Saving time saves your employees from stress while saving your practice money. Are your workflows as efficient as they can be? Or are you leaving time (and money) on the table by getting by with “good enough?”
Inefficiency can happen anywhere
You can think of behavioral health care as three major program models: preventive care, treatment, and maintenance programs. Each one of these models provides support for people at a different point in their experience with mental health or substance use.
- Preventive care: Aims to prevent people from developing a substance use disorder or severe mental health symptoms. Preventive programs can be community-based or outreach programs that step in before more intensive care is needed.
- Treatment: Here, the goal is to treat people who have a diagnosed mental health and/or substance use disorder. Different levels of care, including inpatient, residential, and outpatient, provide different entry points for care. Many people in treatment will at least be recommended to progress through different levels of care.
- Maintenance programs: Help people maintain the progress they made during treatment. Sober or transitional living, aftercare, and alumni/support groups are all standard maintenance programs.
Since there are so many layers of behavioral health care, workflow breakdowns can happen at any point. For example, just the transition between different levels of treatment can pile on redundant administrative tasks that leave both staff and patients annoyed.
Fixing common workflow bottlenecks
Identifying where work is piling up for your teams gives you a place to start solving problems. But work might not be obviously backed up, especially if you have stellar staff. Where have they voiced concerns? What have you noticed from efficiency reports? Here are some areas you might be overlooking:
Intake and admissions
Are your new patients only filling out forms once? Are they completing them all in the office? If you have patients transitioning from different levels of care, you should be verifying information before collecting all new information.
Of course, you’ll still have to collect new information, and you can find ways to improve that process, too. Still working off paper forms? Consider going digital. Manually moving files from a form portal to a patient file? You can likely find a way to accurately capture the information right in the file.
Scheduling and communication
Keeping your providers’ schedules full gives your patients better access to care and keeps the number of claims you can submit up. But if your office staff is spending hours every week manually scheduling or rescheduling appointments, it’s time to find a better way.
Your scheduling tool should automatically update provider availability and send appointment reminders—all in one place. Gone are the days of juggling multiple calendars and struggling to find the right slot for a reschedule.
Documentation and treatment planning
How far apart is the data in your system? Even a few extra clicks per patient adds up to a good chunk of time for your staff over the course of a week. Having systems—CRM, EMR, patient engagement, and RCM—that work seamlessly together gets the right information in front of the right team members at the right time.
Providers can find demographic and customer service notes to provide better patient care and make notes directly in a patient’s chart. Plus, with the improvement of AI, charting can be done in a fraction of the time.
Billing and claims
Tracking down ICD codes or trying to decipher rushed notes delays your billing teams. They should be focused on submitting claims for reimbursement and making sure patients paying out-of-pocket are getting accurate invoices.
Connected RCM software brings clean claims to light faster and more accurately. Notes that contain exactly what’s needed in the right places mean you can keep your cash flow moving efficiently.
Outcome tracking and reporting
When was the last time your team pulled a patient care report? How much time did it take? Did they have to enter individual files? Clean data to remove any identifiable information?
Reporting shouldn’t be a hassle—it should be rewarding. Flexible options that fit your needs as a provider and community partner can improve your patient outcomes, ensuring you’re providing value-based care to the people who need it most.
How Royal Life Centers streamlined their workflows
Operating treatment and maintenance programs across multiple sites in Washington and Arizona is no easy task. As far apart geographically as their treatment centers were, Royal Life Centers’ business management software seemed just as distant. In fact, at one point, just pulling data from different systems to create reports was a full-time job. They also had problems with their billing since insurance information would get lost between their systems and the vendor they were relying on—a vendor that also made frequent mistakes.
When Royal Life Centers switched to Sunwave’s seamless, connected platform, the results were night and day.
- 95% higher clinician satisfaction scores
- Increase in revenue and cash on hand of 80%
- Time to bill: Cut in half
Plus, they were able to switch to Sunwave at all of their facilities—over 900 beds in total—with no downtime, no issues, and no problems.
How much time can you save by switching to Sunwave?
Sunwave is a seamless solution designed specifically for the challenges behavioral health providers face on a daily basis. Our customer relationship management platform connects directly with EMR, patient engagement, and RCM functions so your team has data they need when they need it. Call 561.576.6037 or schedule a demo online now.
