How To Improve Workflow In Your Medical Office

Your medical office’s workflow is more than a mandatory process: it’s the essence of clinical care, determining where and when care providers and resources are allocated. Developing an efficient, value-aligned workflow is a journey. Here are several practical ways and best practices to get started.

Assess Your Current State

Developing your workflow, whether in a medical office or radiology department, requires a rigorous and honest assessment of your current one. Find out where your care providers are spending the most time in the clinic, where they find value, and what improvements they’d like to see in a future iteration. Ensuring a collaborative approach is crucial.

Advanced Strategies to Improve Medical Office Efficiency

• Understand & Map Your Patient’s Journey: From the time they enter your clinic until the moment they leave, your patient interacts with a diverse team of physicians, technicians, administrators, and office staff. Understanding your archetypal patient journey, from intake through discharge, is crucial to discovering untapped efficiency. Are you making the most of your patient’s wait time? This is your time to gather intake information using quick, intuitive tools, and utilize diagnostic and imaging systems that strengthen doctor-patient discussions. By mapping out your entire patient journey in detail, you’ll quickly see where you can save time, streamline interaction and peer collaboration, and provide a superior patient experience.
• Automate & Simplify Your Workflow: In the digital, cloud-driven age, there is little excuse for archaic workflows based on rote, manual tasks. Integrating process automation, transcription, predictive input, and other digital tools into your hospital’s workflow can save your healthcare professionals significant time and effort. Case reporting, collaborative communication, and patient education can all be simplified using modern clinics’ robust and intelligent assets.

Challenges That Affect Your Workflow

• Not Using Digital Healthcare Tools: With some inevitable rare exceptions, your clinical workflow should embrace the use of digital tools wherever possible. Cloud-based PACS, for instance, can help cardiology, radiology, and other clinical units transform image management, allowing care providers to store, retrieve, annotate, and exchange images from practically anywhere, removing physical storage constraints and speeding up collaborative care.
• Lack Of Digital Literacy: However, even if your clinic does take the important step of integrating digital solutions across various points in your workflow, it’s crucial to ensure that your entire medical staff – from the lane to the office – possess the digital literacy required to take full advantage of the assets at their fingertips. While many modem solutions, such as cloud-based PACS, are highly intuitive for users, training physicians and staff on an entire digitized hospital workflow process may be a more challenging endeavor. Understand your team’s average digital literacy before you integrate a new solution, and have a robust training program in place to ensure people are onboarded quickly and rigorously.
• Time and Money Assumptions: Improving your medical office workflow is a significant but realistic endeavor. But many organizations, wary of a prospective price tag, don’t make the investments required to drive efficiency, holding onto legacy workflows and systems in the face of inevitable consequences. In truth, many modern solutions are highly modular, integrate into existing or broader systems, and offer attractive, utilization-based pricing, allowing hospitals and vendors to reach mutually beneficial arrangements based on flexible terms and commitments. The prospect of a workflow overhaul shouldn’t deter your team from learning more about potential solutions.

How does UltraLinQ improve the healthcare workflow?

For radiology, cardiology, and other teams that work with hundreds or thousands of case images every month, UltraLinQ’s cloud-based PACS is an efficient, intuitive way to transform imaging workflows and keep teams focused on life-changing care. UltraLinQ PACS offers:

• Flexibility of Access: Physicians, technicians, and other care providers can access patient images from any location with a compatible smart device, allowing easier utilization across practice locations and while working from home.
• Improved Communication/Collaboration: UltraLinQ PACS includes efficient, intuitive ways for care providers to mark up, share, and collaborate with other medical professionals around patient images. The UltraLinQ cloud server acts as a fully secure, compliant resource hub, allowing collaborators in different locations to access the most up-to-date images and information anywhere, at any time – speeding up radiology workflows.
• Automated Reporting: UltraLinQ PACS automates several key steps in the image uploading, annotating, and retrieval process, reducing the time your team spends on manual reporting and increasing the time they spend on direct patient care.

Developing an efficient workflow for your hospital or medical practice used to be a complex, arduous task. Now, it doesn’t have to be in the age of rapid technological advancement and cloud computing. Implementing focused, high-value solutions, such as cloud-based PACS, can rapidly transform the way your care providers operate and improve experiential outcomes for your patients, practice, and health system at large