Smart technology. Artificial intelligence. Telemedicine. The changes in today’s healthcare are coming on strong.
But at the end of the day, you still only have 24 hours to deal with it all. And if you don’t want to work the full 24 hours every day, something has to give.
To take advantage of all innovations coming your way, the first step of the process is to automate. Automation isn’t just about saving you time; it’s also about reducing errors, increasing your patient satisfaction, and decreasing the volume of tedious tasks.
As you start to automate different parts of your practice, you’ll begin to uncover problems in the way you’ve always operated. You’ll find areas you spend too much time on, routine tasks that eat up productivity.
Automation will automatically make you a leaner, more productive office. And that will give you more time to devote to newer tasks and technology.
There’s a way to automate the right way - automate the easiest parts of your business first. Then as you gain time and see benefits, you can reach deeper into your practice. This should be a collaborative process between everyone in your business: management, staff, patients, and IT. You can’t automate smoothly if everyone isn’t on board.
Once you’re ready, start with these areas first.
Customer Service
What’s one of the top complaints of every patient? Customer service. A recent study showed that 4 out of 5 customer service leaders found that the vast majority of their ticket volume was from highly repetitive yet easy to resolve issues. When you see the same questions over and over again, they are the first things you should attack for automation. Starting here can easily improve customer satisfaction, give customers different ways of answering their own questions, and reduce the amount of time your staff will spend in this role.
IT Operations
IT is still a time-intensive, hands-on process. IT teams admit to spending the majority of their time on maintenance and fixing problems, with less than 10 percent going towards upgrading infrastructure. When you automate software installations, data management, batch processing, and server monitoring tasks, you free up time to spend evaluating systems and infrastructure instead.
Security
Security tends to be an “out of sight, out of mind” process. That doesn’t make your practice any safer; in fact, it puts you at greater risk. Using automation can give you peace of mind knowing you have a process in place to ensure data security and compliance. Automation can include monitoring services that look for suspicious behavior, services that block hackers while alerting you to infected devices. When you have better boundaries in the process, you spend less time searching for problems - you know right where they are.
Testing
If you don’t test your technology regularly, you don’t understand where your weakest points lie. That includes all parts of your practice - hardware, software, devices, technology, and processes. While making any part of this too routine increases your risk, having it built into your regular tasks can ensure you stay up to date with changing technology.
The only way to be ready for the future is one step at a time. And the best place to start is to automate the most routine parts of your business. What can you change today?
For IT Strategy, Cloud Conversion, or Help Desk Services reach out to us at Silver Linings Technology 360-450-4759.
