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According to Gallup, only 48% of Americans — a new low — rate the quality of healthcare in the country positively. So the majority of patients are not only dissatisfied with healthcare costs and coverage, but also the care itself.

Patient care entails a lot of interconnected pieces that involve everyone and everything the patient interacts with, including technology. To improve patient care, you need to address the entire patient experience, including your operations and team culture. This can involve activities like brainstorming, rewriting SOPs, a commitment from staff, and other exercises that depend on human ideas and performance.

But beyond what humans alone can do are abundant technological resources to automate and simplify improving patient care. This guide outlines what patient care entails, and then outlines tech functionality — in a tool you’re already using — that aligns with optimizing care and outcomes. Together, these features help you enhance patient care, optimize patient outcomes, and ensure better patient engagement.

What is Patient Care?

Ideally, urgent cares focus on patient-centered care, which prioritizes a patient’s individual needs, values, and preferences, and actively involves them in decision-making. It addresses the patient experience, as a whole, through the entire healthcare journey to improve health outcomes:

  • Convenience: Giving patients timely, easy access to medical services, billing, and provider communication
  • Diagnosis: Accurately identifying the patient’s condition
  • Treatment: Applying medical methodologies that best fit not only the diagnosis, but also patient limitations and/or preferences
  • Education: Teaching the patient about their health in a way that the individual understands
  • Documentation: Maintaining thorough, accurate, and accessible patient records
  • Patient Communication: Checking in with the patient after treatment and making it easy for patients to initiate contact; ensuring patients understand what is communicated; providing access to charts and notes
  • Organization: Coordinating care between different services and appointments
  • Emotional support: Providing comfort and empathy

Most urgent cares use EMR/PM systems, and the best systems set you up for success when it comes to patient care and outcomes. Let’s look at what features are most important for these objectives.

EMR/PM Features that Most Directly Impact Patient Care and Optimize Outcomes

A good urgent care operating system will improve workflow so that you’re accurate and efficient. While this contributes greatly to patient care and outcomes, there are capabilities you should look for that more directly improve your ability to treat, diagnose, and communicate with patients.

  • Differential Diagnosis: This is potentially the most directly impactful feature you can use to correctly diagnose. It maintains your suggested diagnosis information and shows additional likely differential diagnoses for selected complaints, so providers are less likely to miss anything, especially those with less experience conducting a differential diagnosis.
  • Visit templates: Providers can use pre-defined templates for documenting patient visits, ensuring consistency and accuracy. It helps in reviewing, documenting, and ordering procedures, labs, and X-rays associated with common complaints, so you can make more accurate decisions faster.
  • Discharge Order Sets: Setting up standard order sets and discharge orders specific to the clinic’s best practice patterns ensures consistent and high-quality care.
  • In-House Dispensing: Dispensing commonly prescribed medications in the clinic provides patients with immediate access to necessary medications, improving satisfaction and outcomes.
  • Carequality Integration: Sharing patient data with other providers in the Carequality network ensures seamless communication and continuity of care.
  • Teleradiology: While this is a separate service, it’s worth mentioning here. The costs and complications of hiring a radiologist have many urgent cares outsourcing overread services. Make sure you’re choosing a partner with consistently near-perfect accuracy and short turnaround times. Getting the right diagnosis as soon as possible has a direct impact on patient care and outcomes.
  • Lab Interfaces: Setting up lab integrations streamlines lab orders and results, reducing wait times and improving the accuracy of lab results, which is crucial for enhancing the overall patient experience and ensuring timely and accurate diagnosis.

If you’re using Experity’s EMR/PM and don’t have functionality listed above, contact your Customer Success Manager. You may be unaware you have a feature, or you might want to review another product tier.

Caring for Patients Through Modern Conveniences and Patient Engagement

Patient care and outcomes depend on more than just diagnosis and treatment. Your EMR/PM should also provide a wealth of capabilities that give patients a better experience and/or give staff and providers a greater ability to deliver better care. Additionally, the more patients are engaged, the better their outcomes. Here are some features that address these goals.

  • Complaint-Driven Charting Logic and Built-In Coding Engine: Pre-built, complaint-driven logic allows you to chart 80% of the most common urgent care center visits in < 60 seconds with fewer clicks, which means spending less time on administrative tasks and more time with patients.
  • Real-time Insurance Verification: Verifying insurance coverage information during registration informs patients of potential costs and allows for the collection of copays before they leave the clinic, reducing financial surprises and enhancing the overall patient experience.
  • Credit Card on File Functionality: Securely saving patients’ credit card information and automatically charging their card when a balance is due provides a convenient payment option, reducing financial stress and improving patient satisfaction.
  • Online Bill Pay: Provides patients with a convenient way to pay their bills online improves their overall experience and patient engagement.
  • SMS Patient Balance Reminders: Providing patient balance reminders via text message helps ensure timely payment of outstanding balances, reducing financial stress for patients and boosting satisfaction and engagement.
  • Electronic Prescribing (eRX): Healthcare providers can write, send, and manage prescriptions electronically, improving patient satisfaction by better educating patients on their diagnosis and providing a care plan that can be printed directly from the chart.
  • EPCS/PDMP: Prescribe controlled substances electronically and in compliance with DEA regulations, with access to prescription drug monitoring information, ensuring safe and effective medication management.
  • Patient Portal: Gives patients convenient online access to their health records, including visit history, problem history, vitals history, lab results, and more, empowers them to take an active role in their healthcare, improving engagement and outcomes.
  • Business Intelligence: Increase operational efficiency, patient care, and financial performance with actionable insights and comprehensive analytics crucial for optimizing patient outcomes and ensuring better patient care.

By leveraging these features and focusing on patient-centered care, urgent care centers can optimize patient outcomes and the patient experience.

Arm Yourself With Patient Care Tools the Easy Way

If your EMR/PM is not up to par on helping you deliver the best patient care and outcomes, take a look at Experity. We make it easy to transition so that you can be more effective and efficient quickly. But don’t take our word for it. Here’s what a former NextGen customer said

See what else our EMR/PM, purpose-built for urgent care, can do for your staff and clinic.

Check out the EMR    See How Experity Compares

 

 

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