Let's talk about automation for small health businesses - What is it, when it can help your team, and how it can work for you.
Time is truly the single finite resource we have. It's the true equalizer across all people, whether you work in healthcare or elsewhere. You and your staff only have so many hours every day to get your work done. You constantly need to decide how to spend your time and what to prioritize. Is it any wonder so many healthcare professionals are burning out, private practice failing, and clients missing out? You need tools that create time for you to do the work you love 🤓 👍
Ok. So how do you do that? Three words - Private Practice Automation.
Automating your small health business is key to supercharging your productivity and enabling your practitioners to do their best work. When automation works, it's super easy and removes enormous amounts of your operational busyness. It creates space for providing the client's experience you want. While growing your practice, providing more services, and billing more hours.
What Is Private Practice Automation?
Before we jump into how to best use automation, let's quickly discuss what private practice automation is.
Healthcare automation is the process of combining a deep understanding of work, process, and technology to automate tasks in your health business. For example, instead of doing tasks manually, we use a software app to manage them automatically. This effectively creates time and space for you to spend on the things that matter.
Essentially healthcare automation removes or massively simplifies the operational parts of your business - Improving team productivity, eliminating errors, and creating beautiful client experiences.
How Can Automation Benefit Your Small Health Business?
Now that you better understand what automation means in private practice. Let's explore the ways healthcare automation can benefit your business.
There is massive value in automating operational tasks and process, including:
Automation creates time almost out of thin air. It enables your team to elevate above low-value work to focus on the most critical tasks (typically clinical).
Essentially automating work removes the need for you or your team to do or even think about. Instead, it empowers you to focus on doing the work you love! The things that you go onto healthcare to achieve.
Automation enables you to increase billable hours. When successfully deliver, it makes the work you do with and after clients more efficient.
When practitioners are not doing low-value repetitive work, they enjoy their role more and enjoy a better work-life balance.
Better client experiences. Automated helps not just you; it delivers for your clients also. It provides them with a seamless experience which they will love!
It helps your practice meet HIPAA compliance standards by bringing everything together in one place and standardizing the way work is done and documented.
Automation can remove 95% of human error. As clinicians, we know continuity is almost impossible for humans to do things right every time. We are all human! Automation technology stops human error, reducing the chance something gets missed by your team.
It often dramatically decreases client complaints. Your team will deliver an experience to people, getting it right almost every time. So no more scheduling errors, overcharging or forgotten clients.
Growing your healthcare business can be difficult, as you bring on more staff and can no longer be across everything. Automation provides you a core business tool to scale as your practice grows.
What Work Can You Automate?
I know what you're thinking. Ok, I get it.👊 Automation is excellent, but it sounds complicated and is probably stupidly expensive. Plus, I am not that great with technology!
This is what I initially thought, but I was wrong. Automation can be simple, cheap, and easy to deploy when you use the right tools.
So, where do you start?
There are a few areas within your practice and tasks that you do that are prime candidates for automation, including:
BILLING & PAYMENTS
How much time should Healthcare professionals spend on invoicing and payments? The answer is none or as little as possible.
Invoicing and payments can add up to 10 to 15 mins of work for just one 45 min client session. This often includes creating the invoice, processing payment, and sending a receipt. Also, there are those clients who may pay afterward, which would need to follow up.
When you automate this process, you will remove almost all of the time you waste. For instance, Carepatron users typically spend less than 30 secs on each invoice, payment, receipt, and reconciliation.
Yesterday we had a patient come in for an initial Mental Health assessment. I completed the session as planned in 60 mins. At the end of the appointment, I simply reviewed the invoice, which had been automatically generated, and clicked 'process payment.' This end-to-end process involved 2 clicks and took me 18 secs to complete. And most of that was my slow reading.
The best thing of all it removes the awkward moment at the end of a session where you move from a relationship-focused clinician into a transactional payment receiver. I personally hate how this feels and what symbolizes my clients.
SCHEDULING CLIENT APPOINTMENT
As healthcare professionals, we know a client's engagement is a critical factor in successful treatment. When we deliver a more collaborative healthcare experience, clients feel more involved in the process. As a result, they have more agency in their overall health outcomes.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of operational work which happens behind the scene. This work is often essential but doesn't actually require a human to do them. It can be handled more efficiently with fewer errors through simple automation.
For example, let's say you spend part of every day scheduling, rescheduling, and canceling client appointments. Creating a file note for each of these updates. Then sending appointment reminders to ensure clients turn up on time. 90% of this process is automated for us within Carepatron. We schedule the appointments with clients, send through booking confirmation, facilitate rescheduling and help make sure they turn up with smart reminders. This tool is easy to use, simple to understand, and will save you 10 mins for every client appointment you have. The best aspect of all is that clients love it. They know exactly where to be when you are there and who they are meeting with. They also know how to communicate with you if their availability changes. It's a win-win for everyone.
When you remove operational work from your to-do list. It allows you to spend more time supporting your clients doing the things you often have also wanted to do but never had the time.
If you want to deliver the best customer service possible while meeting your professional and regulatory requirements, keep your team productive and engaged. Automating some of your client processes is the best way to accomplish both. 🧗♀️
TELEHEALTH
When working with your clients, it's essential to recognize that it's not always possible to meet with them in person. As we have all recently experienced this in some way due to the pandemic. But in many ways, it's a broader challenge. Some clients are based or may sometimes work elsewhere. Others move during the treatment process. Or, in some instances, it's just not easy for them to make it in that day.
Having an integrated telehealth solution helps you to automate a big part of the hassle with telehealth.
It also delivers a much more secure service by requiring each participant to log in to the call. This means no one can ever hack your call or join by mistake.
For example, when we schedule a client appointment, you can include a video call option with one click. Send this through to your client, so they have the appointment details in their email and calendar.
You can also automate scheduling group calls across multiple locations with staff and clients.
MEDICAL TRANSCRIPTION
Most people can talk faster than they type. AI-powered medical transcription will provide you a powerful tool to automate note and reporting writing.
I use a powerful combination of AI, natural language processing, and machine learning to provide you with a robust medical transition tool.
Last week I had 4 progress notes and 1 initial assessment report to complete. Previously it would have taken 6 hours of pondering my keyboard to get the information down and formatted. Instead, with Carepatron's voice-to-text tool, I transcribed my notes within 32 mins. Then spent 1-hour formatting and refining the content. This automation saved me over 4 hours in just one day. So do you know what I did? I went home on time.
HIPAA COMPLIANCE
Every health business needs to carefully manage its HIPAA compliance. Unfortunately, this can be a time-consuming process—that is, until you automate it.
For example, we have almost all of our HIPAA requirements within Carepatron. The majority of these are automated or highly optimized. When a client comes to our private practice for the first time, we create a single health record within the platform. This is encrypted automatically and stored with a Hippa compliant AWS Server. We then capture consent via the Carepatron client onboarding automation. These are instantly stored within the client's health record. Our business associate agreement is also signed and captured within the app.
Whether you're new to HIPAA compliance or are a seasoned pro. You can ensure your team meets or exceeds the HIPAA standards. Automation is key to improving your health data security— while saving you time.
Create A Private Practice Your Proud of!
With the right practice management software, you can automate a massive volume of your time-consuming tasks — which will allow you to invest more time with your healthcare clients.
But it depends on using the right set of tools.
And that's why you need Carepatron.
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