Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Patient flow

How efficiently you move patients through the practice’s office each day depends largely on how smoothly your workflow is designed. Now you don’t necessarily want to move patients through your office like it’s a drive-thru window. (Here’s your lab result. Would you like fries with that?) But you do want to reduce wait times and create a smoother flow of people and procedures in the practice’s office.

Figure 8-2: A sample current state process map for nurse/MA visits.

From a Systems Approach to Operational Redesign by Masspro

Recognize that your patients’ time is as valuable as your own. Work to create a patient flow model that offers patients with the least time spent waiting and the most face time with physicians.

You may be surprised to find while you note the state of your patient flow affairs that you come up with a lot of “Why?” questions. For example, maybe you’ve always had the same employee conduct patient intake. Why is that? Perhaps you can think of a way to either share that responsibility or to assign it to another team member if that makes more sense. Ask yourself (and your team members) these questions to get a firm idea of how your patient flow is moving through your clinic:

Pre-visit and check in

• What types of appointment require different blocks ...