What Causes Physician Burnout? Can It Be Avoided? Written by Jeff Tormey on October 29, 2020. Posted in Connect. It’s no secret that doctors have a tough job. Despite this, most physicians are happy and proud to call themselves medical doctors. For this reason, the subject of physician burnout has been studied and explored by many people, including physicians themselves, who are looking to find a solution to the problem. Doctors make many decisions every day, and these decisions have a wide ranging effect on their patients, nurses and administrators who work with them, and their practice as a whole. These decisions can weigh on a physician and slowly cause them to burn out. But what is it about these decisions and circumstances that cause physician burnout? Sequence Health is here to delve into it in depth. What Does Physician Burnout Look Like? Medicine has some taboos and stigmas that may seem strange to those who are on the outside. Mental health strategies, stress management, and preventing burnout are not taught to new doctors, and they’re often not taken seriously despite the stakes. There’s an unspoken feeling that seeking help for burnout is a sign of weakness or incompetence. After all, if other doctors don’t need it, I shouldn’t need it! Despite this, physician burnout is unbelievably common. It’s estimated that 1 in 3 physicians are experiencing burnout at any given time. It’s also very well known among physicians, who are acutely aware of the stresses that the job presents. Burnout has three main symptoms, described by the Maslach Burnout Inventory. They are: Exhaustion. This symptom is an obvious one, but it’s characterized by abnormally low energy levels and fatigue that doesn’t seem to go away. Depersonalization. This happens when the physician starts to emotionally disconnect, but not because they lack compassion: it’s because connecting emotionally is simply too exhausting. Lack of efficacy. This happens when the physician starts to question the purpose or the impact that they have. What Causes Physician Burnout? Long hours. Physicians are no stranger to working long hours, but doing so for years without any reprieve can have some serious consequences. This becomes worse when physicians feel like their work lacks purpose or if they spend too much time on tasks that don’t directly contribute to patient outcomes. Focusing on non-patient-related tasks. When you run a medical practice, you run a business. In any business, there is work that needs to be done that doesn’t have any direct relation to serving customers. Doctors go into the profession, in part, because they want to make a difference in the lives of their patients. When their focus moves away from that, the toil can really build up. Read more : 4 Tips To Grow Your Medical Practice Life stress. Sometimes, life gets stressful. These stresses can be related to positive things, such as a new relationship, purchasing a home, or having a child. Or, these stresses can be negative, such as a divorce, a lawsuit, or dealing with an illness or death in the family. Doctors usually use their home time to recover from the stresses of the job, but when they’re unable to do that, they burn out. How Can Burnout Be Avoided? Invest in mental health. Even though doctors don’t like to seem weak, investing in mental health doesn’t mean that you are weak. Plus, you don’t have to tell anyone! Investing in mental health could mean starting a meditation or exercise routine, seeing a therapist, or getting psychiatric help. It’s entirely up to you, but making sure your mental health is good can help prevent burnout from taking hold. Read more : Exploring the Role of Healthcare Call Centers in Mental Health Support Invest in making your practice more efficient. Doctors often burn out because they’re spending too much time on tasks unrelated to patient care. Eliminating or delegating as many of these tasks as possible can help reduce the likelihood of burnout. This, in turn, can help you work fewer hours and spend more time doing the work you love.
