What is the purpose of the daily appointment schedule How is it handled to preserve patient confidentiality?

Patient Appointment Scheduling

In the healthcare industry, focusing on the efficiency and quality of your services is important. Few other industries deal with the restraints, regulations, and requirements that the health industry does. When it comes to running a practice, lab, or other healthcare service, it’s necessary to focus on efficiency and the patient’s experience. Reducing no-shows, scheduling patients appropriately, and maintaining patient confidentiality are important objectives.

With patient appointment scheduling services, a call center can effectively manage and handle all of your scheduling needs. Using proven strategies and professional agents, a call center can help eliminate no-shows, increase efficiency, minimize costs, and improve your patients’ experience.

Why Appointment Scheduling Is Important in Your Medical Office

Appointment scheduling is key for any medical office. Each day, you are likely scheduling numerous patients for appointments at your office. Nearly every medical office deals with appointments, including walk-in clinics, where follow-up visits or check-ups are often needed for patients. Without appointments, you likely do not have a functioning medical office.

Appointments are your patients’ only way to access your services. With poorly managed appointment scheduling services, your patients lose that access. Improper appointment scheduling can not only create stress for your patients, but also for you and your staff. Without the right appointment scheduling, you might have more no-shows, create more work for your office, and see fewer patients throughout the day.

Ultimately, you may even lose patients. With patient appointment scheduling call center services, your medical office can eliminate these common problems and increase the efficiency of your services.

Benefits of Appointment Scheduling Call Center Services

There are many benefits to using appointment scheduling service solutions.

Staff Benefits

With appointment scheduling services, you can reduce the workload of your staff and free them up to work on other tasks for your office. A large percentage of your staff’s daily work is likely on scheduling appointments, which costs you time and money. By outsourcing this work, you can increase your staff’s responsibilities while avoiding overstaffing or understaffing problems. With appointment scheduling services, you can be assured that your appointment scheduling is handled with the utmost professionalism, minimizing the common issues that cost you time and revenue.

Patient Benefits

Patients receive higher quality service when your medical office uses patient appointment scheduling. They can schedule appointments at their own convenience, choosing from all available times and dates. With scheduling services, your patients can receive fast and professional service at any time of day, meaning that they will never struggle to schedule an appointment with your medical office. These services ensure that the process is easier and more stress-free for your patients.

Other Benefits

Increased revenue, greater patient satisfaction, and a reduction of common issues that affect medical offices (e.g. no-shows, overlapping appointments, busy periods with long waits, slow periods with few patients) are all benefits that you can receive by using patient appointment scheduling. Call centers can help your medical office operate at an even higher professional level, ensuring the best service for patients and the least difficulties for your office.

Improve the Patient Experience with 3C’s Appointment Scheduling Services

3C Contact Center offers patient appointment scheduling services for medical offices. Using proven strategies, years of experience, and cutting-edge technology, we can provide the service that ensures the highest quality experience for your patients. We have represented medical offices throughout the GTA and Canada, helping them increase the number of patients they see, increase patient satisfaction, and reduce common problems that cost them money. Through our trained agents and industry software applications, we can ensure the smoothest appointment scheduling that provides the greatest service for your patients.

Could your medical office benefit from appointment scheduling? As the leading provider of outsourced call center solutions, 3C Contact Services teaches its partners the necessary customer service skills needed to engage and retain patients, customers, and clients. Call us today at 1-888-353-2335.

Robust patient privacy and confidentiality are a fundamental part of the Australian healthcare system. Protecting the intimate information entrusted to medical professionals is part and parcel of the job.

But in a world that is becoming ever more digital, how can patient facing organisations be sure that they are keeping information appropriately protected at all times? This is a growing issue as we increasingly see the amount of patient data growing. In the digital age we also have more need than ever to connect different parts of the healthcare system to create a seamless experience for both doctors and patients.

Let’s have a look at some of the implications of patient confidentiality in Australia, and some practical ways to keep information safe in the modern medical environment.

What is patient confidentiality in Australia?

In the context of healthcare, confidentiality is referred to as the non-disclosure of information received by medical practitioners in the course of their relationship with patients. This includes health professionals such as doctors, but also administration staff who will be handling sensitive forms and other intelligence. Essentially, any information given by a patient must not be passed to a third party either intentionally or non intentionally.

Patient confidentiality is often seen as an ethical obligation for medical staff, but in Australia a breach of confidence is also recognised as a crime in common law.

Why is it so important to protect patient confidentiality?

