Future Health's Interconnectivity Paves the Way towards a Happier Staff

Maintaining a happy staff is vital to having a successful practice. These hardworking, dedicated individuals make the difference between surviving practices and successful ones. Without them, practices would not only fail to attract new clients and keep their regulars, but they would ultimately fall pray to their overwhelming workload. With patient loads continually increasing, the amount of work placed upon each staff member becomes greater every day. The time requirement necessary to complete the work has many of these hardworking individuals feeling overwhelmed and underappreciated. In order to cure this widespread epidemic is it crucial for practices who which to continue thriving, to embrace the remarkable power of digital integration. An integrated system, like Future Health promises to provide your staff with significantly less paperwork and fewer wasteful work redundancies; therefore eliminating wasteful clinic management.

Your Staff has Needs in Order to become Productive
A productive staff has specific requirements that need to be met if they are to remain an integral part of your practice. Human Resource experts point out that in order to have high staff morale, staff members must feel the following about their job: personal responsibility, opportunities for upward mobility and receive recognition for their abilities. What they want more than anything else is to have their work be meaningful.

Your Staff has Obstacles preventing their Productivity
The largest of these obstacles stems from too much paperwork. If physicians are feeling the pressures of tons of paperwork, think about the demands being placed upon their staff. An overwhelming workload is counterproductive to maintaining a happy staff. Future Health provides a documentation module which supplies a variety of benefits to help decrease the meaningless workload and allows staff to hone in on more meaningful areas.

This position is supported by a large study published in the Journal of Allied Health,1 which examined the changing attitudes of nurses and occupational therapists who graduated in the late 1980s and mid-1990s. While many showed a high degree of job satisfaction, most agreed that the health care system was becoming inefficient and were burdened by larger workloads and more paperwork. Respondents who were unhappy said workload and paperwork were key elements in their dissatisfaction. The authors draw the conclusion that increased workloads and burnout seem to stop workers from achieving the very things that normally would satisfy them about a job: a sense of achievement and worth.

You have Options for Improving Productivity & Staff Morale
If you are going to lighten your staff's paperwork load, you have three options: hire more staff, reduce your patients or develop better clinic management. Of the three possible options, the third appears to be the most promising and cost effective. By adopting the electronic health records module by Future Health, you not only create a paperless office but ensure your staff will discover new meaning to their work.

Problems with Current Paper-run Clinics
There are two major dilemmas with trying to maintain a paper office: repetition and coordination. Repeated tasks, the more times they occur, soon lose all meaning to the staff members. Coordination becomes a problem when trying to organize the various parts of a practice; specifically with patient's care before, during and after a visit. These two issues rob your personnel of everything they love about their jobs.

The Solution: Horizontal & Vertical Integration
The permanent solution to both of these factors would be to eliminate the redundancy of tasks and improve upon the coordination between the departments. The best solution in achieving both of these is to utilizing Future Health's Virtual Office Suite (VOS) to provide your practice with both vertical and horizontal integration.

Horizontal Integration
Horizontal integration is the ability of your departments to talk to each other. It allows you and your staff access to every step of your patient's movement through your practice, from the time they first schedule an appointment until the time they're billed for their care. While it sounds complicated, the concept behind this coordination is simple. The concept is called interconnectivity.

Paperwork involves redundancy and discord because it lacks interconnectivity. Take for example, the simple task of double-checking a patient record. Let's say it is to see if your rehab exercise instructor spoke with a patient about modifying their ADLs or therapeutic activities, and if billing actually filed a claim for the service. Without horizontal integration, this single task is extremely time-costly.

First, your office manager retrieves the patient's file from storage and then locates the date in question and the therapeutic modifications involved. Next, the manager will find the staff trainer to ask them if a printout of take-home exercises were given to the patient. The next stop is in the patient's financial file to see if the billings department coded and filed a claim that included services rendered in therapeutic modifications.

Instead of consulting just one integrated source, the manager had to consult with three different sources. Each consultation involved re-filing paper records, opening and closing separate software programs, and manually coordinating the information within.

Now imagine if the task was to double-check not one patient, but 20 patients; and not for one visit, but for a series of visits spanning over three weeks. The time invested in this task would be huge and would take away from other more important tasks.

With Future Health Software implemented your practice, you could utilize true horizontal integration and achieve this kind of task in a few seconds  all thanks to a central VOS source of clinic data. This data is easily accessed and grouped according to multiple search parameters. This allows tasks to be accomplished efficiently and effectively.

With horizontal integration, more meaningful work is possible because staff work in unison and anticipate the needs of the doctor's treatment plan. No longer are they stuck playing catch-up always staggering three steps behind the doctor. Now staff has more time to focus on other tasks and improve their practice's bottom-line.

Vertical Integration
Vertical integration is the ability of all departments to communicate with outside data sources. Communication can occur between different devices, like digital inclinometers and the doctor's SOAP notes, and between storage devices, like digital X-rays to the patient's file. Consider how this would affect the efficiency of your billing department; they would know about the completion of tests and exams instantly.

Happy Staff Makes a Happy Practice
When paper workload is improved by using Future Health Software, staff can do what they do best: help the clients. You have provided them the ultimate tool to manage your practice. They can feel helpful and earn recognition for their outstanding abilities.

As quality and size of workload are critical to job satisfaction, a digital management like Future Health will improve your staff's outlook. Staff morale can make all the difference in how patients experience and perceive your practice. All it takes is the integration of the digital software by Future Health to transform those monotonous piles of paperwork into an opportunity for a new kind of truly meaningful work.

Reference
Lyons KJ, Lapin J, Young B. A study of job satisfaction of nursing and allied health graduates from a mid-Atlantic university. Journal of Allied Health, 2003;32(1):10-7.