How to Improve Your Patient Experience and Enhance Your Practice

To improve the efficiency of your medical practice, it’s essential to first identify the factors that are slowing you down and affecting your productivity. Recognizing these obstacles is the key to finding ways to resolve them, and it plays a crucial role in delivering efficient care, improving outcomes, and increasing revenue.

For clarity, we’ve grouped these common inefficiencies into two main categories. The first category is what we call "Administrative Inefficiencies," which refers to issues related to patient check-in, appointment management, scheduling, reimbursement, and other similar administrative tasks. These may differ in nature, but they are all related to the patient visit and can generally be addressed with similar solutions. Efficient patient care doesn’t just rely on improving what happens during the visit, but also on streamlining the entire process. Every minute counts.

The second category is "Documentation Inefficiencies." While tasks like clinical documentation and EHR management are administrative in nature, they are such a significant issue for many practitioners that we believe they deserve their own category and their own solutions. But more on that shortly.

Common Administrative Inefficiencies in Medical Practices

As mentioned earlier, inefficiencies surrounding the patient experience are often more damaging to your practice than you may realize. For example, one study found that patient check-in alone took an average of 8 minutes, mostly due to “long searches for patient names, duplicate insurance tasks, and delays when the nurse assigned to ‘room’ the patient was unavailable.”

If those 8 minutes could be reduced to just 2 minutes, those extra 6 minutes could be spent scheduling follow-ups, collecting copayments, or simply cutting down on employee hours, which would save on overtime. This is just one example of how small disruptions in one part of the process can have a domino effect. Let’s explore some strategies to reduce these inefficiencies and see patients more efficiently.

The Benefits of Online Check-In for Patient Visits

Mobile or kiosk-based check-ins have been shown to cut down patient wait times by as much as 80%. In the example above, implementing an effective online check-in system could reduce that 8-minute check-in time to just 2 minutes, without putting added pressure on staff.

Patient Portals & Secure Messaging

Studies on practices that use patient portals and secure messaging found that they are linked to better patient outcomes, improved doctor-patient relationships, and enhanced health awareness. While the widespread use of these tools is relatively recent, early data supports their positive effects on efficiency.

A study using past data from the Kaiser system found that online patient communication improved performance in HEDIS measures, one of healthcare’s most commonly used performance tools. Researchers believe that these methods can boost continuity of care and strengthen the connection between patients and physicians. Additionally, online communication helps reduce costs related to mailing, billing, and phone follow-ups.

Delegation to Reduce Inefficiencies

Delegation is a powerful strategy for physicians to combat inefficiency. If you’re spending more time on administrative tasks than on patient care, consider delegating. Your expertise is best used in helping patients improve their health, not in managing schedules or collecting payments. Trust your team to handle what they can, freeing you to focus on what matters most: your patients.

Dealing with Clinical Documentation Inefficiencies

While reducing inefficiencies during patient visits can improve the overall experience, many of these solutions only result in small improvements. However, when it comes to seeing patients more efficiently on a daily basis, the biggest challenges are related to clinical documentation and EHRs.

EHR-related tasks consume 30-50% of a physician's workday, with doctors spending an average of 3.5 hours per day on documentation. Therefore, addressing medical documentation issues is key to improving patient visit efficiency.

Improving patient visit efficiency largely depends on streamlining EHR documentation, as it remains a major cause of physician burnout and patient dissatisfaction. Methods to achieve this include using templates, working with your EHR vendor to adopt best practices, hiring a nurse informaticist to optimize workflows, and documenting during patient visits.

However, you’ve likely already tried at least one of these methods in your practice, yet here you are reading this article. It’s not your fault! Reducing the burden of EHR documentation is no simple task. If it were, EHRs wouldn’t continue to be a leading cause of physician burnout.

Outsourcing Documentation/Transcription 

Today, many healthcare providers rely on outsourced documentation services in various forms, including traditional medical scribes, transcriptionists, dictation devices, and speech recognition tools. The goal of all these solutions is to cut down on the time physicians spend documenting. However, in practice, many of these tools don’t work as well as advertised.

For example, with dictation and transcription, providers simply switch from writing notes by hand to dictating them, which doesn’t significantly reduce the cognitive load or the time needed to complete notes.

Automate Your Clinical Notes with Ambient AI

A better approach to improving patient visit efficiency is to completely overhaul the documentation process. At SOAPsuds, our technology uses AI to automate medical note-taking, eliminating the need for physicians to write, dictate, or input notes into their EHR.

With SOAPsuds, all a physician needs to do is record the patient visit using their phone, and we handle the rest. By using speech recognition and a system called “natural language processing,” we extract medically relevant information from the conversation, create the note according to the physician’s preferences, and push it directly into their system.

Physicians can turn away from the computer and focus back on the patient, while SOAPsuds generates the notes for them. Given that physicians spend an average of 3.5 hours per day on documentation, this technology is one of the few tools that can significantly reduce this time. Our partners save up to 3 hours per day on documentation tasks.