Optimizing your patient access teams for remarkable efficiency
Thousands of healthcare organizations are stuck in the “Staffing Trap”: Unable to grow without hiring new staff, but unable to afford to hire and train that new staff—or unable to find candidates. They're in limbo, and without additional patient access resources, there's seemingly no way out.
For your organization to grow without investing in more staff—aka, to scale—you must enhance the efficiency of your current staff. Enhancing the efficiency of your current staff requires conquering Clinical Combinatorics—the deep complexity that comes with scheduling medical appointments—which we discuss in more detail below.
Beating Clinical Combinatorics will empower you to scale, and it will optimize all components of your patient access operation. This means you're in store for a cornucopia of wonderful things: successful revenue cycle management, rejuvenated patient satisfaction, happy physicians, and motivated staffers.
Many healthcare organizations get ensnared in the Staffing Trap because they rely on tedious manual processes and tribal knowledge to navigate Clinical Combinatorics. But it's impossible to perform at optimal levels if your organization depends on manual workflows and tribal knowledge. The only way to beat Clinical Combinatorics is to automate your workflows.
The EHR Delusion & Blue-chip Blues
Like many healthcare providers, you may have already tried to automate aspects of your patient access operation using your EHR platform or blue-chip technologies from outside of healthcare. These are false solutions that never work. Legacy EHR platforms, despite what they insist, have severely limited scheduling capabilities, which means they can only automate a tiny percentage, usually around 2%, of appointments. And blue-chip technologies from outside of healthcare lack the security features needed to satisfy healthcare's complex web of regulatory protocols.
There's a reason why so many healthcare organizations put blind faith in these ineffective patient access solutions. It's because of the relentless marketing of legacy industry behemoths, who need to convince healthcare organizations they can do everything to justify their high prices. This American Access Disparity means economy-class organizations get the shaft, and legacy EHR companies profit from the economy class’s misery.
Keona Health has developed a new way: the Patient Access Model. The Patient Access Model is a blueprint for transformation. It attacks Clinical Combinatorics at its source.
The cause of your staff’s inefficiency: Clinical Combinatorics
Clinical Combinatorics is the tornado of variables that swirl around each patient's case. These variables lead to endless possible combinations of decisions for your staff to consider. It’s like playing a high-speed chess game where each move could mean life or death.
For instance, let’s say a woman calls with a list of scary symptoms: shortness of breath, chest pain, dizziness. Your staff has only a few minutes to ask the right questions, analyze the patient’s health records, determine potential diagnoses, weigh risks of each, settle on a recommendation, document it properly, update her digital records, coordinate with her physicians, and schedule an appointment. But the complexity doesn’t stop there. Your staffers must also ensure their decisions align with policies, satisfy HIPAA regulations, and adhere to the latest medical science. Each patient brings a new layer of complexity for your staff to unravel.
Only highly-trained, well-paid professionals can navigate Clinical Combinatorics effectively, yet demand for their skills far outstrips supply. It’s nearly impossible to hire and train staff fast enough to keep up, let alone to grow.
Clinical Combinatorics doesn’t only prevent you from hiring new staff; it also leads to burnout among your current staff, which means sky-high turnover rates. Time and money that could be spent improving care instead go to continual recruitment and re-training. It’s a nightmarish cycle.
The solution: AutomatedFlow
To scale, you must make your staff more productive and less likely to burnout. AutomatedFlow accomplishes both of these feats.
AutomatedFlow describes an AI-driven call support system that streamlines each patient interaction. It reacts in real-time to guide your staff to the best decisions. Think of AutomatedFlow as a “Healthcare GPS” that points staff and patients to the right choices. For example, when a patient calls with shortness of breath and chest pain, AutomatedFlow would prompt your staffers to get critical details, call 911, and alert the patient’s cardiologist.
AutomatedFlow aggregates data from:
- Patient 360 (patient medical histories)
- Provider 360 (physician information)
- Practice 360 (practice variations)
AutomatedFlow analyzes data from these sources in real-time to ensure high quality care for every patient. With AutomatedFlow, staff can handle 25%-50% more calls per hour, and training time falls by 70%. Patients experience shorter wait times, decreased callbacks, and better outcomes thanks to accurate triage and resource coordination. Staff feel less overwhelmed by complexity and more empowered to focus on compassionate care, which reduces burnout and turnover.
Case studies show AutomatedFlow benefits healthcare organizations of all sizes by relieving the administrative and cognitive burden on staff. The result is a sustainable solution for scaling quality patient care, among many other benefits:
- Liberation to focus on your patients rather than on your processes.
- Amplified productivity and improved revenue cycle management.
- Optimized management of patient information and medical records.
- Stronger data integrity thanks to a more integrated patient access system.
Final thoughts
In the end, every provider aims for the same goal: to meet patients where they are with the best care possible. For most, this vision is limited by operational realities, not ambition. But now, collective will is poised to overcome systemic barriers through solutions designed not just for healthcare as it is, but for healthcare as it should be.
The future remains unwritten. Scale, efficiency, and quality do not have to remain mutually exclusive. Your vision does not have to remain constrained. There are solutions to achieve growth without sacrificing compassion or community. Through purpose-built platforms, healthcare is prepared to reach new heights of access, excellence, and sustainability.
Are you ready to transform complexity into strategic advantage and join the future?
To learn more about innovative patient access techniques and staffing strategies ==>
