A hospital is a very busy place. Nurses and doctors are running around, patients keep coming in the emergency unit, and several visitors are rushing to see their confined loved ones. With the urgency of tasks and demanding environment, it’s often difficult to keep order and organization in a hospital. Everything is just all over the place.
Although it’s understandable that the environment is indeed fast-paced and stressful, hospital staff can further improve efficiency by streamlining their operations. It can help them do their jobs better while saving serious time and energy. This will enable them to focus on more important matters. Here are some tips to streamline operations in a hospital.
Automating repetitive tasks
Probably what takes up a huge chunk of a nurse’s or doctor’s time is undertaking repetitive tasks. Some examples of this are data entry or retrieving information from several systems. The common scenario in a hospital is that staff have to sign into different databases and input information in all of them.
This duplication of tasks takes up a lot of time and energy, which could have been put to more important matters. These administrative tasks, in reality, do not need so much intellectual capacity that brings up the need for a labor force to undertake it. In fact, bots can be used for simple yet time-consuming tasks like these.
Automated bots can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They can do all the simple data entry or data recovery tasks for the staff, giving the latter the opportunity to work on more pressing tasks. Hospitals should learn to automate some administrative tasks to achieve efficiency and productivity.
Going digital
Gone are the days when it was efficient and convenient to have hospital files in physical documents. We don’t see cards and paperwork in most hospitals anymore. The advent of technology has made administrative work in hospitals much easier by allowing them to input and access information through digital platforms.
Now, hospitals can make use of tablets, smart phones, or computers to store and retrieve information in a single database, such as Julota. This makes it easy to find patient information, history, and other essential information that can be used to treat the patient better. Through taking advantage of digital platforms, hospitals can save crucial time and energy compared to navigating through thousands of paperwork and physical documents.
Make sure patients are prepared before their appointments
Patient intake can also take up a lot of time in a hospital. Typically, when the patient arrives, several administrative tasks have to be accomplished before the actual checkup. This can include filling out a form or validating insurance. To save more time, a good method is to ask the patient to prepare these information or requirements beforehand.
The doctor or nurses are not the only ones who want to hasten the patient intake process. The patients themselves want to get it over with as soon as possible. It’s an ideal situation for both parties, so the patients would be willing to cooperate.
Before the appointment date, have an automated system send a reminder to the patient. Include an online patient intake form with the reminder and ask the patient to fill it up before the appointment. Once they submit the online form, give the patient instructions to fulfill certain requirements, depending on the needs of their treatment. For example, you can ask them to bring a urine sample, or the like, to make the process easier once they show up for their appointment.
A hospital is a very busy and fast-paced environment. But there are several things that can be done to make operations easier and more efficient.
