1 Jan 2015
Bryan Williams
Job Title
It’s impossible to prevent clients from searching the internet, but you can preempt their need to search by implementing a targeted education campaign. Your practice management system can be a valuable tool in making those education tasks cost-effective.
Many industry advisors and consultants agree keeping clients up to date with your practice activities is important in maintaining a strong relationship. Email or SMS messages are effective and using social media to do the job is even more so for a growing segment of your client base.
Most advisors recognise those clients and your followers are much more likely to respond to regular practice Twitter updates. Why not create a series of educational messages on a topic, such as the need for a yearly or half-yearly health assessment? You could post a “tweet” every two or three days. The problem is remembering to do it, as well as having the time available. If it’s left to a manual process, it’s likely to be inconsistent and fail.
Tools such as RxWorks’ Event Manager let you schedule messages and decide the delivery method. Your email, SMS and Twitter accounts are configured to automatically send the messages on the timetable you’ve defined and away you go. It’s equally important all staff in contact with clients play a part in their education. It’s essential they know and can explain the value of your preventive care recommendations to clients.
Most practices already use their computer to “market” preventive care for their patients through reminders. And they’re usually the biggest generator of business in a practice. However, we have found a surprisingly high percentage of patients in practices all over the world do not have a current reminder on their records, which means the client never gets a reminder. Make sure your practice management system has the capability of checking and rectifying that situation.
Unfortunately, reminders are typically restricted to advising clients of vaccinations that are due. Other aspects of a preventive care programme, such as health assessments, dentals or screens, are not included in the reminder process. It’s left to the veterinarian to inform clients on their next visit. This is very much a “hit or miss” approach to an important part of maintaining a patient’s health, because:
The American Animal Hospital Association in the US conducted studies on compliance with practices’ preventive care programmes in 2003 and 2008. They showed consistent and regular client communication was the key to successful compliance. Nothing is more damaging to the client’s perception of your service than getting garbled, inconsistent and irrelevant messages on why it’s important to accept your recommendations.
Consistent and regular communication means all practice staff who are in contact with clients must:
It’s easier said than done. How are you going to make it happen without looking over everyone’s shoulder each minute of the day? If there is one thing a computer is good at, it’s being consistent and regular. Once you have set up the reminder system, it will always work the same way until changed.
But let’s not forget people are involved. Your receptionists and nurses are critical resources for effective client communication. They must be totally on board with the goals and methods of any compliance process you implement. Once you have everyone’s buy-in to your plan, you can look at using your practice management system to help with the process.
The first step is to define your standards for preventive care – the treatments and services each patient should receive and their frequency. Each patient’s status with the appropriate standard is stored in its record. Is it current, due or overdue?
When the patient receives the needed treatment, the status is automatically updated and the due date for the next is calculated and stored. Each time the patient’s record is accessed, the status of its compliance with your standards is immediately available.
Now you know what is due for each patient, the next challenge is to be consistent in explaining the value of treatments you’re recommending. Again, this is where your system can help.
A “script” describing why patients should have the treatments can be defined and stored within the database, and it can often include scripts that can be modified to suit the message you would like the client to hear. Each time the treatments that are due are displayed, the script is also shown. When a client calls or comes in about a patient, the receptionist or nurse brings up the patient’s record and immediately views any treatments or services that are due. He or she also sees the “value message” to remind him or her of what to tell the client.
The standards of care that are due should also be transferred to your reminder process. Reminders for these services will be sent out as part of that process. In this way you ensure your clients receive consistent and reliable preventive care treatment information. You are covering not only time-based reminders that are under your control, but also those that happen when clients contact you. You can’t control when the client will contact you, but you must be ready with your recommendations for the patient’s care.
The remaining task is to record the outcome of your explanation of the treatment needs for the patient. If the client agrees, the patient record will show it received the treatment and the status will be updated accordingly.
But as far as management is concerned, it’s arguably more valuable to know why he or she didn’t agree. Did he or she defer the treatment or refuse it? If it was refused, why? By analysing these answers you can possibly make adjustments to your fees or maybe your message to improve compliance rates. The outcome should also be added to the patient record in case of any questions later.
It’s in the best interest of everyone involved that clients accept your recommendations for maintaining the health of patients. The process we have just described uses your practice management system to support staff in that effort.
