Stay on Top of Healthcare Staff Administration With a Personnel Management System

Each healthcare clinic needs a wide variety of healthcare workers. Even specialty clinics need nearly a dozen different types of workers. From secretaries to medical assistants, office managers, and head doctors, clinics require personnel management to work efficiently.

The healthcare field is set to grow 14 percent in the next decade. That’s much faster than employment fields on average. Your clinic has likely experienced high demand due to the growing health needs of the populations you serve.

When the next hiring wave comes, you need to be ready. Here’s the best way to stay on top of hiring needs and staffing concerns for your healthcare clinic.

Keep Records of Your Current Employees

Before you can get ready to start hiring other workers, you need to know who you currently have on hand. Maybe you don’t have enough doctors to see all of the patients that come through, which impacts your clinic as a whole. Each doctor needs several people to support them, from medical assistants to phlebotomists and other specialists. Some of these specialists can serve multiple doctors, but they also may be strained in the number of patients they see each day.

Keeping records on employee work habits can help you see when certain individuals are trying to do too much. Overworking can lead to patient dissatisfaction, which impacts the level of care you offer as a clinic.

Set Thresholds That Mark When it’s Time to Start Hiring

How do you know when it’s time to start increasing personnel management? In your system, you can set up markers that will flag when your clinic is overburdened.

One of the best metrics is patient wait time. If patients are waiting more than 30 minutes to see a provider, something is going wrong,

Create Processes That Make the Hiring Process More Efficient

You may not be suffering from a staffing shortage but instead lack processes to make treatment go smoothly. If you don’t have clear, repeatable processes that your staff can stick to, then you’ll need to focus your attention there first. It might be helpful for you to hire temp workers to help you create the systems and make your patient treatment processes more efficient overall.

Here are some processes that will help make every aspect of treatment more efficient.

Filling out paperwork online

Many times, patients can complete paperwork like medical history and current medications before they come into your clinic. Doing this simplifies the check-in process and decreases the need for support staff to work with your patients.

Automated check-in procedures

Do you have a kiosk where patients can check themselves in when they arrive? This will set a flag in your system and let other people know when patients are ready to be seen. That way, assistants can spend time addressing patient questions instead of being involved in check-in procedures.

Use a Cloud-Based Database to Track Medical Equipment

Medical equipment is an important part of treating patients. Without it, you and your staff wouldn’t be able to make diagnoses or monitor potential health issues. Using a cloud-based system allows your managers to see what equipment is being used, and which items aren’t helpful to treatment. It also helps them see when certain items need to be cleaned, and when they need to be retired.

Steps to follow for seeing patients

Does your clinic have a process for seeing patients from start to finish? Here is an example of steps you could implement to automate patient treatment while still providing stellar care.

1. Automate check-in procedures
2. Let providers know when patients are ready to be seen
3. Have medical assistants set flags in your system when they’ve taken vitals and done any prescreening work?
4. Have providers set a flag when they are currently seeing patients so other staff knows they are occupied and can’t address other concerns.
5. Set post-visit tasks like processing test results, sending prescriptions, and other steps so doctors and assistants don’t have to keep it in their head.
6. Create an area in the system that will go off when patients need to be notified of their results and possibly schedule a follow-up visit.

Having an easily repeatable process such as the one above will help everyone on your staff know what they need to do, and when they need to do it. This will also simplify the new hire orientation. Instead of having to memorize treatment steps, they can reference your system