The medical profession can be quite demanding to the point where it becomes difficult to manage time. If you find yourself in this pickle, you don’t need to worry. In this piece, we’ll share some time management tips that will help you manage your time more effectively. With these tips and strategies, you’ll be able to reach your career objectives, prevent burnout and stress, and provide first-rate patient care.
Have a Plan for Each Day
Weekly or monthly scheduling will help you to be focused and ready for unexpected circumstances. Planning your calendar helps you to know which patients you will see. It also helps you to be ready for scheduled visits by having the necessary medical documents, supplies, and equipment.
Use Sundays to plan your week, divide your goals into daily tasks. You also need to assess the importance of each task. With this planning, you can quickly realize which chores are suitable for delegation.
Furthermore, think about your energy level all through the day. If you get more active in the morning, set the most important and demanding tasks for your morning. Then, plan less important chores that are not of great importance in the second half of the day.
To plan more easily, you can get medical practice management software with an automated scheduler. This will help you to improve your time management. It will also let you take control of your calendar and that of your team.
Moreover, scheduling tools let you create automated appointment alerts for your patients and yourself. Also, they usually have a buffer time of at least ten minutes before an appointment to get ready. You can also change your normal availability and availability for particular days while letting your patients view these updated changes.
Assign Tasks to Other Qualified Staff Members
An outdated mindset is believing that doctors should handle patient care on their own and should have all the answers. These days, a team of varied, competent medical experts with distinct skills cover several facets of client healthcare. This system and structure of patient-oriented healthcare ensure that the demands of every individual are fulfilled.
Delegating some tasks to qualified medical staff has several benefits. It will save you time, lighten your workload, improve client care comprehensiveness, and free you from some obligations. Some easily assigned tasks are listed below:
- A qualified nurse will greatly assist you in patient care if you assign responsibilities such as obtaining patient information, contacting patients to let them know about lab results, drawing blood samples, and vital sign measurements.
- Front desk workers can handle financial concerns with patients, handle organizational issues, or connect patients to the required healthcare practitioner.
- Medical assistants can handle basic chores, including document filling-in or phone call management. You can also hire a Medical Office Answering Service to help with your client calls. These will save you time and free up your staff for other responsibilities.
Utilize Electronic Health Records (EHRs)
Using electronic health records enhances not only the effectiveness of patient treatment but also the arrangement of your clinical processes. Electronic health records let a patient’s medical history be automatically updated in real time. It also makes this medical history available to every doctor engaged in patient care. Streamlining patient management will save you significant time when a patient needs to change doctors to continue treatment.
An EHR can make your work easier because of the following:
- availability of medical records and history to authorized medical professionals
- built-in templates for medical forms that are often used
- Storage of information that is often used, thereby eliminating the need to constantly input the exact data
- The capacity to securely retrieve data should a data breach occur
- fewer errors resulting from hand data entry
- regular data backups.
Furthermore, numerous healthcare facilities and clinicians nationwide electronically prescribe medications due to the widespread usage of EHRs. From the point of care, accurate medical prescriptions can be delivered straight to a pharmacy online. This, in turn, lowers medical errors, saves time for healthcare personnel, and enables patient care.
Automate Tasks
8.7 hours each of week in the life of an average U.S. physician is spent dealing with administrative tasks. You can read this article to find out why doctors and nurses are always busy. These duties, although important, reduce the time meant for patient care. By automating these administrative tasks, you can take care of the following:
- Billing management
- Appointment scheduling
- Team management
- Virtual care
- Health records automation, etc.
Technology allows doctors to eliminate administrative chores and paperwork and free more of their time for treatment.
Conclusion
Improved physician performance, increased patient satisfaction, and better-quality treatment all depend on better quality time management. You can achieve all of these by utilizing the tips and strategies we’ve shared in this article. Take advantage of technology, systems, and structures to help you manage routine chores and tiresome processes and free you to focus on individual healthcare.