As healthcare professionals, we have a duty to provide outstanding patient care. But let’s face it, delivering top-notch healthcare is not just about compassion and expertise – it’s also about being a lean, mean efficiency machine. When we optimize our practices, we can save valuable resources, shave precious time off our schedules, and most importantly, offer our patients an unparalleled experience. So if you’re ready to take your physical therapy practice to the next level, buckle up and get ready for four game-changing tips to boost your clinical efficiency!
1. Streamline Physical Therapy Workflows and Processes
Running an inefficient physical therapy practice is like trying to walk through quicksand. Every step requires an enormous amount of effort, and progress is slow and frustrating. Inefficient workflows and processes can sap the energy of everyone involved, bogging down the practice and making it difficult to move forward. On the other hand, streamlining your practice means you can focus on what matters most!
Set Yourself Up for Success: Standardize Your Workflow
An efficient practice creates streamlined workflows and routines. From scheduling to check-in to billing, every piece of the patient journey has the potential to save time – or waste it.
Your goal? To complete everyday, repetitive tasks with as few steps as possible. Often, this means switching from manual tasks to an automated workflow (hint: check out tip #4). Standard practices can reduce the time, energy, and effort involved in your team’s administrative routines… So you can focus on tasks that truly require the human touch!
Reduce Friction in Your ‘Flow
Standardizing tasks isn’t the only thing that can save time. You also need to look at the pain points in your workflow. If you’re feeling friction in your workflow, you may need to:
- Update your technology. Beyond updating your software, make sure that your technology is truly working for you. Optimized solutions should anticipate and meet the needs of the physical therapy specialty.
- Train staff. An office that runs like clockwork doesn’t automatically happen. It requires planning and training. Every physician, team member, and new hire must be on board with the streamlined procedure model.
- Reorganize your workspaces. A poorly designed office layout can be a major roadblock – literally. Simple adjustments can help your patients and entire team move more easily from point A to point B.
Once you’ve created an optimal workflow and smoothed out any rough spots, you’re on the right track! You’ll be set up to more easily manage your patient load, reduce wait times, deliver top quality care, and improve patient satisfaction.
2. Help Your Patients Arrive On Time, Every Time
A streamlined, efficient therapy practice delivers patient services on time, every time. But of course, it takes two to tango! After you streamline your practice’s operations, there are a few ways you can help your patients stay on time and on track, as well. This will not only improve their quality of care, but also reduce holdups in the front office. To encourage timeliness, you can:
- Send appointment reminders via email or text message. Bonus points if you reduce the burden on your front desk staff by automating patient communications.
- Provide clear directions to the clinic. Your website, social media, local business profiles, and text reminders should make it easy to find directions for patients on-the-go. This is especially helpful for new patients!
- Offer flexible scheduling and check-in options. More and more, patients expect to have options for self-directed scheduling and check-in. Make it easy – and fast – by offering convenient alternatives to scheduling by phone. You can even offer automated scheduling for patients on your waitlist, to fill in the gaps!
- Educate and incentivize patients. Make sure your patients know the importance of arriving on time and the potential consequences of late arrivals, such as shortened treatment sessions, late fees, or rescheduled appointments.
By implementing these strategies, physical therapy practices can increase patients’ timeliness and treatment adherence. It’s important, because in doing so, you can enhance the value of your time and the profitability of your PT clinic.
3. Every Moment Counts: How Staff can Optimize Downtime
Even with the most efficient office procedures and patient communication tools, you’ll occasionally have gaps in your schedule. Turn this unplanned downtime to your advantage. Here are a few suggestions for any PTs who find themselves with unexpected free time:
- Catch up on patient documentation. Fill in missing documentation or edit hastily composed notes from earlier in the day. This can help reduce the need for overtime to complete documentation, and improve work-life balance.
- Help a team member. If another team member or physical therapist is behind, check in to see how you can help. More hands equals less time wasted.
- Practice self-care. Exercise, meditation, or other stress-relieving activities may not seem “efficient” – but can reduce burn out in the long run.
- Tidy up your workspace. Go over surfaces with antibacterial wipes. Use the time to clear the dust from your computer keyboard. The little things can make your space more enjoyable.
- Hit the email. Clean out your inbox and send those replies you’ve been putting off. Take back that mental energy!
Clinical efficiency isn’t just about processes – it’s about sustainable productivity and making the most of every moment.
4. Leverage EMR Automations: Ways to Make Your Life Easier
One of the most effective ways to maximize PT practice efficiency is to utilize technology to automate tasks. There are a plethora of tools available in the market that can help streamline your practice’s workflow, i.e. EHR, appointment scheduling applications, and telehealth platforms.
Choose the Right Tools
Your clinic’s team must specialize and keep up with the latest advancements, so why should your tech be any different? Without question, the technology in your practice should provide highest level of performance in management and EMR systems. Streamlining your practice to ensure efficient use of staff time and resources is difficult if you’re struggling with outdated systems. Choose industry-leading solutions like ours, so your practice remains at the forefront of innovation. As you create strategies to increase your bottom line, measure your success, and grow your physical therapy practice, you want technology to match.
The Benefits of Automation
Bring your modern clinical practice up to speed through automation. Like we discussed in tip #1, it’s possible to replace many manual, repetitive tasks with automated systems. This streamlines your workflow while setting you up for accurate document and data entry, referral and lead tracking, improved income, and best patient outcomes. Minimize wasted time!
Seamless Solutions
Interoperability is a major benefit to patient care, because it makes it easy to share patient data between different healthcare providers and systems. It also saves a lot of time and hassle by getting rid of the need for manual data entry and paper-based communication.
Improve Efficiency in Your PT Practice with Raintree
Delivering quality patient care is one of the most critical responsibilities of any healthcare professional. From fully automated systems to those that focus on only what you want, efficiency in your practice is only a system install away.
Using a comprehensive system like Raintree’s All-in-One EMR solution and its “Software-as-a-Relationship” approach gives you the tools you need to streamline your practice, improve your patient services, and manage your practice more efficiently.
Schedule a demo with us at Raintree to find out how your practice can streamline for success!
