Patient Communicator - Helping make doctors more efficient
Patient Communicator handles all the incoming requests to an office - prescription requests, appointments, lab requests, referrals, and regular communications. On the surface, some of this is quite similar to other services, such as Practice Fusion, but only on paper. Our implementation is unique, as Patient Communicator was built from the perspective of a doctor doing all secretarial work himself. What does that mean? Every single task has been analyzed, hacked and re-engineered to be as efficient as possible. What takes maybe 3-5 minutes on other services would take mere seconds in Patient Communicator. We assume you have no staff and therefore reduce the number of clicks/dropdowns/data entry to an absolute minimum.
Let's look at how we schedule appointments. Patient Communicator provides patients with a login. They log in, see exactly what slots are available, what types of appointments (15 min follow up, 45 min general exam, whatever the doctor specifies), and other info.  They set the appointment themselves. Â
On the doctor portal, you'll see this as a simple request and can act on it with a single click 'approve' or deny, and in one screen we've put all the relevant info.  So if the patient requests a 15 min but you know they need a 30 min for other reasons, you can edit that. Clicking "approve" automatically adds that appointment into the calendar, logs the request, emails the patient that the request has been approved, and queues a preset reminder to be sent out via email and/or SMS just before the appointment. One click.
Prescriptions are similarly efficient.  I log in and renew 3 prescriptions. (The patient portal is just as quick for patients to use. No long forms to fill out. Things are intelligently laid out so there is minimal data entry - and therefore fewer mistakes made - by the patient).
On the doctor portal, you'll see that I am requesting certain prescriptions as well as pharmacy information that I have filled out. Â You'll have my insurance information as well, all in one screen. Â You'll fill those Rxs the way you normally do (we plan to integrate with SureScripts so it is one step), and then you click 'approve' and it again logs that the prescription was made, it emails the patient that the prescription was filled, and removes that outstanding task from the list of incoming requests.
This just scratches the surface of what Patient Communicator can tackle. We've built a robust and flexible system that can work well in a variety of offices.
While we don't have integrations with an official EMR or billing program, we more than make up for those minor inefficiencies (where you might have to refer to another system to do something) by freeing up huge amounts of time in 1 click task completions on the communication end. Â
The single biggest benefit you'll get will probably be a > 50% reduction in phone calls.  No other system attempts to curb that the way ours does.  My father's practice went from 150 calls/day down to about 30-50 . These calls constitute patients with urgent calls or the 30% of his practice who are not tech savvy enough to use the website.
My father gets his labs from the web and fills prescriptions via the Quest website. He has a makeshift EMR which is basically just MS word docs and Acrobat PDFs - we created it for free in 1999 (and even wrote an article about it) so we are way ahead of the EMR crowd in understanding how to integrate and improve efficiencies. Â It could be better, but the new EMRs are generally filled with tedious dropdowns and are not built for speed.
Healthcare and medical software is built for traditional offices with traditional staff. That's a recipe for poorly optimized software.
My father uses a billing program called EZ Claim that he paid less than $100 for and pays a modest monthly fee of about $60 to a clearinghouse to process the claims. Â From doing his own billing for the last few years he has gotten the time down to only 3 hours per week. Compare those numbers to billing services that eat up 3-7% of your gross, or a relic of the past: full-time billing staff!
For this and many other reasons, you generally don't want everything to be fully integrated under one umbrella company because systems change and it's important to be nimble and update as innovations are made. That's been our mantra for a decade and it's worked out well. Â
By the way, we all cope quite easily with tons of non-integrated stuff all the time - websites, for one. Â Email and calendars are not integrated. Â But it doesn't take more than a few seconds to go from one window to another.
That said, of course certain integrations make a lot of sense, such as prescriptions. But that won't save huge amounts of time above the gains already realized with the base Patient Communicator features.
Focus on improving operational efficiencies and the rest will follow. It worked for my father's office - better than I think even he could have imagined.
Six Reasons Why Your Doctor's Office Doesn't Call You Back and a Few Solutions (managemypractice.com)
Signs that your practice is ready for EMR (kevinmd.com)
A Family Physician's EMR Experience (thehealthcareblog.com)
EMR and the Falling Patient (thehealthcareblog.com)
How to improve patient satisfaction with electronic records (kevinmd.com)
Prevent Medical Errors With Health Records (everydayhealth.com)
EHR and the solo primary care physician (kevinmd.com)
How Many Staff Do You Need in a Medical Practice? (managemypractice.com)
"Physicians vs. Health IT: The EMR Culture War" written by: Dr. Michael Koriwchak (listahit.wordpress.com)
