Posted by What is Stress?
The body’s response to a problem or obligation is stress. Everyone is subject to stress, which can be driven by various situations ranging from little irritations to big life changes such as divorce or job loss. Physical components of the stress response include increased heart rate and blood pressure, thoughts and personal ideas about the stressful experience and emotions such as fear and rage.
Stress in healthcare staff and its solution
In healthcare offices, front desk staff, healthcare providers, paramedical staff, and nurses are porn to stress because of continuous patient dealings, emergency treatments, deaths, etc. The back-office staff of the healthcare offices are subject to stress. They have to manage paperwork for the claims submissions, recording, scrubbing claims, audit, resubmission of denied claims, etc. Stress affects the operational capability, concentration level, and moods while affecting the overall efficiency of the worker.
A healthy, relaxed team is capable of contributing to their full potential. To minimize the stress level of the staff around your healthcare entity, you can adopt upgraded AI tools and Systems like EHR software etc.
Healthcare staff can be splinted into three sections:
- Front desk staff: Front desk staff is vulnerable to more stress because they have to face not only patients but their attendants as well. Every new patient interacts with your front desk staff. They have to discuss financial as well as healthcare related queries with them. Front desk staff must be trained to meet the requirement of customer dealing. You can aid your staff by providing them with AI-tools and software to record data properly and speed up there process.
- Physicians, Specialists, Care providers, nurses: Physicians take stress for right diagnosis. Secondly, if a specialist is unable to diagnose some specific disease, he may consult to others. In some cases a panel of specialists discuss the disease symptoms in presence of medical reports. An EHR with physician portals can connect multiple specialists working in different parts of the world.
- Back Office staff (Accounts, financial management staff, auditors): Back Office staff is responsible for financial management, account receivables, streamlined revenue cycle management, claims management, submission/resubmission of claims etc. Back office staff has to prepare salaries and pay other office expenses. By providing EHR software to back office staff will help them in report generating, data analysis. The automated system saves their time and energy. It will also help them to identify any mistake before claims submissions. After claims submission these software help them to rectify the issues at the earliest making resubmission and claims scrubbing easier. You can also hire a medical billing company to support your back office staff or you can replace your back office staff with it.
EHR helps all sections of the staff in the following terms
Streamlining workflow
An EHR streamlines workflow and increases your efficiency. It ensures the automated record inflows. For example, data recorded at the front desk or information of the appointment recorded at the front desk is promptly forwarded to the respective physician or the care provider. An alert message is also delivered to physicians. This information inflow helps manage appoints and reduces the patient hustle and bustle in the healthcare entity. Physicians suggest the medication, medical tests etc. EHR generates an automated bill. This bill appears on the system of the cashier or is forwarded to the accounts office for claims submission.
The whole process is completed with the completion of the patient’s visit.
Automated Process Management
EHR automates alerts, delivers information to individual staff, and generates reports. So, there is no stress for front desk staff to send appointment reminders or payment reminders. It also helps manage patient appointments and reduces patients’ waiting times.
Reduces Human Errors
EHR reduces human errors because automated reports are generated based on the data input. The software or systems identify the omissions or errors that help rectify the error on the spot.
Decreases administrative costs
EHR reduces, Transcription costs, overstaffing and infrastructural costs. EHR helps staff members to focus on the value-added services for the patients.
Aiding Pharmacists and Pharmacies
EHR generates Electronic prescriptions (e-prescribing) that enable direct communication between physicians and pharmacies. E-prescriptions reduce readmissions and confirmation calls of the pharmacists to physicians because it helps pharmacists check drug instructions. EHR helps physicians by giving multiple medicine options (prerecorded in the software); they can choose the best among them and add in the prescription. The prescription is either emailed (end to end encrypted), printed, or made available on the personalized user ID. The e-prescription helps patients and pharmacists to read easily.
Multiple healthcare providers
EHR increases the level of communication among different healthcare providers, labs etc. The patient and physicians can access this record anytime and from anywhere. Previous health records of the patient help physician in better decision making and healthcare outcomes. The physician can share the record of complicated diseases with multiple specialists, which increases the ability to diagnose better. It is also satisfying for the patient because he feels personalized care.
Increases billing collections
EHR helps care providers to meet mandatory requirements. It helps billing staff submit claims on time and complete the process within a specific time frame. It reduces the time frame of claim submissions and resubmission, helping to avoid penalties. It increases readability as handwritten documents maybe not be easy to read or understand. Hence, EHR gives relief to accounting staff by supporting them with no errors and many automated generated reports.
Zero-Level Duplication.
The EHR records complete information of the patients in one place. It helps to reduce duplication of data, medical tests or medical procedures. EHR is designed to notify any duplicate data and stopovers the duplicate entry. It is easy for billing staff to generate accurate bills when there is no duplication.
Enhances care quality.
EHR performs most of the extra tasks, freeing care providers to focus on their core responsibility, “Patient care”. EHR enables your healthcare entity to meet the mandates of the Quality Payment Program, MIPS or MACRA.
Last Words
Deploying EHR software, tools and AI to your office to assist your staff helps your staff work with ease and effectively.