Managing a healthcare facility comes with distinctive challenges, including efficiently managing patients’ appointments and walk-ins, minimizing waiting times, and optimizing the flow of patients throughout the facility. These factors significantly impact the patients’ experience and play a crucial role in achieving positive patient outcomes.
Healthcare facilities need to streamline the patients’ journeys to boost their efficiency and raise the level of care they provide. Innovative Technologies like patient flow management systems can help forward-thinking healthcare providers. This article takes a closer look at these systems and how they can transform healthcare centers.
What is a Patient Flow Management System?
It is a comprehensive solution designed to streamline the patients’ journeys as they navigate from one touchpoint to another within a healthcare facility. With seamless integration, the system efficiently guides patients through various centers and departments, aiming to enhance operational efficiency, reduce waiting times, and ultimately create a stress-free and pleasant patient experience.
The primary objective is to provide improved healthcare service at a faster pace than ever before. In addition to enhancing the patients’ experience, the system also optimizes the utilization of medical professionals' time by eliminating the necessity for healthcare staff to manually manage patients’ visits using physical queues and manual call-outs. The flow management system seamlessly takes over these tasks. Through digital screens and SMS notifications, patients can be efficiently directed to their respective services, allowing staff to focus on patient care.
In addition, patients can easily book their next appointment through automated self-service machines, as well as provide valuable feedback after completing their journey. This added feature facilitates continuous improvement by incorporating patient’s insights and feedback.
How do Patient Flow Management Solutions Work?
The patient journey begins with appointments’ booking, followed by checking-in upon arrival at the hospital or clinic. Patients without prescheduled appointments can use a ticketing kiosk within the healthcare facility to make an appointment.
Using digital signage, the next patient's number is displayed on screens and announced through automated audio announcements. In addition, healthcare providers can advertise their latest services on the screens.
For more convenience, color codes can be displayed on the screens to guide patients to the location of the right clinic, lab, X-ray room, or pharmacy. Patients can easily follow the corresponding colored arrows on the floor, which guide them towards their desired healthcare facility.
Patients can cover all these touchpoints with a single ticket. Furthermore, a modern flow management system can send notifications to a patient’s phone when their test results are ready or when their doctor is available.
On the other hand, a flow management system can incorporate BI dashboards, allowing healthcare facility’s management easy operation of each branch. Key performance indicators (KPIs) such as service quality, utilization, and turnaround time can be tracked, allowing immediate action to be taken when needed. Additionally, a flow system can provide insightful reports, ensuring better resource allocation and strategic planning.
Integrate self-service solutions with your flow management system for an exceptional patient experience
Healthcare facilities can significantly enhance the patient experience through automation. Integrating self-service with patient flow management solutions is only one example. These kiosks help healthcare providers automate routine tasks such as appointment booking, registration, and payment, all contributing towards excellent patient care. Plus, the machines can easily issue tickets to help manage queues.
The self-service kiosk reduces patients’ registration and check-in time from 10-20 minutes to less than a minute, as it is able to instantly check insurance approvals, patient eligibility, and payment requirements, and it ensures proper social distancing in the healthcare facilities.
Patients can use self-service machines to verify their identity and insurance information before being guided to the correct medical professional. Automation frees up valuable time that healthcare staff can use to deliver better patient care.
Top Five Benefits of a Patient Flow Management System
1. Enhancing the Patient Experience
A patient flow management system helps eliminate delays and potential snagging points from patients’ journeys through healthcare facilities. Having just a single ticket streamlines the patient journey from one healthcare facility to another. The result is a better overall patient experience from the beginning to the end of their visit.
2. Increasing Efficiency in Patient Treatments
A more seamless transition from checking into a facility, completing administrative requirements, and performing preliminary screenings improves staff utilization. Healthcare facility teams can focus more on patient care rather than spending a large amount of time in administration.
3. Improving Service Efficiency at Healthcare Centers
Streamlining the patient journey offers multiple benefits for healthcare facilities. This has never been more important than today as the healthcare sector worldwide is facing challenges from unpredictable economic situations to persistent shortages of healthcare workers in many countries.
Running healthcare facilities more efficiently, for example by providing patients with a single ticket for their entire patient journey reduces administrative challenges. At the same time, it also results in an improved patient experience.
4. Limiting Potential Mistakes
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that between 5 and 50% of all medical errors in primary care are administrative errors. One of the most common administrative errors is keeping inaccurate or incomplete patient records, which can become the source of mistakes during treatment.
A comprehensive flow management solution can prevent the occurrence of such mistakes through automation and self-registration.
5. Gaining More Patients
The majority of patients would switch healthcare providers if it was easier to book appointments and receive a quality service. Introducing a flow management system with an online appointment booking app helps you win more patients.
Plus, patients can give feedback about their experience to your facility through the flow system, allowing you to build on your strengths and address weaknesses. Happy patients can also help spread the word about the outstanding treatment they received, resulting in more patients for your organization.
Streamline Patient Flow in Your Healthcare Facility
With so many advantages, the question is less about ‘if’ but rather ‘when’ your facility will implement a patient flow management system. SEDCO’s Patient Experience Management (PEM) system offers one of the most comprehensive solutions currently on the market.
The platform includes a virtual queuing system, self-service kiosks, and a mobile app for e-ticketing and appointment booking. Patients can also arrange virtual meetings and appointments through video calls. Inside the healthcare facility, the SEDCO solution streamlines walk-in and pre-booked patients, ensuring a seamless patient journey.
The patent flow management solution allows healthcare providers to benefit from direct patient feedback to gain invaluable insights into what is working well and where to make improvements. Additionally, positive reviews help build the healthcare facility’s reputation and attract more patients.
SEDCO solution also offers business intelligence tools, allowing healthcare providers to run their organizations more effectively. Reports analyze the facility’s performance over a period of time, and live dashboards monitor real-time performance. Data from all these components are gathered to deliver an actionable business plan to healthcare leaders, allowing them to further optimize business performance.
That is not all – SEDCO solutions can easily integrate with the Health Information System (HIS) your organization is currently using. This means you will not need to replace existing systems. Your team continues to use the tools they are familiar with – only more effectively.
Ready to improve patient journeys, minimize the administrative workload of your staff, and improve overall business performance? Contact our expert team at SEDCO today.
