Blog Who decides how your clinic operates: your software or you?
Plato is a flexible, template based software – you manage Plato, it doesn’t manage your clinic. There are a lot of choices to make when deciding how you want your clinic to run. In this article, we will address two choices:
- Managing your patients’ first impressions: what happens to the patient before they arrive at the clinic.
- Patient record management: How you take and organize your notes
1) Managing your patients’ first impressions
Before your patient even sees a doctor at your clinic, they begin forming an impression of what their patient care experience will be like. If they experience long wait times, they may feel frustrated before even seeing a doctor or nurse. Conversely, if they enter a beautifully decorated clinic, that may put them more at ease.
Software can help set patient expectations. Before a patient arrives, do they have to call to book an appointment, or can they set an appointment on a calendar embedded in your website? The latter may be more convenient for a lot of patients.
Plato also helps you reduce admin work and wait times during patient registration, giving patients a better experience. Your clinic can send patients an electronic pre-registration form, which they can complete before entering the clinic. Or patients can self-register at the clinic on arrival. Both of these options save your staff from doing data entry work, and also reduce the patient’s wait time to see you. Of course, some patients prefer paper registration forms, and Plato lets you manage that too.
2) Patient record management
Many software dictate how a doctor or clinic should organize and take casenotes – they don’t let doctors decide where and how casenotes should be viewed. The Plato team believes that doctors should choose how casenotes are organized and recorded. First, you choose in what folders you want to record notes, results, and other information. If you want all investigations to be in a common folder, you can do that. Otherwise, if you want them split into separate folders you can manage that too.
Second, input notes your way. There are a lot of different files created during the course of patient care – images, scans, results, writing, maybe even audio/video. Plato lets you save all of these files to the secure cloud. Moreover, Plato lets you input casenotes your way – you can write/draw notes electronically, type, use speech to text (talk and have Plato transcribe for you), or save audio/visual consults. As a doctor, it matters that you choose how to manage your patients’ records, because you will be the one reviewing files and looking for trends, concerns, and solutions. Shouldn’t your software enable that process?
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November 23, 2017