The Impact of Technology in the Healthcare Industry Written by Jeff Tormey on October 22, 2020. Posted in Connect. The healthcare industry is known for being somewhat slow to adapt new technologies, but this reputation is simply untrue. Healthcare has actually taken on some new technologies much earlier than other, larger industries have. And these technological advances have made great strides in the fields of healthcare and medicine. In this article, we’re going to discuss some of the more impressive impacts of technology in healthcare. Examples of Technological Advances in Healthcare Digitization of health records When computers were first introduced, one of the first things that people considered was to digitize health records for the entire healthcare industry. Of course, health record digitization came about very slowly due to HIPAA regulations, the cost of installation and training, and computer security requirements. However, most peoples’ health records in the USA are digitized and are accessible with the click of a button. Now, we have patient portal systems that hospitals and practices can use to allow their patients to access their own medical records, securely, from the comfort of their own home! Robotics Where robotics has really shined in recent years is surgery. Now, some surgeons are currently utilizing robotic technologies combined with laparoscopy in order to perform surgery with a precision never seen before. This increased precision can help reduce recovery times, lower procedure costs, and make some procedures much more accessible. Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality These are still in their infancy when it comes to healthcare. However, the potential is astounding for both of these technologies. Artificial intelligence and the use of machine learning have allowed for amazing advances in the field of cancer detection, among others. Virtual reality has the potential to transform several aspects of healthcare and medicine, including mental health, restoring sense perceptions in those who have lost them, providing effective telehealth, and much more. Make your processes more efficient. As you grow, bottlenecks in your operation will be exposed. Investing inefficiencies early will help you scale up effectively and will allow you to take on larger patient loads early on. You want to make sure that your administrators, nurses, physicians, and other staff are able to do their jobs effectively. Invest in technology to make it easy for your staff to access medical records, input charts, access lab results, and communicate with other practices for patient referrals. How Technology Has Changed Healthcare Increased efficiencies It’s no secret that healthcare has always been noted for its inefficiencies. But thanks to technology, many of these inefficiencies have either gone away or improved significantly. Insurance claims are processed much faster. Physicians have much easier access to reference tools and the latest scientific literature. Prescriptions can be filed nearly immediately, with the medicine available for pickup almost as soon as the patient can arrive at the pharmacy. The computerization of healthcare has also made administrative jobs much more efficient as well. Although there’s still a long way to go, accessing files and information is so much quicker and has resulted in time and money savings on the order of millions of hours and billions of dollars. Improved communication Communication, particularly between medical practices, has become a lot better. In the past, if a physician wanted to refer a patient or get help, they’d have to call the other physician’s back line. Now, physicians can communicate securely with automatic logs of their conversations for easier reference. They can also make use of telehealth activities and an active patient portal. Easier access to medical records Although some electronic medical record (EMR) software is difficult to use and can cause problems and frustrations, it’s obvious that it’s much easier for patients and other physicians to get access to medical records when they need them. These medical records have also become more comprehensive, reducing the need to hunt down charts and test results.
How Telemedicine is Transforming Healthcare in 2020 Written by Jeff Tormey on October 15, 2020. Posted in Connect. As of this writing, the COVID-19 pandemic has been going on for almost a year. In this time, we’ve seen medical practices shift from entirely in-person approaches to having most of their services available virtually. Telehealth is nothing new: it’s existed since landline telephones were first available in peoples’ homes. However, more and more people are becoming aware of telehealth and its ability to augment, and in some cases replace, inconvenient doctor’s visits and in person screenings. So how is telemedicine transforming healthcare in this new world of 2020? Let’s dive in! How Does Telemedicine Work? In the past, telemedicine was generally reserved for patients who were simply unable to make it to the doctor’s office. This included low mobility patients, elderly patients, and those who lived too far away from their doctors. Telemedicine generally worked via telephone and fax. Doctors used telemedicine to transmit images, records, and to ask patients questions directly. Nowadays, telemedicine works much differently. Video conferencing & online seminars were not used nearly as much in telemedicine as it is today. Since doctors are trying their best to limit the spread of COVID-19 in their practices, they’ve allowed for virtual consults to be done via video conferencing. Telemedicine has proven to be effective for patients who have chronic conditions that need a small amount of physician monitoring. Diabetes, asthma, and mental health have been managed with the help of telemedicine–and the list continues to grow. How Has Telemedicine Changed Healthcare in 2020? The COVID-19 epidemic has brought with it some unforeseen changes in the field of healthcare. Medical care has been focused on dealing with COVID-19 patients and handling COVID-19 testing. Research has been focused on developing COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. Despite this, other health conditions haven’t just gone away. Millions of Americans still need to visit their doctor more than several times a year in order to manage their conditions. So what has changed in 2020? Insurance Insurance companies have traditionally had mixed views on covering telemedicine. But thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for medical practices and hospitals to provide telemedicine services, insurance companies are more readily supporting them. It’s important to note that Medicare now reimburses for live video telemedicine, however this is the limit of their telemedicine coverage. Patient Monitoring Thanks to new wearable technologies and remote monitoring devices, it’s become easier for patients to monitor their own conditions and tell when there may be a problem. This allows for early detection of symptoms of conditions that may have long-lasting consequences if not caught early. Easing the burden on emergency rooms During the pandemic, it’s absolutely paramount that patients who have this disease are able to get the help they need, particularly if their situation is dire. Thanks to telemedicine, a worrying symptom doesn’t need to result in a trip to the ER. Patients can now access 24-hour telemedicine services and speak to a doctor who will tell them what they can do. This makes it so that fewer patients who don’t need emergency treatment end up in the ER due to a worrying symptom.