Patient confidentiality is an essential part of maintaining the integrity of the medical sector and should be followed for the below reasons:

• Trust: Medicine is all about trust. Patients disclose very personal information to those in the healthcare industry in the faith that it will only be used to help them. Without trust,  people will be less likely to seek help when they need it, resulting in an increased level of illness in the community
• Digital hacking: Most patient information is now kept digitally which, while convenient, increases the risk of hacks (the number of reported attacks on health care information has increased by 125% since 2010, according to the Ponemon Institute’s Fifth Annual Study). Losing this information can lead to events of identity theft and fraud which have the potential to damage patients’ lives and livelihoods
• Legal disciplinary action: Data breaches and failure to uphold patient confidentiality can result in everything from fines to prison sentences for those responsible. It is best for the profession and those working in it to uphold this ethical responsibility

5 ways to maintain patient confidentiality

The digital world has revolutionised patient confidentiality. How can you hope to protect information with the growing dependence on online portals and device connectivity?

1. Create thorough policies and confidentiality agreements

Drawing up all encompassing and wide-ranging confidentiality agreements or policies means that everybody on your medical team knows exactly what is expected of them in every eventuality.

A confidentiality agreement is, in its essence, a legal document which specifies exactly what information cannot be shared outside of the working premises. This policy must be read from cover to cover by every staff member and signed. It can also be regularly shared with patients to demonstrate that your organisation upholds strict confidentiality procedures.

2. Provide regular training

People adhere best to policies and practices when they fully understand why they are in place. Holding regular training sessions for all your staff members, from administrators to doctors and nurses, helps to reinforce how essential confidentiality requirements are, and provides a refresh of staff duties and expectations.

For best results, make these training times fun and a good opportunity to learn while getting to know colleagues. Taking a creative approach to the topic and introducing games can also help the information be more engaging whilst also being a positive experience for your staff.

3. Make sure all information is stored on secure systems

As the standard of healthcare improves and populations expand the amount of patient data being stored has increased astronomically. As a result, many practices and clinics may face challenges in correctly storing this information, both in terms of where huge data quantities can be saved, and making the information easily accessible. Alongside these systematic difficulties it is essential that the highest level of security and digital protection is used when storing patient data. Purchasing platforms or using cloud providers that ensure your data is safe is the best way to look after this.

Furthermore it is important that only strictly necessary personnel have access to this data. Levels of password protection that controls access is also worth considering and investing in.

4. No mobile phones

An easy way to eliminate possible threats to patient confidentiality is to strictly limit or remove mobile phones from patient areas. This ensures that no one could either maliciously or accidentally record or photograph private records or information. According to research by Imperial College healthcare NHS trust in London 65% of doctors used SMS to communicate with colleagues about a patient, opening up concerns about privacy.

This can sometimes be a difficult rule to enforce given the proliferation of digital devices. However, regularly reminding staff and patients why it is their best interests can help to reduce any resistance.

5. Think about printing

Once all your technical solutions and security is in place it can be tempting to think you have everything sorted. However, printed materials that contain key patient information are often overlooked. Labels, forms and printed notes can easily be misplaced, or even stolen, if they are in a busy area. Having streamlined, easy-to-use and secure printing systems is well worth investing in.

Brother’s print solutions for healthcare provide Cerner certified print solutions. They can link seamlessly with secure cloud storage, PDF and can provide password protected printing.

Are there any situations where confidentiality can be breached?

The straightforward answer is yes. In some special circumstances it is legally acceptable and necessary to breach patient confidentiality. There are many complex situations that could result in the need for private patient information to be shared, but the most common are:

• Legal requirements: Certain instances must be reported to authorities regardless of whether they reveal personal information. For example, suspected child abuse, reporting cause of death and informing authorities of the spread of certain infectious diseases
• Implied or express consent: In specific circumstances, individuals’ medical records can be shared with appropriate guardians. This is often the case for dependant children and also adults who require extensive care. Carers can request this information
• On the grounds of public interest: This is a tricky one as there are no clear definitions around when this would apply. In general, it refers to a situation where withholding certain information presents the real risk of danger to an individual or the public at large. This could be a threat to national security or where a medical practitioner has reasonable grounds to think that a patient means to seriously harm another

How can Brother help?

Brother provides specialised healthcare printing solutions, designed with patient confidentiality at front of mind. Our products improve efficiency across the board to help both staff and patients to reduce stress and maximise resources.

• Improved point of care efficiency: Efficient, connected printing saves time and resources so more can be put into helping fight illness. Our applied print and imaging solutions are tailored to each clinics’ individual needs to reduce errors and improve patient outcomes.
• Stronger compliance and security measures: As we know, patient confidentiality is critical at all times. Controlled printing solutions allow you to maintain strict security oversight and comfortably conform to privacy policies, without wasting time.
• Secure Devices: In the age of network connectivity, you have to ensure that your networked devices are configured to limit to potential external threats. This includes printers and multifunction devices as they could become a point of entry. Brother devices have never had a security breach and provides the important security features that allows your IT technicians to protect it from hackers.

To learn more about printing solutions to ensure your organisation can protect your patient’s confidential information, get in touch with the experts at Brother for a free consultation.

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