If your provider group struggles to maintain a full staff, you’ve likely already felt the impact on electronic health records. The effects can have harmful consequences for patients and contribute to burnout among your staff. Thankfully there’s a solution.
It’s difficult to hold on to qualified medical personnel. That’s no secret. Clinician burnout, strikes, and vaccine mandates contribute to a staffing shortage plaguing the entire healthcare industry. All across the country, provider groups and clinics struggle to keep their employees.
The team members struggled to cover all of their clinic’s obligations. Stretched thin and overworked, it doesn’t take long for fatigue to set in. Burnout and turnover become serious concerns, reducing the staff numbers even more and making a difficult situation worse.
Among its many impacts, the staffing shortage causes delays in medical record indexing—an already notoriously slow process. For many provider groups, manual data entry and inefficient workflows are the norms. Team members make countless computer “clicks” just to file a single document, wasting much more time than most people realize.
It’s even worse for clinics with limited personnel. Team members simply don’t have the time to file records quickly. They’re too busy with other responsibilities, like providing quality care and a positive patient experience.
But here’s the catch: if records aren’t filed soon enough, appointments and treatments get delayed. This escalates patient risk and lowers satisfaction—the opposite of the intended outcome.
It’s a vicious cycle. Your team works harder to compensate for the staffing shortage. But in doing so, burnout and turnover become problematic, which delays your record indexing even further.
Automate your patient record filing
An automated service like SmartFiler helps you avoid these situations. Our industry-leading services can quickly eliminate your backlog and get all of your incoming documents filed right away.
The workflow is easy. When a document comes in, like an e-fax, all your team has to do is make a few computer clicks to initiate the automation. SmartFiler handles everything else from there. It automatically reads your documents and fields the information accurately in as little as four hours.
Because no software is perfect, there is a safety net built directly into the SmartFiler service. If there’s ever a document that the technology is unsure how to index, our team of highly-trained human experts is always standing by to make sure it’s correctly filed right away (with no additional help from your administrators).
That’s it. Your team just takes a quick moment to start the process, and then they get right back to focusing on patients. Faster filing means follow-ups and treatment appointments get booked sooner. Your patients receive better care and communication, and that’s sure to boost your satisfaction scores.
Without the burden of manually indexing each document one by one, staff feel less frustrated and more satisfied. This reduces the risks of burnout and turnover, so your organization will feel less impacted by the staffing shortage.
Contact DISC today to learn how SmartFiler can help limit the staffing shortage’s impact on electronic health records for your provider group. Improve efficiency and maintain the highest level of care, even with a reduced team.
Let’s Connect
Ready to Consider Optimization of Your Chart Management? We Can Help.