An increasing number of health IT companies have announced plans to launch new healthcare services that offer cloud computing systems and streamlining patient care services. While many of these company’s products include similar features to ones produced by Iron Bridge, the latter company offers superiority over these competitors in a number of different ways. These innovations, along with other advances in EHR integration, reduce clinician burden, and lets health care staff members focus back on in-person patient care.
Benefits That Online Scheduling Brings to the Healthcare Industry
How Online Scheduling Can Improve Practice Workflow
An increasing number of healthcare providers are starting to offer online self-scheduling services for patients. In the past, scheduling would typically take place in-person or over-the-phone, which wasn’t always the most convenient option for either patients or providers. In fact, scheduling a doctor’s appointment can take eight minutes to finish. To put this in perspective, this means that healthcare providers spend an average of 93 business days a year just to schedule an appointment for patients.
This is why most healthcare providers offer online self-scheduling tools for patients to address this issue. Let’s examine three benefits that come from implementing online scheduling in your service offerings.
1. Focus Staff Time Elsewhere
This inefficient process takes critical time out of a staff member’s day that could have been spent providing high-quality care to patients at the office or reaching out to high-risk patients over-the-phone. It also comes with the risk of making mistakes in patient scheduling, which can eat up more of your team’s time later on. By implementing self-scheduling software into their online patient services, both providers and patients can save time while remaining in contact with each other.
2. Fill Up Your Schedule
Giving your patients the ability to schedule their appointments online can actually increase their likelihood of showing up to the appointment. A medical group in New England experienced a 42% reduction in patient no-shows after they implemented an online scheduling system for them. Other research studies that compared online booking to traditional booking through a phone call found that no-show rates by patients who booked online were six percent lower in no-show rates by patients in the ladder group.
3. Improve Patient Satisfaction and Health
For many patients, being able to have greater control over their own scheduling empowers them and increases the likelihood that they will show up to their appointments. In turn, this allows them to stay on track with their health goals and remain up-to-date with their yearly check-ups.
Patients are also starting to choose different healthcare providers based on their ability to schedule appointments online. One survey found that over one-third of customers will choose between competing practices based on whether or not they offer online scheduling.
Why Online Scheduling Plays an Important Role in Healthcare Interoperability
Healthcare Still Lags Behind Other Industries in Terms of Connectivity
Many healthcare providers have successfully improved their patients’ experiences by digitizing their information to create an integrated scheduling system. Some patient information is still coded differently among other systems and providers. This is why new technology has been developed to interpret the data and enable routing across different schedules based on various conditions and preferences. In order to allow simple online scheduling for patients, developers must be able to connect a scheduling interface to any relevant patient and physician information so that they are appropriately matched together for appointments.
How Cutting-Edge Technology by Iron Bridge Can Assist Your Healthcare Organization
Leading Innovator in EHR Integration Offers Effective Health IT Solutions
Iron Bridge offers a number of health IT solutions including data integration and aggregation.
To help your organization reduce clinician burden and allow you to refocus your efforts on patient care, Iron Bridge has built the Nuvola Hub Healthcare Integration Platform as a Service (Hi-PaaS). This system is built to help healthcare providers organize critical projects and achieve your clinical goals.
The Nuvola Hub in Action
Iron Bridge is committed to helping organizations improve their healthcare outcomes through advanced data collection products and solutions. Rather than wasting time chasing data across a vast healthcare ecosystem, Iron Bridge leverages its Nuvola Hub Hi-Paas to collect and leverage your organization’s data. Everything from medication data to patient demographics can be collected. This critical information is essential for improving patient outcomes.
How Iron Bridge Sets Itself Apart From Competitors
While numerous health IT systems are beginning to offer streamlined services, Iron Bridge stands out from them in a number of ways. Some of the company’s top offerings include:
- Transparent and Affordable Pricing — you will always know what you are paying for and how much you are paying for it
- Enhanced Interoperability — streamlined healthcare systems that successfully lessen clinician burden
- Consistent Support — team members are available to assist you with any questions or problems
- Fhirstation Add-On — companies can add fhirstation, a leading patient access solution designed for the 21st Century Cures act and ONC and CMS Interoperability Final Rule 2020
Something as simple as trying to schedule an appointment can end up becoming a burden for both patients and physicians if a streamlined service is not put in place. That’s why health IT companies and software leaders like Iron Bridge continue to work toward improving EHR integration for healthcare providers. For more information on how you can improve your healthcare organization’s interoperability, contact the team at Iron Bridge today.
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