10 Jun 2015
Mark Colton
Job Title
Image: © Tarchyshnik/iStock.
We spend a lot of time discussing how your practice management system (PMS) can best help you provide better preventive care. That’s understandable, as it’s the reason why the majority of patients visit your practice. However, there’s another significant group of patients that can benefit from the help a comprehensive PMS can provide – and that’s chronic illness patients.
This group can also play a valuable role in increasing your bonded clients. Highlighting you understand their individual needs, and that you are making every effort to ensure treatment schedules are followed, can greatly boost their trust in you – and in your practice’s capabilities.
It’s obvious chronic patients require more administrative resource and clinical management than preventive care patients. They require customised treatment schedules, and will normally return to your practice more frequently for regular check-ups and follow-up treatments to help manage their condition.
You need to be proactive and your reminder system is an important tool to make sure clients are always informed of treatments and check-ups.
However, to facilitate the management of chronic patient needs, you need to go beyond a typical reminder system. It has to be more flexible and capable. There’s an extra burden on your client reminder process too, as reminders cannot be generated based solely on the provision of a product or treatment.
Some medications can be dispensed to treat both chronic conditions and acute traumas. A good example is Rimadyl – which can be used in day-to-day treatment of arthritis as well as short-term postoperative pain relief.
You require a reminder system that caters for both situations, even though they share a common medication. The arthritis patient should return for regular follow-up examinations to monitor progress, but the patient being treated postoperatively for pain does not require a follow-up reminder.
Therefore, your PMS must allow you to attach follow-up reminders to these “dual-use” medicines, but only trigger the reminder for patients being treated on an ongoing basis.
You have to have the ability to fine-tune which medications are used in the treatment, and of those, which are for long-term conditions and which reminder should be associated with the condition (for example, a chronic patient illness system will let you attach a follow-up reminder to your Rimadyl items, but only apply that reminder if the patient is being treated for arthritis).
The other factor in managing chronic care is to be able to identify the illness involved. These can be grouped into long-term and acute illnesses. Arthritis is an example of long-term illness, and obesity being an acute condition.
Obviously, the list is extensive, and your PMS should already include a pre-populated comprehensive list of conditions.
This is what we refer to as “veterinary content”, as it is applicable to the vast majority of practices. It should be part of any
PMS along with other veterinary content such as a list of breeds, product information and so on.
To build your own custom content is not only time-consuming, but can also be very costly.
Along with the illness you need to be able to define the stage of the patient in the treatment process. Typical stages are:
This, in turn, allows you to indicate the status of any illness that has been diagnosed. It can also be used in queries and reporting – for example, if you want to send a text message or email to all clients whose animals are being treated for a particular condition, advising them of the availability of new treatments.
Or, you want to know those patients who had arthritis, but have now been treated successfully. They are both simple queries.
The process should include a “rule” that states that if the patient receives a treatment, which has a restricted reminder linked to it, a reminder will only be applied to them if they have the illness and the status is “ receiving treatment”.
If the status is set to any other stage, or the patient does not have the illness at all, the reminder will not be applied to the patient.
This way you ensure only those clients with patients that meet those conditions will get a reminder.
Once the reminder has been activated, it becomes part of your normal reminder process.
The goal of any worthwhile chronic illness system is to ensure clients are informed of the care needs of their pets in a regular, reliable and consistent manner. It can be done with a manual process, but this cannot be guaranteed to be regular, reliable, timely and consistent – as well as being both time-consuming and expensive.
We don’t need to highlight that chronic care patients are a very important segment of your clientele, both for increased client satisfaction as well as the financial benefit towards the growth of your practice.
The client/practice bond will be strengthened with the timely and proactive communications provided by a chronic patient illness system.
The good news is once it is set up, a comprehensive PMS will provide the tools and content to make the tasks much easier, basically running itself with little significant additional burden on your practice resources.
