With flu and respiratory illnesses running rampant, winter can be a wildly busy time for urgent care clinics. With higher patient volumes, staff can be stretched thin. While a busy clinic can be good for your bottom line, it can be stressful for your team.. Waiting rooms become noisy, wait times increase, and there’s a higher risk of patient frustration. This can all ultimately negatively impact patient loyalty. Meanwhile, staff morale goes down as healthcare workers and administrative staff become stressed and overwhelmed with their workload.
However, investing in front desk tools and technology can improve staff workflow and decrease staff stressors. When leveraged in the right ways, these can improve both the patient experience and your staff’s experience during these busy times.
Predicting & Planning for the Seasonal Surge
Urgent care clinics know that flu and respiratory season is going to be busy. But just how busy it’s going to get can sometimes feel like a bit of a mystery. With the right tools, it can be a whole lot easier to plan for the seasonal surge.
Did you know that the CDC actually tracks seasonal influenza activity with their Weekly U.S. Influenza Surveillance Report? With this helpful tool, you can track all sorts of outpatient respiratory illness data, including areas with high illness activity, healthcare provider visits, hospitalizations, and more.
Google Trends is another helpful tool — consider tracking the search terms “flu,” “covid,” or “rsv” for your local area to see how many times people have searched those terms over the past 30 days. This can help you get an idea of illness rates in your area and help you predict surges.
One of the best aspects of both of these tools? They’re free to use.
The Dual Priority: Patient Experience and Staff Wellbeing
Respiratory season often heightens the challenges faced by both patients and staff in urgent care clinics. Navigating the balance between patient satisfaction and employee experience is always an intricate and delicate dance, but becomes especially crucial this time of year. Staff experience and patient experience are intrinsically linked, and it’s important to understand that overburdened staff can significantly impact the quality of patient care, leading to potential delays, communication breakdowns, and decreased patient satisfaction. When you cultivate a culture that invests in each patient interaction, this contributes to better patient experiences. Likewise, when staff are overworked and plagued with operational inefficiencies, the effects trickle downstream to patients, who might face long wait times or cumbersome check-in processes.
Fortunately, urgent care centers can lean into a few different strategies to improve patient satisfaction. This includes optimizing your technology workflow to support smoother front desk operations, supporting your team in any way they need, establishing a culture of recognition and accountability, and training your staff on technology and customer service techniques.
Tools to Empower Workflow
We mentioned the importance of having the right technology in place at your urgent care clinic and making sure your staff is properly trained in using it. This is especially true when it comes to technology solutions that promote front desk efficiency. Online scheduling, digital registration, mobile check-in, and saved patient profiles, can reduce your staff’s administrative burden in a big way.
When these tools are available, your team can speed up their workflow. Subsequently, this benefits your patients by providing a simpler and more engaging patient experience. But that’s not all. By reducing your team’s administrative burden, you allow your staff time and mental space to connect more meaningfully with patients, which can then reduce burnout, improve job satisfaction, and elevate the patient experience.
Tips for Measuring Success
To better inform you of what’s going on in your clinic now and to prepare for change in season and fluctuality of patient demand it’s important to measure key performance indicators (KPI) throughout the busy flu and respiratory season. You’ll want to look at metrics in a few key areas:
- Patient-centric Metrics: This includes things like average wait-times, door-to-door time, real-time patient volume, patient flow and throughput, patient ratings, and patient sentiments and satisfaction as expressed in patient reviews.
- Staff-centric metrics: Pay attention to factors like staff attrition and turnover rates, staff efficiency, and employee sentiments that they provide in employee surveys.
- Technology-centric metrics: Some effective technology metrics include usage rates, cost-savings and return on investment (ROI)
Key Takeaways
During the busy flu and respiratory season, investing in staff wellbeing is one of the most effective pathways to enhanced patient care. You have a few ways of doing so — one of the best is to equip them with tools that empower their workflow. Investing in front desk tools and technology is extremely important. In managing the holiday rush, technology is your ally — and leveraged effectively, can improve both the patient experience and your staff’s wellbeing.
