As the medical industry becomes more competitive, many businesses are looking to gain an edge over competitors and adopt practices that speed up patient diagnosis and reporting. It’s no longer enough to compete on the basis of healthcare fee as patients demand accurate and better results.
Medical Businesses Can Speed Up Reporting & Diagnosis
Businesses working in a cluster can easily exchange information and report the medical history of patients as they have the staff and high-tech hardware and software to support a large volume of patients. However, independent businesses aren’t able to afford large-scale investments.
That said, these businesses can still take measures to speed up diagnosis and reporting. Here are 5 ways to go about it:
Look at the software side
Investing in a SaaS product is perhaps the most cost-effective way to improve efficiency of healthcare services.
According to Practice Suite, there is software that helps with quick charting, diagnosis, segmentation and billing to enable medical firms to make in-depth patient reports. Advanced software solutions even include features to search ICD-10 codes – the diagnosis codes that have become the standard for out-patient healthcare. This should help you with accurate diagnosis and claim filings
Push for frequent feedback
While the majority of diagnosis are correct, there is the possibility of errors more often than you expect, which delays the end reporting process. The accuracy of diagnosis and the speed of reporting can be best improved when medical professionals are informed of their own errors and when the patient collaborates to provide frequent feedback.
Physicians and clinicians should stop learning about their failures or success in ad hoc ways (seeing a nodule that has been overlooked for instance) and start refuting or confirming a diagnostic hypothesis based on temporal relationships.
Streamline internal communication & collaboration
Shared lessons from patient feedback should be shared with all the employees to assist in building an institutional culture that helps ensure ongoing training in improving diagnosis. The senior department can also develop a group of improving reporting by building expectations into new staff orientation, employee training, and performance management systems.
Lastly, it can be a good idea to develop communication and collaboration between safety and quality departments to dispel power dynamics between departments with different mentalities (as these deter the efficiency of reporting.
Be open to replacing current EHR
Most EHR systems used today don’t include medical error data reporting, and require paper-based steps which add to the responsibility of medical professionals.
This feature is only available in advanced solutions that include medical error data reporting into the present workflow for automatic validation and diagnosis with push of a few buttons. As a result, you should be open to integrating a mature solution into your workflow to eliminate cumbersome steps.
Update and audit patient records
Hospitals and medical firms deal with thousands of patient records every week. It is essential to keep every record updated and audit them for accuracy so that correct diagnosis can be made in time, and correct treatment reports can be given. In this case, computerized databases can store patient data and reduce the time and resources required for manual entry provisioning resulting in more efficient billing and reduction in error charges. 😀