4 Tips To Grow Your Medical Practice Written by Jeff Tormey on October 8, 2020. Posted in Connect. If you’ve recently opened up a new medical practice, let us first say: Congratulations! You’ve taken your first step from physician to medical entrepreneur. This is an exciting step in your life and, hopefully, will be the first of many great things to come for your new business. You might have a little bit of anxiety for the future. Growing a medical practice is not easy, and it’s not as simple as doing a great job as a doctor. That’s part of it, but growing and running your own practice is just like growing and running your own business. After all, it IS your own business. If you’re like many doctors, then you want your primary focus to be on the patients. We’re going to give you some tips to help you grow your medical practice while keeping your focus on patient outcomes. 4 Tips To Help Grow Your Medical Practice Be active in your community. As a physician, you hold a special place in your community. People inherently trust you much more and hold you in high regard because of your profession. If you run a practice, you’re an important pillar of the community and you have to present yourself as such. Join your local chamber of commerce or board of trade. Attend and/or sponsor events that happen in your local area, both virtual and in person. Provide articles and content for your local blogs and newspapers. Comment and provide conversation in local social media groups. Get on social media. Social media is here to stay, and in 2020 it’s more important than ever. Social media is, for better or for worse, where people get their news, learn about local matters, connect with friends and family, and interact with their local community. Be where your people are! Many physicians feel awkward about being visible on social media. You might consider it somewhat unprofessional. It’s true that social media is NOT the place to post about sensitive matters. But, social media is an easy way to connect with your community and your patient base. Get your patients to write honest reviews. People trust review sites. When considering doing business with any local establishment, people often go straight to Google, Yelp, Facebook, Angie’s List, or some other review site and take a look at what people are saying. When you first start out, you won’t have any reviews. But, as you start to get patients, you’re going to want them to talk about their experiences with you. Simply have your front desk staff ask them to write a review and remind them via email to provide feedback on review sites. Don’t incentivize reviews or ask them to specifically write a positive review. And definitely don’t get fake reviews! This could ruin any trust that you build in your community. Make your processes more efficient. As you grow, bottlenecks in your operation will be exposed. Investing inefficiencies early will help you scale up effectively and will allow you to take on larger patient loads early on. You want to make sure that your administrators, nurses, physicians, and other staff are able to do their jobs effectively. Invest in technology to make it easy for your staff to access medical records, input charts, access lab results, and communicate with other practices for patient referrals. Using a patient portal system is one of the first things you should consider. This will give patients easy access to their medical records, make it easier for them to schedule an appointment, and make it easy to give patients the educational material they need to manage their condition when they’re not seeing you. Make sure your patient portal is accessible on mobile, as well! Enhance Patient Experience with a Robust Patient Portal Growing your medical practice requires a strategic approach that balances patient care with operational efficiency. By implementing the tips discussed, you can enhance patient satisfaction, streamline processes, and position your practice for sustained growth. At Sequence Health, we specialize in providing tailored solutions to help healthcare providers achieve these goals. Our services include effective website design, digital marketing, healthcare CRM/EMR integration, and medical call center support, all designed to attract and retain patients while optimizing your practice’s performance. Contact us today to elevate your medical practice.
