How to Save Clinical Hours? Top Practical Ways to Be Productive Doctors

3 years ago

I grew up seeing my family doctor always busy with patients and documents. 

On one nice day, I finally gathered the courage to ask him, are you actually busy or is it something wrong with the impression I have for you? 

He looked straight at me and nodded, I am actually busy. All doctors are always busy.  

I took a while to reply to him Oh! I see. Then there must be a problem with your profession, not with you! 

Being a doctor is the task of dignity. But being a productive doctor is a task of choice. You need to have a firm choice on being a productive doctor and see almost double of patients you are seeing now on an average day. 

Benefits? Well, there will be 2 game-changing benefits of every doctor being a productive doctor. 

1. You will make more money. 

2. There will be less wait time in the Canadian healthcare system. 

But the question is how to be a productive doctor. 

Here are a few practical productivity tips for doctors from a healthcare IT expert who has helped Canadian physicians save 100000+ clinical hours in the last 7 years. 

Our other very interesting healthcare resources:

How to be a productive doctor? Solid yet easy productivity tips for doctors

“Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.” - Franz Kafka 

1. Execute your day smartly

The majority of doctors face several unpredictable scenarios every day. They never know how busy they would get the next moment. 

They also have to manage several extra things other than patient care. Among all this chaos, they always have to find time to see a patient. 

If they get busy in patient care and forget any administrative work, things get worse and they have to put more time and effort into damage control. 

To avoid trapping in such situations, doctors need to have their whole day plan on a screen. All patient appointments coming from multiple sources must be accessible from a single dashboard.  

They must receive automatic reminders for upcoming appointments. They must be able to execute entire clinical workflows without missing out on any step. 

If there is a no-show from a patient, doctors must be informed priorly and the system must adjust those appointment hours with other appointments. 

In short, doctors must not keep their day plan and SOP for executing patient care and administrative work in mind, but in a smart digital system to not forget anything, to not achieve a task the wrong way and to not confuse with a pile of other tasks and appointments. 

2. Onboard patients faster

A slower patient onboarding results in poor patient experience and patients spending more unnecessary time in your clinic. And the more time they spend in your clinic, the fewer patients you can see in a given time. 

To quickly onboard patients, you have to adopt technology that enables patients to fill out all patient forms online and add insurance details before even visiting your clinic. 

Whatever data patients add online automatically gets reflected on doctors’ EMR or dashboard. Meaning, there is no need for patients to manually fill out forms while sitting in the waiting room and no need for clinic’s staff or doctors to make data entry of patients’ records in their EMR or dashboard. 

3. Reduce wait time at your clinic/hospital

More patients sitting in a waiting room means the busier you are. To productively see the patients, you need to reduce the wait time.  Or in other words, you need to see more patients in a given time to reduce the wait time. 

Quick patient onboarding is the one way to quickly onboard and see the patient. Another solid way is to implement a virtual waiting room. A virtual waiting room is a game-changing concept and can reduce the wait time significantly. 

Here, patients while on the way to the clinic or even from their home can virtually check in to the clinic and join the virtual waiting list. 

And a patient gets notified digitally when it is his turn to see a doctor. This way, doctors can reduce their ideal time between their patient A and patient B and eventually see more patients in a given time. 

4. Treat patients with mild symptoms using telemedicine

Needless to say, virtual care is more rapid, comfortable and easy than in-person visits for both patients and doctors. 

Doctors using a telemedicine platform can easily treat patients having mild symptoms as telemedicine platforms are built specifically for that purpose. Doctors can access patient’s clinical data, write ePrescription, write medical notes and even write referral notes. 

Doctors have to manage almost zero data when there is an appointment for virtual care as while booking appointments, patients need to share insurance details and doctors can easily share patient intake forms which patients have to fill before joining the virtual care.

This way, doctors have nothing to do extra than providing quality virtual care. And by freeing up doctors from data management and administrative work, we can make them more productive! 

Building a custom telemedicine app can be a costly choice for doctors as it costs more than $90000. So here, a white-label telemedicine platform is the most value-for-money tech platform for doctors with full-code ownership and branding. 

5. Spend less time in clinical collaboration, diagnosis and patient engagement 

To achieve the highest level of quality care, doctors often need to collaborate with other clinicians, spend more time diagnosing, and constantly keep in touch with patients to engage them in their patient care cycle.  

Each of these processes is time-consuming and tedious for doctors if it is not executed the right way. 

For instance, if two doctors decide to collaborate on call, they cannot access clinical data and they cannot share it on a shared screen and discuss care plans. 

So to reduce the time spent in clinical collaboration, doctors must use a dedicated clinical collaboration platform that facilitates doctors to collaborate with other clinicians from the mobile phone and share clinical data in real-time. 

Same way, doctors can utilize the clinical decision support system to receive help with diagnosis and medication plans. 

For patient engagement, doctors can use a dedicated patient engagement tool to keep connected with patients while the tool sends reminders for medicines, diet, workouts and shares custom medical resources with patients. 

We can help you save hours and efforts using cutting-edge healthcare technologies 

We are an Ontario-based healthcare-focused IT company - has been serving healthcare providers in Canada and the USA for more than 7 years. 

We accommodate healthcare app developers, designers, business analysts and compliance specialists who have been working on healthcare IT projects since the first day of their professional careers. 

All of our team members share the same vision - help healthcare providers with technology to help patients and our country! 

If you are planning to build a healthcare IT product in the form of software, mobile app or web app to save your time and efforts, we can help you with documentation, workflows, UI/UX, development, compliance, QA, pilot and launch. 

And if you don’t have any solution but only clinical & administrative problems, we can brilliantly find the best tech-enabled solution for you and execute it with Canadian quality of work and the American quality of innovation.