Checklists are more than just for to-do lists

It’s easy enough to lose track of specific tasks, check patients in without following procedures, and lose patient information.

Some practices end up relying on a cobbled-together system of sticky notes, paper lists and spreadsheet tasks. Thankfully, there’s a better way to keep everyone at your practice on-task and coordinated. In this article, we’ll show you how and talk about some of the biggest advantages of bringing checklist technology to your practice.

If you’re tired of relying on paper or even expecting human memory to help your practice stay organized, we’re here to help you get started with checklists and revolutionize your clinical operations.

What’s checklist technology?

Built-in to many EHR systems today, checklist technology allows you to develop customized checklists to keep your office’s practices and processes streamlined and on-track for every patient and each aspect of the patient encounter. If it’s a task or process you use in your office, then chances are you can create a checklist that can help you automate it.

Whenever someone is in the midst of completing tasks, they can manually pull-up the list or even have checklists pop-up automatically for processes such as checking in a patient, onboarding a new patient at the clinic, etc. Depending on your EHR system and how it works, you can have these checklists come with reminders and automatically guide staff members through the process.

Organized and on-task

With this feature, the office manager or chiropractor can review the day’s lists at the beginning of the day, shift, or week. This is a great way to know what to expect for tasks that are specific to that time period only. Later, it’s also an at-a-glance guide to what’s already happened and what still specifically needs to be finished.

These checklists can help you measure productivity in your office or hold specific employees accountable if tasks are unfinished at the end of the shift. You can also know whenever your team encounters problems or issues with their work, so you can offer guidance or know when to provide additional resources to help.

Setting (and using) checklists

Create new checklists and set specific rules or time and date triggers that automatically generate on-screen lists for specific appointments. Or, if you have specific patients that need different checklists, set these lists to generate on-screen whenever that particular patient checks in.

Outstanding checklists haven’t been completed yet. You can pull these up and figure out your current progress. Depending on your system, you may also easily pull up lists of completed checklists so you can see what’s done. With these tools, you can reduce the likelihood that you’ll forget something or that your team won’t know what to do.

Checklist ideas

Make checklists to keep yourself on track, let your team know what needs to happen, or remind everyone of infrequent-but-important dates and deadlines. You can have checklists devoted to particular daily responsibilities, set up intake process checklists and more. Processes you might normally use emails with staff members for, for instance, you can often just set up checklists and have employees check specific lists and know immediately where they’re at in the process without having extended email threads or conversations for every patient.

In time, these checklists can help you track statistics about your office’s productivity, task completion rates, and patient characteristics. You can see what happens frequently at your office and what deserves more attention. Having consistent processes can also help you avoid backtracking, wasting your team’s time or forgetting aspects of a particular procedure. This can be particularly useful for insurance billing, marketing, intakes, annual physicals and other things you do around the office and in the exam room.

Source
Konold, George. “Create Checklists for Your Patients.” Genesis Chiropractic Software. https://genesischiropracticsoftware.com/create-checklists-patients/. Published: December 2015. Updated: July 2017. Accessed: March 2018.