Why Do Patients Miss Medical Appointments? How To Reduce No Shows Written by Jeff Tormey on October 1, 2020. Posted in Connect. Having patients miss their appointments can represent a large expense for a medical practice. It wastes time, it lowers revenue, and it often throws off the entire rhythm of the organization!It’s important to understand why patients miss their medical appointments, though. This way, you can implement strategies to reduce no-shows and encourage your patients to arrive for their appointment on time. So why do patients miss medical appointments? Reasons Why Patients Miss Medical Appointments Patients report many different reasons for missing their medical appointments, but these reasons aren’t always obvious to those who run medical practices. Some of the reasons they cite are: Unable to make it due to logistics For many people, life sometimes gets in the way of being able to make an appointment. Patients report being unable to take off work, secure childcare, and arrange for transportation.There doesn’t seem like there should be a reason why a patient doesn’t give notice. But patients are often unaware of how they should give notice, or simply don’t believe it’s all that necessary because they lack the understanding of how medical practices work. Doesn’t understand the scheduling system Many patients don’t know how medical practices operate. They may think that missing an appointment is no big deal for a practice. They think that it might reduce someone else’s wait time, or that it would simply be filled with another patient. This is mainly due to a lack of understanding about medical practice operations. Negative emotions surrounding the appointment Going to a doctor’s office is scary for a lot of people. The doctor’s office is where people get painful shots and get scary health news. It’s also a bit of an inconvenience to people. Feeling disrespected or inconvenienced Some patients feel like they don’t get the respect they deserve at the doctor’s office. They may be told to wait for a long time, or they might be told that the things they’re doing for their health are wrong. This breeds a distrust of doctors and the medical establishment as a whole. Tips for Reducing No Shows Optimize your reminders. It’s not enough to just call them a few days before the appointment. There are other tools at your disposal. Using automated reminders to call patients at certain points of time can greatly reduce the amount of staff time you spend on making reminder calls. SMS reminders are an easy and less intrusive way to remind people about their appointments. Sending them one at different intervals will reduce the chance that they forget. Make it easy for people to put their appointments into their Google calendars by including a Calendar invite link in your emails. Educate patients. Nobody likes to be reprimanded for being late, but patients need to understand that missing appointments doesn’t do anyone any favors. Make sure they understand that a missed appointment does not free up a slot for someone else.
How To Improve The Patient Experience Written by Jeff Tormey on September 21, 2020. Posted in Connect. When a patient walks into a doctor’s office, they do so with a feeling of apprehension and anxiety. Patients have grown accustomed to a poor patient experience. They expect to be told to wait for a long time after their appointment’s scheduled time. They expect a cold, uncaring doctor and are prepared for a diagnosis that they don’t agree with. As a medical professional, part of your job is to help your patient overcome these feelings and leave feeling like they got the answers they needed. It’s not often easy to quantify the patient experience. However, there are key performance indicators that can indicate a poor patient experience. Wait times, return rates, and no-show rates potentially point to patient experience issues. How can we improve the patient experience? Let’s look at a few different ways. Ways To Improve The Patient Experience Make it easy to schedule an appointment. New patient acquisition is a whole other topic in itself, but let’s say a patient finds your website and wants to schedule an appointment. Ideally, they should be able to do so very easily and without much hassle. If your website is difficult to navigate, impossible to load on mobile, or downright confusing, that doesn’t bode well for a patient’s expectations. You want to have a visible web presence, a quick and easy-to-use website that works well on mobile, and a simple appointment scheduling system that can be used online or easily done over the phone. Reduce wait times. Your patients don’t want to be waiting very long. They have things to do. Yet, patients often go into the doctor’s office expecting to wait. Why let this happen? Reducing wait times is not easy, and many factors outside your control can affect them. However, making sure booking is well managed and that fellow physicians keep to strict schedules will help you reduce overall wait times for patients. If wait times are unavoidable, have your staff call the patient and let them know how long they should expect to wait. You could even offer to have them reschedule an appointment. This will make the patient feel more comfortable with you and make them believe that you have their best interests in mind. Encourage them to take an active role in their care. Let’s be honest: most patients have a low level of health literacy. They need to be told why they need to do what they’re told, otherwise they may not understand the gravity of the situation. Education should be used as a way to help patients take an active role in their own care, rather than to justify your decisions. Allow them to ask questions and make sure they know that there’s no such thing as a stupid question. Improving the patient experience is a top priority for healthcare organizations. Sequence Health can help you achieve this goal by providing a platform that streamlines healthcare workflow management and improves communication between providers and patients.
