Building Your Urgent Care Playbook to Improve Patient-Centered Care

Despite the advancements in convenience and accessibility, patients are reporting extreme dissatisfaction with healthcare – not only around costs and coverage, but the care itself. Quality patient care is a goal of every urgent care clinic, so what needs to be done to give patients what they want and deserve?

Every facet of your business and everyone involved in a visit contributes to the overall quality of care. For example, if your workflow is inefficient, that can result in patients having a longer wait (major pain point,) and providers feeling too rushed to spend enough time with patients.

To take a broader look at patient care, we refer to a JUCM article about creating the ideal patient experience written by Alan Ayers, Urgent Care Consultants President. He notes that building an urgent care playbook around “a consistent, scalable, repeatable, measurable, and predictable operating model” can help clinics put best practices in place to deliver the best care possible. It revolves around three main ideas:

1. Operational Excellence
2. Patient Experience
3. Engaged and Empowered Employees

Organizing your approach to care around these three interconnected pillars can help simplify your strategy to make improvements. Let’s look at each idea and some basic tactics to make them work.

1.    Operational Excellence

Ayers notes: “For operational excellence, this means the center’s operating philosophy and culture should be centered around improving workflows that boost patient throughput, eliminating unnecessary administrative burdens for providers and staff and identifying and correcting errors, friction points, and bottlenecks at every opportunity—all of which are built upon a set of highly optimized processes.”

Here are a few key elements to work on.

Preventative Culture

Staff should be trained to spot and fix potential problems before they happen. For example, making sure claims are submitted correctly the first time can directly impact revenue by avoiding the need for rework. Similarly, double-checking patient information during registration can prevent costly denied claims. Overall, the goal should be to get it right the first time in all clinical and administrative tasks. Consistently reinforcing the importance of accuracy and prevention helps it becomes a core part of the company culture.

Continuous Improvement

Regularly evaluating and refining processes can enhance efficiency and quality. Three effective ways to identify what needs improving are:

• Leveraging performance data from your EMR/PM
• Soliciting feedback from front-line staff who interact with patients daily
• Consistently asking patients for feedback

Inventory and Labor Management

Having the appropriate supplies available when needed, and right-sizing staff positions you to deliver better care, but regulating these controllable costs can also help you reduce expenses. In the end, that could help you afford new equipment, training, or staff to treat more patients in more ways.

According to Ayers, leading medical supply houses offer inventory management systems for free or a nominal cost, allowing “the center to reduce supply expenses by creating a formulary of pre-approved items, preventing staff and providers from ordering expensive, unnecessary supplies.”

Similarly, aligning staffing levels with patient volume trends and cross-training employees to handle multiple roles can optimize labor costs and ensure efficient use of resources. Learn how to optimize your staff and reduce excess labor costs in Urgent Care Staffing: Models, Tips, and Strategies for Optimal Returns (no form required.)

2.    Patient Experience

While a part of patient care, the patient experience includes every touchpoint in the patient journey from your Google listing to billing and follow-up. Today, the majority of this is related to technology. If you want tips around the types of technology that helps improve patient care and patient outcomes, read A Technical Guide to Improving Patient Care and Outcomes in Urgent Care >>

Ayers made note of a few ways to improve the patient experience.  These were still considered newer at the time of Ayers’s writing, but today they are must-haves.

Online Reservation and Registration

Offering online reservation and registration options can significantly reduce wait times and improve the overall patient experience. These systems allow patients to reserve their spot and register their information online, leading to more predictable and efficient operations. Additionally, managing patient flow and staff scheduling through online systems can enhance operational efficiency.

Text Communication

Patients want and expect to receive information about wait times, lab results, and appointment reminders through their phone. They also want billing to be easy, and initiating conversation to be hassle-free.  Using tools that text updates on wait times, payment reminders/links, and also feedback surveys provides more convenience for patients, and more trust and loyalty for you.

Patient Satisfaction Rounding

Staff should provide regular in-person updates on wait times to patients in the waiting room or lobby. This can make the wait feel much more tolerable. As a rule, do this every ten minutes or less.

Financial Transparency

As far as surprises go, owing more than you expect for healthcare is among the worst. Patients are extremely frustrated by the lack of transparency around costs, insurance coverage, and other financial obligations. Do what you can to simplify and be very up front about costs the patient will encounter. Ayers says, “to that end, the center can help facilitate clean financial transactions by employing real-time insurance verification to determine patient responsibility, and digital tools such as credit card preauthorization to ensure collection of the patient’s obligation at the time of service.”

3.    Engaged and Empowered Employees

The success of any organization depends on the quality and commitment of its people. They’re the ones who carry out daily processes, determining the overall success of the urgent care business and a large part of the patient experience. Here are some practical tips to keep your staff motivated, engaged, and empowered.

Create a Bottoms-up Culture

Empowering employees to share their ideas and opinions fosters a sense of ownership and involvement. Millennials, who make up a significant portion of today’s workforce, thrive in a bottoms-up culture where everyone has a voice. Encouraging suggestions and involving employees in decision-making processes helps show them how their work contributes to success and helps them buy into your goals and processes.

Employee Engagement Through KPIs

When team members understand key performance indicators (KPIs) and their personal impact on the business, they feel a greater sense of ownership for their roles. Successful teams often write their main KPIs on a whiteboard and review them in team huddles. This leads to discussions, brainstorming, and teamwork to improve patient care and service delivery. They also use “mini-games” to set goals and challenge themselves, which boosts motivation and enthusiasm in tracking and improving key metrics.

Employee Rewards and Recognition

Recognizing and rewarding employees for their achievements is essential for maintaining motivation and loyalty. Simple gestures like gift cards or team lunches, as well as salary increases and bonuses tied to performance, can make employees feel valued. A culture of gratitude, where employees are regularly appreciated for their work, leads to happier staff who are more likely to provide excellent patient care.

Everything you do for and within your business trickles down to the patient in one way or another. When you take care of your patients, you take care of your business and vice versa. And if you need help with some aspect of your business to achieve your goals — efficiency, patient engagement, billing, teleradiology, or business intelligence —  you can quickly see how Experity compares to competitors by visiting this page.