Finding the right balance between following sanitation requirements and scheduling client appointments is crucial as the world recovers from COVID-19. While adhering to health and safety guidelines remains an essential part of keeping clients safe during in-person visits, it can cause them to become lengthier due to personal protective equipment (PPE) requirements. Fortunately, the addition of virtual consultations can help ease this burden. Part two of our blog series, Returning To a New Normal, will go over balancing safety protocols and appointments and how Doctor Genius can provide your practice with virtual consultation technology to help meet your patients’ needs.
Keeping Your Practice Safe
Although rollout for the COVID-19 vaccine has begun, it is still necessary for practices to take the right precautions to keep their teams and patients safe. According to the American Dental Association Council on Dental Practice, offices must remain diligent about sanitation requirements due to the lack of full immunity and transmission uncertainty. All healthcare practitioners, including fully vaccinated people, are recommended to wear PPE, watch their distance, and wash their hands frequently.
Safer But Lengthier Appointments
Infection control procedures require healthcare practitioners to wear PPE equipment such as gowns, eyewear, masks, and gloves. After each patient, treatment teams must throw away their disposable masks and gloves, wash their hands, and wear a new pair of gloves before seeing a new patient. Practices must also clean and sterilize their tools and disinfect the examination room surfaces, including the chairs, drawer handles, and countertops.
While necessary, these additional steps and processes can also lengthen the time of an office visit. Practices must adapt to meet the needs of clients while also keeping them safe. Changes may include expanding office hours to accommodate more patients and offering virtual appointments to reduce the need for lengthier in-person visits. Doctor Genius provides virtual consultation technology to increase your practice’s efficiency while giving patients the quality care they deserve.
Virtual Appointments Are a Part of the New Normal
Virtual appointments have grown exponentially during the pandemic, with the CDC reporting a 154% increase in telehealth visits during the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. As the pandemic slows, it is unlikely that the current high utilization of virtual healthcare visits will continue, but it will remain higher than before COVID-19. Although virtual appointments will not replace in-person ones, they will become a standard in the healthcare industry as we enter the new normal. This care method is beneficial not only for helping patients feel safe and comfortable but also for creating valuable time savings.
Save Practice and Patient Time
Virtual consultations can save your practice time by reducing the amount of time spent with patients without sacrificing the quality of care. These virtual appointments can help healthcare professionals facilitate treatment, guidance, and education more efficiently. The convenience and flexibility of virtual consultations can reduce late and missed visits, which minimizes income loss and scheduling delays. Saving time can benefit your practice’s bottom line and improve the patient experience through quick scheduling, expedited assessments and treatment recommendations, and faster access to care.
Offices can expand their availability hours with virtual visits since they reduce the barriers for patients previously restricted by work hours or provider location. Since these visits often focus on patient screening and maintenance, they also allow providers to focus on the next steps. The virtual visit enables appointments to occur faster than ever before and produces a more patient-centered care system that empowers practices to focus on treatment and diagnosis.
Find the Right Balance With Doctor Genius
Doctor Genius offers patient-first technology solutions to help your practice provide quality care remotely. Smart and innovative tools, such as contactless forms and secure message sending, allow you to pre-screen and evaluate patients to save time and make critical decisions regarding at-risk patients before they come to your office. We can help your practice communicate with clients where it matters the most and transform the patient experience. Contact us for more information about our marketing solutions!
Doctor Genius, located at 16800 Aston Street, Suite 270, Irvine, CA 92606, provides a range of services for practice success. We seek to meet our clients’ needs by providing a variety of marketing, SEO, practice optimization tools, and coaching to transform the healthcare experience. Though we work to provide the most accurate information, the content found on this website is solely intended for entertainment purposes. Therefore, we cannot guarantee that the information provided is entirely correct. You may not use the information on this site to cure, prevent, or diagnose a perceived medical issue. If you have healthcare-related needs, please speak directly to a healthcare professional. Never self-perform medical treatments discussed on this website. All images displayed are also for entertainment purposes only, and personal experiences may differ. Please note that the business tactics mentioned on this site might not be applicable to your industry or practice.