How To Attract More Patients & Increase Patient Volumes for Your Medical Practice Written by Jeff Tormey on September 14, 2020. Posted in Connect. Medical practices, at the end of the day, are businesses that need adequate numbers of patients in order to operate profitably and smoothly. It’s not enough to be an excellent physician; medical practices need to be visible and trusted in order to attract patients. So what are some tactics to increase patient volumes and attract patients to your medical practice? We’ve prepared a list that you can implement in your practice. Tips For Increasing Patient Volumes Engage With Your Community As a physician, you are an unbelievably important member of your community. People trust you with their lives, or at least with certain aspects of your health. You’re a pillar of the community, whether you want to be or not. Take advantage of it! Join your local board of trade or chamber of commerce and attend meetings. Show up to local events. Don’t be afraid to sponsor whatever’s going on in town! Seeing your name and your practice’s brand name as a sponsor will make people feel like you’re more familiar to them.Utilize Social Media To The Fullest Everyone’s on social media, and you should be too. But it’s not enough to just be ON it: you need to flaunt it! Simply posting articles and sharing info isn’t enough, although it’s a good start. Use your social media as a showpiece for how you engage with the community and what you’re able to do for your patients. Maintain a strong follow-up system. Following up with patients regularly is a must in medicine, but it’s not just for the patient’s health. Keeping existing patients is the easiest way to maintain patient volumes, because they already know you and trust you. Good follow up systems are timely, provide relevant information to the patient, and aren’t perceived as spammy. If a patient has a bad experience with you, it’s up to you to figure out why it is and how you can use their information to improve going forward. Following up with them is an excellent way to get this info as well. Make things easy for patients online. Patient portals are a wonderful thing for medical practices, but patients often find them confusing. You want your website, your patient portal, and your online scheduling system to be super easy to navigate and use for the patient. If your patient finds working with your practice to be easy and effortless, they’re more likely to have a good experience with you.
Why Patient Portals Are Important in Healthcare Written by Jeff Tormey on September 7, 2020. Posted in Connect. With the advent of the Internet came a highly disruptive innovation for healthcare organizations: patient portals. Now, patients can take a much more active role in their care by having nearly instant access to their own medical records. In the past, a patient had to get medical records by showing up to the doctor’s office and asking them for a copy. Now, most of the information is digitized. But that’s not all patient portals can do. Patient portals now include appointment scheduling, telehealth features, and educational content to help patients understand their conditions better. In this article, we’re going to discuss the real benefits of patient portals and why they’ve become so important. Benefits of Patient Portals Access To Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Saves Patients & Staff Time. A patient with access to their patient portal can access their medical records at any time via the Internet. No more having to wait in line at the doctor’s office just for some paperwork. What’s even nicer is that administrative staff, who used to spend a great deal of time copying medical records and updating the audit trail, can now simply direct the patient to their portal so that they can get the information electronically. This saves a great deal of time because the information can be securely accessed from anywhere. Best of all, now patient portals can be made to work on mobile, making access possibly truly everywhere. Educational Content Makes It Easy For Patients To Engage. Patient engagement is a huge buzzword in healthcare organizations, but it has real implications. Engaged patients have better health outcomes, are more satisfied with their care and are much more likely to return in the future. To learn how you can get started engaging your patients, check out our blog post on how to increase patient engagement with patient portals. Educational content hosted on patient portals can make it easier for patients to take a more active role in their care. They can have access to relevant information about their conditions, medications, all in one place on the Internet. Patients no longer have to sift through a stack of pamphlets just to get the information they need. Patient Portals Can Be Used To Schedule Appointments. A big part of staff time is spent on scheduling and verifying appointments. If a patient is able to do that themselves with automatic scheduling software, then that’s one less thing that your staff has to worry about. Time is also spent on reminding people of appointments. Patient portals can make appointment reminders automated, when integrated with your CRM that keeps track of all of these automations, which leads into the next benefit. Patient Portals Can Integrate With CRM Software. Your CRM, if set up correctly, can act as a single source of truth about your organization. It can include information about patient outreach campaigns and their conversion rates. Your CRM can also be a place where all patient information is securely stored and accessed. Patient portals can integrate with this software, making certain tasks completely automated. If a patient portal has appointment scheduling and is integrated with your CRM, the patient’s appointment is scheduled and a tag is applied in the CRM making it known that the patient has scheduled an appointment. This is powerful, and nobody on staff needed to do anything to make it work! Medical patient portal integrated with CRM software make for a much more efficient organization. That being said, patient portals are not perfect and neither are CRMs. Most organizations need a fair bit of help making sure that they’re doing their job properly. We at Sequence Health specialize in patient engagement solutions and marketing automation for healthcare organizations. Call us at 855-588-5918 for more information about how to make a patient portal work for you!
