Administrative support Automate to ‘right size’ your practice

Administrative support
Automate to ‘right size’ your practice
By Nancy Smith

Administrative tasks are the behind-the-scenes support to your practice. But administrative tasks by their nature are time-consuming, may be repetitive, and keep you and your staff from focusing your time and energy where it really counts — on patients.

Often administrative tasks in chiropractic offices are relegated to be done when the doors close and patients are gone. Doing administrative work after hours has a drawback — burnout. Who wants to work after the work day is done?

When corporate America “right sizes” to increase productivity and profitability, it downsizes, outsources, and restructures. When chiropractic “practice-sizes,” it uses technology to free team members from administrative tasks and let them focus on patient care.

Technology — both hardware and software —used to the fullest results in:

• Scheduling. Automated software relieves your CAs from manually making telephone calls to patients to remind them of their appointments. Instead, scheduling software can call patients the night before. It can also call patients on their cell phones who are more than 15 minutes late.

• Billing. Software can also lighten the burden on staff with regard to HCFA forms, and billing and processing claims by pre-configuring fee schedules to recognize patients and automatically generate HCFAs based on services.

• Patient care. Office technology also directly affects your relationship with your patients. In a wireless clinic, you can document in real time and eliminate the need for travel cards.

You can also call up patient records to have information about prior visits, review x-rays, review patient accounts and charges from the patient’s last visit, and give you reminders about patient care, such as “re-exam due next visit.”

• Computer backup. Another daily activity is the critical, yet repetitive, end of the day “backup” of the computer(s). This too can now be done automatically, with data backed up off site in a fully encrypted environment.

Imagine the change in a practice when the last patient walks out and the staff wraps up the day, locks the front door, and everything is complete, ready for a new day.

By relegating repetitive, administrative tasks to technology, a practice experiences much more than just automating paper tasks. It opens the door to better time management, shifted psychological burdens, and enhanced patient satisfaction.

Nancy Smith is the CEO of PPT4Drs, a technology firm dedicated to the chiropractic profession. Nancy has assembled a team of top technology experts to streamline workflow and provide technology assistance to chiropractors. She can be contacted on the company’s Web site at www.PPT4Drs.com or by e-mail sales@ppt4drs.com.