Patient Access Week 2024: 5 Key Strategies to Enhance & Optimize Patient Access
As healthcare providers, maximizing patient access is crucial to improving health outcomes and your bottom line. When patients can easily access timely and affordable healthcare, they are more inclined to receive preventive care, manage chronic conditions, and recuperate faster from illnesses. Moreover, enhancing patient access can help reduce healthcare costs.
As we celebrate Patient Access Week 2024 from March 31 to April 6, this serves as an opportunity to honor the healthcare heroes and improve patient access for patient-centered care.
In this blog, we’ll share strategies your practice can adopt to reduce barriers to care and enhance patient access.
5 Strategies to Improve Patient Access:
- Provide patient-centered care:
Not every practice is the same. It’s crucial to understand your patients and their expectations, considering cultural background, socioeconomic status, and language preferences. With a patient-centric culture, your practice can improve satisfaction and loyalty.
What you can do: Use automated surveys to understand patient sentiments and analyze patient populations to identify strategies to improve patient care.
- Reduce barriers to access:
Healthcare professionals should work to eliminate barriers to access, such as transportation and language barriers. Reducing such barriers is crucial to ensure timely medical care, improve health outcomes, and foster trust between patients and healthcare providers.
What you can do: Offer multilingual support to enhance communication, which helps patients understand diagnoses, treatments, and preventive measures effectively, regardless of their background. Additionally, identify patients with transportation challenges and provide support wherever possible.
- Train and educate staff:
Your patient access team is the face of your practice who ensures smooth patient experience. It’s important to empower them with proper training and access to technology. When your staff has the right tools to reduce their administrative burden, they can focus on delivering quality patient care.
What you can do: Conduct training programs for best practices to improve patient interactions. Additionally, appreciate your staff and analyze their feedback to address their challenges and reduce burnout.
- Invest in technology:
Technology improves patient access through telehealth, online scheduling, and electronic records. Digital tools can empower both your patients and staff by providing ease and convenience.
What you can do: Some digital solutions to enhance patient access are:
- Appointment scheduling: Make it easier for patients to schedule an appointment. Offer online self-scheduling and same-day appointment options to enhance convenience, reduce no-shows, and provide quicker access. These tools will also help streamline the scheduling process and reduce staff burden.
- Telehealth solutions: Telehealth offers virtual visits, enhancing convenience and cost-effectiveness for routine check-ups, follow-ups, and specialist consultations. This will also help in filling provider schedules and reducing barriers to care. Also, keep in mind that it’s crucial to ensure security and compliance with regulations to safeguard patient data and meet legal obligations.
- Secure messaging platform: In most cases, patients and the staff are involved in continuous phone tag, thereby impacting care access. Use two-way secure messaging that helps patients reach the practice easily. This is a powerful way to reduce communication barriers. Also, your staff can use digital communication channels to send out important updates, reduce no-shows using automated appointment reminders, and leverage broadcast messages to convey educational resources.
- Measure and monitor performance:
Establish metrics to track patient access performance, such as appointment wait time, insurance verification rate, prior authorization turnaround time, and patient satisfaction. By measuring and monitoring performance against goals, your practice can identify areas for improvement and optimize the patient access process.
What you can do: Create a plan where you include your goals and the current baselines. Follow a review cycle, say every 6 months, to track your progress.
Maximize Patient Access with CheckinAsyst’s Digital Solutions:
Leveraging digital tools is an effective way to enhance patient access. And with the on-going staffing challenges, the use of technology can ensure better patient experience without compromising your staff’s workload.
Take this success story, for example:
Jeffers, Mann & Artman Pediatrics used pre-registration and digital check-in modes at their facility to reduce wait times by 10 minutes for every patient. This helped in improving patient experience and persuading patients to come in for their appointments.
Want to explore different ways you can implement CheckinAsyst’s digital platform to improve patient access? Talk to our solution experts today.