Top Criteria For Choosing A Healthcare CRM Platform Written by Jeff Tormey on August 31, 2020. Posted in Connect. Choosing a CRM is a big decision. You have to spend the money on the CRM itself. Then you have to construct it to fit your needs. After that, you need to migrate your systems to the CRM and integrate it with your current software suites. It’s a giant pain and a long process that costs thousands of dollars and months of time. For this reason, you want to choose the right CRM for your healthcare organization. But what criteria should healthcare organizations be considering when choosing a CRM? Let’s go over them now. Top Criteria For Healthcare CRM Platforms HIPAA Compliance All CRMs marketing themselves as being for healthcare organizations MUST include procedures for keeping your organization compliant with HIPAA regulations. Make sure to grill the sales rep with questions about how the CRM keeps EMR safe, and how the CRM keeps an audit trail. Learning Curve Migration is a big enough pain as it is, but then you have to make sure that your staff is adequately trained to use the software. If the software is too hard to navigate or use, then it becomes a liability rather than an asset. This is a difficult one to estimate, but by doing a demo of the CRM software you’ll be able to figure out how difficult or easy it will be to train your staff to use it. Ease of Integration Many CRMs include a great deal of features out of the box. However, not all of them integrate well with every system. If your CRM doesn’t integrate well with your billing software, for instance, then it will be hard to provide a single source of truth for decision makers! When speaking to a sales rep for a CRM software, make sure you let them know which software you use and for what purpose. Then, ask them how it will be integrated. It’s important to know how it integrates, because if it’s not a seamless integration, then it may cause additional problems down the line. Feature List CRMs generally brag about their features, and healthcare CRMs are no exception. However, some features are more important than others. Many CRMs are little more than glorified autoresponder software, whereas others can do nearly anything. Ask the sales rep about each of the features and how it helps healthcare organizations manage their data and workflows. Automation Ability This is separate from the other features, because automation is such an incredibly helpful feature that it needs to be mentioned. Can your CRM save your staff time on menial tasks, and can it automate things that used to be done manually? For example, if your CRM can be accessed by multiple departments without having to start and keep track of an email chain, this is a huge time save. There are other things that CRMs can automate, such as patient outreach, segmentation, appointment reminders, scheduling, and so much more. Price We didn’t include price first, because we don’t believe price should be the main criteria. But it is important, and that fact cannot be ignored. Consider your other criteria, then look and see what you’ll have to pay to get all the features you want. Don’t just go with the lowest bid: choose the CRM that fits your budget while giving you the most relevant features.
Patient Engagement in Healthcare: How Understanding The Patient Experience Produces Better Outcomes Written by Jeff Tormey on August 17, 2020. Posted in Connect. Patient engagement is a term commonly used in healthcare organizations. It’s used so much that its meaning has become muddied and those who discuss it may as well be talking about different things. For those who are interested in patient engagement to produce better patient outcomes, this topic is highly important and its specifics are not to be ignored. So how is patient engagement so important, and why should we be focused on implementing initiatives to improve it? Let’s discuss. The Benefits of Focusing on Patient Engagement in Healthcare Organizations It’s clear that patient engagement is beneficial. But what are the statistics on patient engagement improvements? Let’s find out. Impacts on Patient Satisfaction A study done for the California Healthcare Foundation showed that a focus on patient engagement improved satisfaction. By implementing a way for patients to get online access to their health records, they were able to report a 90% satisfaction rating. Happier patients mean patients who are more likely to return for another issue, or to continue care with your organization for their current issue. It also means patients who are more likely to refer other patients who are suffering from similar conditions. This results in your organization’s growth. Read more: Patient Engagement in Healthcare: How Understanding The Patient Experience Produces Better Outcomes Impacts on Health Outcomes Does focusing on patient engagement actually help the patient get better? The answer is yes. A meta-analysis published by Health Affairs showed that more engaged patients have improved health outcomes than those who are not. In the paper, they discuss several different sources of evidence that show improved health outcomes in more engaged patients. Read the full paper here. How Healthcare Organizations Can Improve Patient Engagement Involve patients in decision making. Of course, a patient cannot diagnose themselves or prescribe themselves medication. However, they can play an active role in their health by making decisions with their physician. Have physicians spend enough time with them so they have enough information to make an informed decision. It’s tempting to just provide them with all the information they need, but it’s not the same as an involved discussion with their physician. Improve your patient portals. Not all patient portals are equal, and some are downright difficult for patients to use. Some patient populations care a lot more about what their patient portals provide. Many patients have expressed that they want a large variety of features in their patient portals, including: Easier to understand information Billing details The ability to book appointments online Telehealth features Summaries of their appointments Just having a patient portal isn’t sufficient: you need your portal to be doing a good job of engaging the patient. Most importantly, the patients need to understand how to use it. We at Sequence Health provide patient portal solutions that integrate with your current systems while also providing the features that patients want. Call us at 888-986-3638 to talk about your patient portal needs!