Month: November 2018

Text Messaging your Patients with Vetters Enterprises

Best Practices for Text Messaging Your Patients

Posted on by VettersEnt

Text messaging is undoubtedly one of the most popular ways to quickly and easily communicate today, but does that make it secure? Think again! While text messaging your patients might seem like an exciting new way to stay in touch, there are many unique problems that can pop up when using texting in the healthcare space.

Texting and HIPAA

As a provider, your medical practice is required to follow the rules and regulations put together in HIPAA. Some practices mistakenly think that HIPAA prevents all text message communications, but that isn’t the case. There is no rule that stops you from texting patients missed appointment notifications, appointment reminders and other information. However, HIPAA does mandate that, when text messaging your patients, you must put adequate protections in place to guard Protected Health Information (PHI). Since you have no guarantee that text messages are arriving at the phone number associated with a patient and phones can be easily compromised, you shouldn’t dive into text messaging your patients without the right preparations.

Do Your Patients Want to Receive Text Messages?

Before you add text messaging to your suite of contactoptions, you should consider what your patients want. The Columbia University Medical Center conducted a study of patients to see what they wanted from theirdoctors. ¾ of patients said that they preferred:

  • Being texted statements instead of questions (“Reply YES to this message to confirm your appointment on November 20th” instead of “Can we expect you at your appointment on November 20th?”)
  • Receiving text messages that are professional and written with proper grammar (Saying “you” instead of “u,” “tomorrow” instead of “2mrw,” etc.)
  • Cute, happy emojis included at the end of messages

When You’re Text Messaging Your Patients

  • Verify patient contact information every time you speak with them to ensure reminders and confirmations are arriving at the right destination.
  • Let patients know that by giving you their wireless contact information, the number may be used for both telephone and text message communications.
  • If patients ask to stop receiving text messages or change the phone number on file, you should have procedures inplace to instantly update the information in the system. You can face legaltrouble for unwanted text communications.
  • When text messaging your patients,include the least amount of PHI possible.
  • If you choose to use a third-partymessaging service, make sure that it is HIPAA-compliant before signing up.

Alternatives to Text Messaging

Patient portals offer secure messaging between providers and patients, and they are 100% HIPAA compliant. Vetters Enterprises can help your practice implement patient portals and ensure safe, prompt communication between your office and clients. Patient portals also offer the additional benefit of fulfilling the secure patient communication guidelines that are part of the Meaningful Use standards. If you are tracking your metrics for MU or MACRA, adding a patient portal will help you to reach your goals.

Improve Your Practice with Vetters Enterprises

Vetters Enterprises specializes in practice management, private practice business support and revenue cycle optimization. We can perform in-depthassessments of your practice or facility and identify potential issues. Let uskeep your business as healthy as you keep your patients! Give us a call at(443) 352-0088.

Preventing Physician Fatigue with Vetters Enterprises

Preventing Physician Fatigue at Your Medical Practice

Posted on by VettersEnt

As we covered in our last blog, preventing physician fatigue needs to be a major priority for every medical practice. When providers are under constant pressure to perform, not only are they at risk of developing stress-related health issues, but employees and patients can also suffer increased stress and dissatisfaction. Thankfully, there are a number of strategies currently being used by many medical practices to get to work preventing physician fatigue.

How Your Practice Can Work to Prevent Physician Fatigue

  1. Make wellness for your employees a top priority at your medical practice. Remember that physician burnout isn’t just a problem for the doctors experiencing it, but also the patients and employees who may bear the brunt of it.
  2. Create a wellness position at your practice or a collaborative committee. Your wellness chairperson or champion should be someone who can help to survey employees for burnout and troubleshoot initiatives to prevent physician fatigue. These employees can also work to make employees aware of all of the wellness resources available and model positive anti-burnout activities, like leaving the office on time or stopping during lunch for a short meditation session.
  3. Survey your employees on a yearly basis to see what employees are doing to keep themselves in good physical, mental and emotional health. Use the results to identify potential workplace wellness initiatives and get a look at where your medical practice is succeeding and where you could stand to improve.
  4. This might seem obvious, but if you complete a workplace wellness survey, you should also use the results to make positive changes in your workplace. Whether it’s redesigning the way that daily workflow occurs or developing new and better ways for employees to communicate, these changes will show employees that you are listening and that you care about their experience enough to change.
  5. Once you have made some changes, you should repeat the survey to see how things have changed. Are you doing your job when it comes to preventing physician fatigue? Checking back in allows you to also see if there are new areas where you could stand to improve.
  6. Don’t call out employees or embarrass anyone in the office with survey findings. Instead, you should be supportive and continue to emphasize improvement. Just like physician fatigue doesn’t happen overnight, counteracting burnout doesn’t happen in one day either. 

Preventing Physician Fatigue with Vetters Enterprises

Vetters Enterprises specializes in practice management, private practice business support and revenue cycle optimization. We can perform in-depth assessments of your practice or facility and identify potential issues. Let us keep your business as healthy as you keep your patients! Give us a call at (443) 352-0088.