The Easiest Way to Manage Your Practice’s Staff

Poor staff management is one of the leading causes of medical office inefficiency. Insufficient staffing, unequal workload distribution, and unclear job responsibilities indirectly decrease patient satisfaction. More often than not, practices struggle to create a balanced staff schedule between office locations or fail to plan for peak patient demands. On top of caring for patients, your staff deals with a handful of administrative tasks. Without an efficient staff scheduling and time management strategy, you can easily create dissatisfied patients and overworked employees. Luckily, your practice can implement specific tools to combat staff management challenges.

Meet Staffing Challenges in Healthcare With EMO

EHR-integrated tools can go a long way in making better staffing decisions and helping your staff prioritize tasks. The Electronic Medical Office (EMO) is an entire suite of modules integrated with Meditab’s IMS system designed to optimize your medical office. EMO includes three modules to help you build a more efficient team and satisfied employees. Let’s take a deep dive into each one and see how it can help you better manage your staff.

1. Clinic Staff Scheduler

Clinical managers dread creating staff schedules. Managing different timetables, calendars, spreadsheets, and time-off requests takes a big chunk of a clinical manager’s time. Then, there’s the added headache of balancing enough staff between multiple locations and keeping up with last-minute changes. Having too many staff members can be costly, but too few results in long patient wait times. So how do you create the perfect balance?

IMS Staff Scheduler allows you to create an optimized staff schedule by calculating staff requirements based on past patient visits or future appointments from your EHR data. You can also opt to add a buffer to meet unexpected patient demands. With EHR integration, you don’t need to switch between different systems to create and share employee schedules. IMS Staff Scheduler is a centralized module where employees can view the schedule for the day and every employee assigned to an office location. With every second counting in patient care, placing transparency into your care team’s schedule can help practices better respond to sudden changes.

2. Clinic Staff Time Clock

The healthcare industry’s demanding work pace puts your staff at high risk for burnout. Day in and day out, your team deals with both patient care and administrative work, leading to longer working hours. One way to prevent burnout is to set work boundaries and establish work breaks. IMS TimeClock, an IMS-integrated time monitoring system, allows you to set break, lunch, and clock-out reminders to ensure your staff maintains a healthy work-life balance.

EHRs are the first and last thing your staff touches during each shift, so why not use them for time tracking and payroll purposes too? When an employee logs in to IMS at the start of their shift, a clock-in window automatically appears for the employee to check in. The same goes for clocking out when your shift is up. IMS TimeClock simplifies work hour tracking and verification and helps you seamlessly calculate employee pay.

3. Clinic Staff Checklist

The increasing complexity of healthcare gave way to new job roles and specialized fields, increasing the uncertainty regarding tasks and expectations between job roles. Employees who don’t understand their job's scope, limitations, and priorities suffer from role ambiguity. Role ambiguity in healthcare increases the risk of staff burnout and creates inefficiencies in the workplace. For example, a front desk staff's primary job is to check-in patients and book appointments. Because of unclear task designations, several providers ask the front-desk staff to process referrals when it should be the medical assistant’s job. This results in a poor check-in workflow and an overworked front-desk staff. Practices can reduce role ambiguity by providing their employees with a clear definition of tasks and priorities related to the job.

IMS Checklist allows practices to assign job-related tasks and reminders to particular individuals or job roles. Users can attach documents and add links to help further clarify tasks. Setting due dates lets your staff know which tasks to prioritize and reduce overwhelmed employees. Checklists pop up whenever an employee logs in or out of IMS to ensure no task falls through the cracks. Each assigned task is trackable to ensure accountability.

Simplify Staff Management

Your staff is your most valuable resource in providing quality care. A well-balanced staff schedule prevents overwhelmed employees. Providing transparency in staffing schedules allows staff to act quickly in an unexpected staff shortage. Integrated EHR checklists ensure that everyone is doing their part. The Electronic Medical Office (EMO) helps you achieve all these and simplifies your staff management process. With EMO, your practice can improve clinical efficiency, practice cost-effective staffing, and achieve employee satisfaction.