One key strategy for improving your practices time-management, and overall effectiveness is to implement providing patients with pre-registration and any pre-visit paperwork. In collecting these materials and important information prior to the patient’s appointment, you are creating patient satisfaction while simultaneously improving the efficiency of your process overall.

If your practice has yet to create pre-paperwork, then it is time to do so! Make sure the forms you are having patients fill out are simple with terminology the average patient would understand. Try not to have too many forms, if it seems cumbersome to fill out the forms, most patients will not complete them all. Lastly, make sure it is user friendly, and if possible, allows for a mobile version so patients can access from anywhere. There should be designated staff to review these forms as they are submitted or leading up to appointment so that errors or missing information can be caught. Your patient registration platform should contain mobile optimized forms, e-signature capabilities, image capture capability for insurance information, EHR integration, and an e-checklist functionality. Try implementing a policy for postponing services if the patient is not pre-authorized or the pre-registration is not complete. This will save your staff time and improve patient wait times. It can be a complex process requiring a considerable amount of preliminary patient data input, but it will save an immense amount of time for other aspects of the process.