An article in today’s Medical Economics provides some useful tips to help improve the flow of patients through your office, and in the process increase their satisfaction and your productivity. Among them is the advice to use the time-stamp feature in your EMR or practice management software to chart patient flow and see exactly where the bottlenecks are occurring. Using NueMD’s medical scheduler, for example, each patient can be tracked and time-stamped with arrival, check-in, visit and departure times. Once this data is analyzed (more detailed suggestions for doing this are contained within the Medical Economics article), it can provide invaluable fodder for benchmarking and setting goals for your practice. Other productivity-enhancing tips in the article include how to deal with phone calls effectively and how to end visits from that patient who would like to chat all day!

Despite the continued wrangling over whether utilizing telehealth methods affects standards of care, there is currently a convergence of perfect conditions for the rise of remote health care options. Technological capabilities are rapidly increasing while the cost of high-tech solutions is decreasing, which also affects the adoption rate of electronic medical records and practice management software by providers. The increasing use of application service providers (ASPs) in this field means that physicians can securely access patients’ records from anywhere in the world, and video conferencing options provide a human touch to a remote physician - patient encounter. Added to technological factors, the U.S. is facing a shortage of nurses, leaving some rural areas particularly understaffed; plus high gas prices are prompting many to seek remote alternatives for services or tasks they would usually conduct face to face.

Telehealth solutions are not just limited to linking patients to providers. Some of the most valuable ways to utilize this technology is to provide a link between medics; for example, between hospitals and consulting surgeons who are not on-site, or paramedics and ER doctors. An indication of how mainstream remote health care services are becoming is Aetna and Cigna’s recent decision to offer reimbursement for teleconsults. It seems that geography or an inability to travel may soon no longer be a barrier to receiving the same range of health care services as everyone else.