Month 2 - Seeing the benefits!

Well, what can I say!!! All of a sudden, things have improved!! And drastically at that!

The issue was to use the work flow effectively. The biggest learning curve was for the reception staff: most of my reception staff work part time which has meant it has taken longer to learn to use the new system. Our reception staff are not from the ‘millennial’ era which meant that technology is slightly more challenging. However, it is a very intuitive system and they have quickly started to become more confident with more practice and support. The main problem was that patients stood a long time at reception before the ‘workflow notes’ (these are the notes which tell you how long, when to book for and for what; also, how much money to take and to see if emails and phone numbers need to be updated) came through.

Thus, it has been decided that the clinicians will finish ‘checking the patient out’ in the surgery before letting them proceed to the reception area and then make their clinical notes after the patient has left. This seems to work very well and all the clinical staff and reception staff are now on board for this. There is an added feature of instant messaging in case there are extra notes you would like to send to reception.