communication in other scenarios as well! For example, with the help of business intelligence tools, it’s possible to organize your patients by demographic or scope of care, making it easy to identify groups of individuals that can all benefit from the same automated messaging.
7. HTML Email Builder for Custom Email Templates
A little personalization can go a long way – that’s why we’re thankful for custom email templates! With an HTML content builder, you don’t have to compile individual email content for each patient, or worse, send a difficult-to-understand email with formatting issues and broken links. By taking advantage of a customized email template tool, your practice can deliver an effective patient engagement strategy as well as reinforce cohesive branding.
Choose Top EMR Systems Like Raintree
For nearly 40 years, Raintree has been partnering with therapy and rehab providers to improve the delivery of quality care as well as foster growth for patients, providers, and their practices! We offer our sincere gratitude to anyone that utilizes digital solutions to make the world a healthier place and are committed to continuing to provide the most powerful and flexible EMR for the therapy and rehab market.
See how Raintree tools can benefit your practice. Schedule a discovery call with one of our experts today!
