Time and resources are limited at most eye care practices. Here are four administrative tasks you can automate to help be more efficient with time management.
Administrative tasks can be efficiency stumbling blocks for eye care practices. They’re obviously necessary, but often take up way too much time when you add them all together. Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to do some of them? It would free up your schedule for important things like patient engagement and marketing your practice.
Fortunately, there are quite a few administrative tasks you can automate to free up time and resources. Here are four of them:
1. Automated Email, Text and Voice
You communicate with your patients in a variety of ways, from emails and text messages to phone calls and voicemails. These communications can be about appointments, products and even birthdays. They add up, so you probably have to set aside a good chunk of your day just to handle them — sometimes even after hours when you’ve already gone home.
You actually automate many of these communications, as there are automated services that remind people about appointments, notify them when their eyewear is ready and even send them a greeting on their birthday. Best of all, they can receive communications in whatever form they want: email, text or voice.
2. Appointment Filler
Appointments are particularly problematic when it comes to consuming time and resources. There are quite a few tasks associated with appointments, from figuring out which time slots are free for your doctor and initially scheduling the appointment to moving them around and canceling them. While there are some time-management tools and software out there, you often have to manage appointment-related tasks with phone calls.
With appointment filler automation, however, you can fill canceled appointment slots using an electronic waiting list. So, if a patient backs out of a scheduled appointment, you’ll already have another patient waiting to automatically fill the time slot. If patients can request appointments online, this is a doubly effective way to free up time.
3. Automated Patient Surveys
Having patients fill out paper surveys by hand is no longer an effective way to get constructive feedback. Chances are good that you won’t get many responses. So how do you know how patients feel about your eye care practice and learn about what’s important to them? Going digital is the first step; automation is the second.
With automated patient surveys, your patients will automatically receive an opportunity to give feedback. They’re easy to fill out, customized based on things you want to know and greatly help with improving patient experience. More importantly, they prevent patients from going straight to review sites with negative feedback before you’ve had a chance to learn about areas you should improve. All of this improves your capture rate.
4. Patient Testimonials
You might think there’s no way you can automate patient testimonials and you’re technically right. You don’t want a computer to generate patient testimonials; you want real patient testimonials from real people. What you can automate, however, is moving the feedback you receive from patient surveys to your website. This allows you to prominently display feedback with a rank of four stars or more, for example — all without lifting a finger.
Automating just a few administrative tasks can give you more time and resources than you think. If your eye care practice is looking for either, it’s time to consider an eye care rewards program with automated benefits as one of its rewards.