Stage 2 is coming. Soon enough you’ll have an opportunity. No, you’ll have a responsibility to get your patients to communicate with you through your portal. Some of you are already using a portal successfully. Others, not so much. Let’s look at some of the success factors behind successful adoption and why you should pay attention.
The first reason to pay attention is money. Until now, you likely never considered the cost of answering a phone call within your office during the day. In my over 30 years in dealing with physicians and medical staff, I’ve heard it so often that it oozes like a thick gooey substance you can’t wash out. “I have no cost to answer the phones. My staff is there anyway”. Yes, your staff is there anyway, but they could be doing so much more if they weren’t costing you upwards of $6.00 each time they answered a phone call. How is that you say? Many studies have been conducted and yes, if you take into consideration the cost of the time to take the phone call, it is indeed an average of $6.00 each phone call. The purpose of this article isn’t to tell you what to do with the new found time available to your staff. You can do that, just keep in mind that the phone will ring about 100 times per doctor per day. You can save lots of $taff time.
Some of you have poorly performing portals and you are likely thinking, “they don’t work anyway”. You would be correct. On their own, they don’t really work. You need to incorporate them into your office and the office workflow. You can’t just expect to make a portal available and hope that they will get used extensively. The first thing you need to do is educate people.
You need to educate your staff. Your staff needs to buy in and recognize that they get to take fewer calls if the patients use the portal, making the staff workday less stressful. The math is easy. Fewer calls = fewer interruptions = lower stress. But managing change is not. This might be a job changer for some staff who are unable to adapt to a digital world of communications.
You need to educate your patients. Patients are already aware of the level of service they receive on the phone with your staff. They need to be assured that they will receive at minimum the same level or preferably, a higher level of service through the web, or they simply won’t change their behavior.
Next week in part 2 of this series, I’ll discuss several secrets to successful adoption of your patient portal.
