In a busy practice, you may get so far behind in finishing tasks that you give less attention and time to your patients than you’d prefer. The key to a thriving practice is to make sure you develop a good rapport between staffers and patients. To help you improve the situation, here are five steps to building a successful patient relationship that you can start taking today.

Shocking stories of major data breaches by computer criminals continue to appear in the news, with no end in sight. So many organizations fail to shore up their computer networks or apply the latest in security best practices that hackers from any location in the world with Internet access can penetrate their systems with relative ease.

To err is human, the saying goes, and no matter how careful your employees are at your medical organization, you can count on mistakes arising from time to time. The trick is in setting up procedures and protocols to make preventable mistakes as few as possible. Consider that an overworked staff trying to process too much information in a limited amount of time can grow frustrated, which can lead to even more mistakes.

Foot traffic in your medical practice seems to be declining lately and you are starting to grow concerned that you are not going to get enough business to justify keeping your current staff load. While there can be annual variations, such as more appointments during the cold and flu season, you will want to achieve stable appointment rates and keep your staff as busy as possible. It’s possible that there are some marketing and community outreach tactics that you haven’t yet considered doing. Why not give any or all of the following four methods a try so you can start filling your appointment calendar with more patients?

Your medical organization does not revolve around general practice doctors. Yours is an outfit that focuses on one or more specialties. Just as you wouldn’t try to use a basic graphics program that came free on your computer to make a major work of art, you wouldn’t want to use generic electronic health records software that doesn’t account for the unique services you and your team offer.

The following excerpt is from an article found on HIT Consultant. It was written by Catalyze’s Travis Good who talks about why there’s more to EHR integration than the API. --------------------------- Last year digital health funding reached $5.8 billion, leaving no question that the potential is aplenty for ambitious health-tech innovators. Still, it takes more than seed funding to bear fruit in this market. While innovating in digital health may truly be something, integrating in digital health—well, that’s everything.

How would you assess the overall quality of your medical practice? No one sets out to develop a merely average medical group, but some practices will do better than others for a variety of reasons. Statistically speaking, if you have a number of outstanding medical organizations, there will be a similar number that are below average. You do your best to recruit the most talented and knowledgeable medical professionals and they all receive ongoing training to keep themselves sharp and abreast of the latest best practices when it comes to health care. That’s standard operating procedure for practices, of course. Where you distinguish yourself in the market is in bettering the patient experience as well as the working conditions for your staff.

Your medical practice obviously relies on the timely paying of claims. In order to keep the lights on, you can’t afford to make mistakes or remain committed to an older way of doing things (submitting claims by paper instead of digitally). Sometimes a medical practice hasn’t switched over to modern software because no one in the organization has pointed out how many errors the team has been making lately, or the realized the number of delayed payments caused because a form wasn’t filled out properly.

Prescription medications are such an integral part of the healing process that it can be easy for medical practice managers to run on autopilot when it comes to how we prescribe drugs and get them refilled. The traditional paper pad of prescriptions is becoming part of ancient medical history as more hospitals, practices, clinics and other medical facilities make the transition to e-prescribing. Electronic prescriptions are convenient for all concerned parties, from medical organization managers, nurse practitioners and physicians to the patients whose lives they seek to improve. If you’ve been sitting on the fence about making the switch to electronic prescriptions, there’s no time like the present to learn more about the benefits.

The following excerpt is from an article found on Harvard Business Review. It was written by William B. Weeks, MD and James N. Weinstein, DO. ------------------------------------------------- In health care, value accrues to patients, insurers, and society at large. We believe that patients’ perceptions of value are what really matter and that insurers and society derive more value when patients are served well.