Healthcare work presents a unique set of challenges as well as some universal ones (like labor shortages). A lot of the time, healthcare workers see the same patients regularly, making long-term care an essential aspect of any medical business.
Healthcare is also a constantly developing field, where new understandings of and approaches to various kinds of treatment completely alter the industry. A good healthcare administrator or business manager is aware of emerging trends and ways to streamline the patient experience.
Medical businesses need to be mindful of:
Data privacy
Your healthcare business will receive, process, and work with very sensitive information. Patient medical records are highly confidential and it’s damaging if they’re compromised, both for patient peace of mind and because it will make future treatments more difficult.
Additionally, confidentiality is a requirement for anyone practicing medicine, meaning that data breaches can actually violate regulations. As a healthcare professional, you need to ensure that patient and administrative data is secure at all times.
Technology trends
A number of new technologies can improve patient experience and care quality. Simple things like online booking and check-in make the bureaucracy of arranging appointments easier and encourage more people to choose you as their healthcare provider.
When it comes to quality of care, electronic records allow you to stay on top of patient needs much more easily. Digitally generated patient care forms like SOAP notes are consistently formatted, clear for both patient and physician, and easy to store for future visits. Conducting patient interviews with a checklist also ensures you don’t skip over any important questions.
Regulatory compliance
In addition to data confidentiality regulations, numerous other laws exist to prevent fraud, data misuse, and protect both patients and providers. For example, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requires any Medicare-participating hospital offering emergency services to treat patients experiencing health emergencies.
Other regulations around everything from medical fraud to OSHA workplace safety standards result in a complex arrangement of legal obligations for your healthcare business to keep track of. Consistently ensuring that your organization is compliant avoids high fines and other consequences.
Chronic and mental health treatments
One of the healthcare industry’s more specific challenges is keeping pace with long-term illnesses like diabetes or heart disease. This is where electronic records can be especially useful. Well-maintained patient documentation allows you to build on observations and treatment recommendations from previous sessions.
There’s also been an increase in people experiencing and seeking treatment for mental health issues. As this is an area sometimes overlooked by doctors and similar medical practitioners, an awareness of mental health risks is an invaluable way to differentiate your business. It’s imperative that you listen to and treat people experiencing these issues in a destigmatizing way.
Healthcare business management with Lumiform
Traditionally, healthcare business management involves a lot of paperwork and repetitive data entry, especially when you have to prepare hundreds of copies of the exact same document.
Using a workflow management platform like Lumiform makes all of that much less tedious, and also improves your patient interactions. Using Lumiform to create your own forms gives you consistent and business-specific medical paperwork that you can duplicate instantly, so you won’t waste hours copying new forms by hand.
Filling these forms is just a matter of following digital checklists that guide you through each item to be entered, leaving no room for guesswork or error. That makes it easy for any healthcare practitioner in your business to use these forms in their work and improves reporting accuracy.
Use Lumiform in your medical business to:
- Improve the patient experience by doing away with paper forms
- Conduct more thorough and impactful patient examinations
- Establish a record of visits and treatments for repeat patients
- Ensure confidential records stay confidential thanks to encrypted cloud storage
- Make regulatory compliance a habit with automatic documentation and reporting
- Automate and save up to half the time on administrative tasks
Any information you collect using Lumiform is not only stored in the cloud automatically and in accordance with strict data protection guidelines, but turned into automatic analytics that you’ll receive regularly. These data visualizations make it easier for you to identify patterns and notice things like common patient difficulties that can be improved.