When Was the Last Time You Visited a Doctor?


 

Your older daughter is six months into a one year accelerated nursing program. So far, she has completed clinicals on a labor and delivery floor, a postpartum unit, and. veterans administration hospital. She has also spent a Saturday in a medical surgery hospital watching a seven hour procedure. Next up is a five week rotation on a psych ward in a local hospital. Between these clinicals she has attended classes, taken tests, participated in simulation labs, and done community visits to schools, retirement homes, and individual residences. The one thing that she has never done so far, however, is spend any time at a family medicine office. And while she certainly has plenty of experience being a patient in a family medicine office, she is interested in getting to visit one of these locations to get a behind the scenes view of how these offices operate.

As the nation as a whole continues to look for ways to fill the immediate and future needs in the medical field, there are many different kinds of programs that are available to prepare nurses for a future, and varied career. From the traditional four year nursing programs that are offered at many universities to the one and two year accelerated programs that help college graduates turn their first degree into a Bachelor of Science, there are many ways that the health science field is trying to recruit more interested and eligible candidates. With the need for nurses being so significant in many parts of the country and in many different settings, in fact, the best preparatory programs seek to expose nursing students to as many options as possible. From family medicine offices to out patient surgery centers, one of the tasks that nurses need to become familiar with is the paperless digital check-in software platforms that are combined with the latest digital medical records options.

Family Medicine Offices and Obstetric Offices Rely on Electronic Document Management Systems for Efficiency
Physicians, medical practice administrators, as well as health care CEOs and CFOs, can all attest to the need for accurate, efficient, and easy to run medical check-in packages. Finding a way to increase patient interaction with any medical staff is important, so it is equally important that there is an efficient way to verify the information for returning patients, as well as gather needed data from new patients. All health care managers, in fact, have a strong need to understand that there are tools out there that have technologies that can increase their clinic efficiency and revenue, while at the same time reduce the need to hire more staff. In turn, these digital platforms can also reduce provider burnout. Creating a setting where these digital tools will be part of the normal fabric of a medical practice will be imperative in the next five to 10 years. In fact, many experts predict that medical practices that are not able to embrace these technologies will become archaic and their patients will likely leave these practices for medical practices that are more digitized.

The process of visiting the doctor for a routine check up is often stressful. Even worse, a visit to a doctor for lab results when you are fearing a scary diagnosis can be nearly debilitating. For these reasons alone it is important that medical staffs do every thing that they can to efficiently gather the information that they need when a patient enters an office. With the use of digital software, many receptionists and nurses are able to more accurately verify patient information while also maintaining eye contact and establishing a rapport that will allow the visit to go as smoothly as possible.

Currently, there are 472,560 primary care physicians in the U.S. When you realize that there are more than 7.2 million open healthcare positions available in the world today because of staffing shortages you begin to realize the impact that these shortages are going to have on the future of the healthcare that we all receive. With the latest software used for check-in and patient data, however, it is important to know that there are some plans in place to ease the work load of an already overworked profession.

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