They’re highly skilled and dedicated—but exhausted and stressed out too. Clinicians need support and structure as much as their patients do—that’s why you should thoroughly evaluate any Care Management tool you’re considering to ensure it makes their shifts more efficient and enjoyable. The selection of software for clinicians is expansive, so before investing in one, make sure you understand exactly how it will enable more care and less stress.
How can software for clinicians improve care?
Imagine if your clinicians could clone themselves. They’d be able to accomplish twice as much assessment, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up, for twice as many patients. The next best thing? Software for clinicians that enables each provider to more thoroughly and efficiently execute more tasks throughout the workday—ultimately improving care with these steps:
Streamlining clinical workflows
As providers face rising pressure to deliver more care in less time, software for clinicians can offer relief from a major pain point: inefficient workflows.
Poorly-integrated software for clinicians can force your team to duplicate data across multiple applications or log in and out of several systems to find the clinical data they need to make critical care decisions. Effective software for clinicians features value-stream maps that analyze each step to identify waste and minimize no-show downtime.
If your healthcare organization’s medical software is outdated, it may not allow you to communicate directly with patients. It may not feature robust analytics capabilities that enable clinicians to capture, manage, view, and analyze data on the patient level. It may not send automated patient appointment reminders via phone, text, or email. It may even take a coffee cup worth of sipping time to upload.
You’ll know you’ve found the right software for clinicians when you see your team enjoying a lean, standardized workflow and effortless digital collaboration.
Enhancing patient-centered care
The Journal of Healthcare Management has done a deep dive into the capabilities of software for clinicians to help deliver high-touch, customized care. Researchers found that hospitals which deliver the most patient-centered care use the highest quality software for clinicians, which enables them to:
- Expand access to affordable care.
- Decrease reliance on redundant paperwork.
- Enable quick and secure sharing and storage of patient data.
When they don’t have to worry about inputting, tracking, and processing data, clinicians can fully focus on delivering quality care to their patients.
Improving health outcomes
The Journal of Patient Safety tells us that up to 400,000 Americans die each year from medical errors. Why? Serious medication errors could occur when clinicians don’t have enough information about a patient or drug. Well-designed software for clinicians enables patients and care teams to communicate more clearly and thoroughly, closing those information gaps.
Even consumers with common chronic conditions are demanding more convenient healthcare, driving the exponential growth of software for clinicians in all medical settings. A recent MedCity News survey found that 83% of patients prefer to get reminders from their providers about blood pressure checks, rehabilitation exercises, medication prescriptions, follow-up appointment scheduling, or progress reporting.
What does the ideal software for clinicians do?
How can you tell which medical software is ideal for your health organization? The one that enables you to track the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that matter most to your team. The one that’s designed to help you achieve your priorities: improved outcomes, higher patient experience scores, and reduced costs.
The right healthcare software for clinicians will enable them to centralize data in a scalable structure, set and track benchmarks, and increase efficiency ratios by enabling these tasks:
Automating touchpoints
Once appointment scheduling and reminders, symptom alerts, billing, and follow-up surveys are automated, your clinicians are liberated from administrative tasks that pull them away from their priority: care delivery. Patients respond and interact best on the communication platform they’re most comfortable with—and quality software for clinicians accommodates all of them.
Tracking patient progress
Tracking patient scores and data in real-time enables each provider to observe trends that can be critical to assessing conditions and prescribing next steps—without skipping any. Daily progress tracking also informs clinicians when it’s time to taper off treatment. When you observe both individual and aggregate patient outcomes improving, you know you’ve developed an effective program that’s ready to scale across your organization.
Coordinating care
Today’s patients expect efficient, convenient care and communication. Quality software for clinicians enables you to house their entire journey—symptoms, assessment scores, needs, and communications—in a centralized, user-friendly patient profile. Coordinating care with this degree of transparency allows each team member to seamlessly pick up where the last one left off, giving patients exactly what they need from each interaction.
Standardizing industry assessments
A premium, innovative software for clinicians will house evidence-based guidelines that they can apply when developing patient programs. Once they absorb the latest healthcare content and adopt industry-standard assessments, your clinicians will be better prepared to deliver the care today’s patients expect and deserve. Continuing their education can also help boost clinician confidence and reputation.
Improving clinical efficiency
Centralizing your care with a well-designed, flexible software for clinicians allows you to create seamless, patient-centered programs for each population you serve. You’ll soon observe how each customized program relieves you from the pressure of building your practice around your care—and, instead, begin building your care around your practice.
Increasing patient satisfaction
Once you’ve accomplished the goals above, try sending out a robust patient satisfaction survey. You’re likely to be pleasantly surprised. Higher scores can lead to more patient and specialist referrals. It can also lower stress levels while improving self-esteem and job satisfaction for your clinicians.
How does software for clinicians impact healthcare?
The studies and surveys are in—consumers have made their demands clear, and clinicians have identified their needs. Software for clinicians will define the future of healthcare.
To delve deeper into all the customized software strategies that can improve processes and outcomes at your organization, read our comprehensive guide to telehealth to discover insights on virtual care delivery.