Tag: communication

Jun 14
2016

How IT Solutions of Medical Practice Can Help Streamline Your Business

Guest post by Saqib Ayaz, co-founder, Workflow Optimization.

IT solutions are intended to making businesses more efficiently run and developed. In terms of medical practice, the business extends way beyond tending to patients only. Factors such as keeping both medical and billing record of patients, scheduling appointments that do not clash with each other, adhering to medical laws and regulations, and maintaining cross communication with patients as well as the support staff are central to smooth running of the medical practice.

The streamlining of these central factors among others constitutes “medical practice management” that is fueled and run consistently with the application of IT Solutions. These mainly include the usage of relevant software to help keep up with the daily operations; be it the medical activities or the administrative and support activities.

Some of the ways information technology solutions can help streamline your medical practice have been discussed in detail below.

Record Keeping

Higher the number of patients a medical practice tends to see, the trickier it is to keep up with the specific information and follow up instructions for them. IT solutions help manage the plethora of information ranging from medical record numbers to past medical prescriptions, medical tests history and health graph of specific patients. Employment of software such as the electronic health record help streamline these jobs, thereby making it easier to access detailed data regarding each patient.

Same goes for billing records. The best part about such software is their ability to converge different aspects of information about a patient at a single point, accessible through the patient’s medical record number prescribed by the practice.

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Dec 21
2015

Improve the Way Hospitals Communicate with Non-English Speaking Patients

Guest post by David Fetterolf, president, Stratus Video Interpreting.

David Fetterolf
David Fetterolf

By 2050, the world population will grow to more than nine billion people, according to the U.S. Census. As our world grows more diverse, so do the languages associated with different populations. Today, there are at least 6,909 distinct, known languages, and as globalization continues to grow, the number of non-native English speaking people living in the United States will grow in parallel. For the healthcare industry, this means hospitals and health systems must think about how this plays into patient engagement and care. Communication is crucial to managing patient relationships, caring for patients and working with their families to follow treatment plans correctly.

U.S. law requires hospitals to provide medically trained interpreters for patients with limited-English proficiency. This requirement aims to bridge the patients’ needs with how physicians plan to care for these needs.

How do healthcare organizations acquire interpreters?

When it comes to providing interpretive services, healthcare organizations have several options. Some hospitals that have significant limited English proficiency (LEP) populations keep interpreters on staff. Others rely on relationships with interpretation agencies to bring in interpreters as needed. Many facilities use remote, on-demand interpreters either over-the-phone or on video. More often than not a hospital will rely on a combination of these resources.

Perhaps the most important component of any language access network in healthcare is agility. Take the incoming Syrian refugee population – suddenly Arabic interpreters are in demand in areas they never worked in before. Healthcare facilities have to remain nimble to meet their patients’ needs. Interpretation needs can change over night, and hospitals need to be ready to respond.

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