Hiring a physician assistant (PA) is a wise business decision, even if it seems like its a costly one. And, the benefits of bringing a PA into your practice may just far outweigh that cost — often, it can even increase practice revenue.
A PA works closely with the physician to help provide patient care the same way the doctor would. The physician supervises the PA, but the PA is able to write prescriptions and provide patient care without the supervision of the physician.
While hiring a PA may be a good way to increase your revenue and expand your practice, you'll want to ensure you have an organized physician assistant schedule that accommodates both the PA's needs and the needs of your doctors and patients. Physician assistant scheduling software can help with this. Online scheduling is one of the simplest ways to:
- Increase patient growth
- Improve patient satisfaction
- Improve physician/PA satisfaction
- Reduce manual tasks.
Below are 5 reasons why you should implement this online scheduling software.
1. Helps Better Maintain your PAs Work-Life BalancePAs work long hours. Having an erratic and unorganized shift scheduling system can make these long hours seem even longer. It can result in job and personal life discontent and unhappiness for your physician assistants. When your PAs are unsatisfied, they're distracted and unproductive.
Your objective is to maintain consistent rotations in scheduled days or hours to allow your physician assistants to fit their personal lives and sleep into their schedules as well as their work. Otherwise, you'll end up with a higher PA turnover rate.
2. Fill Open Appointments
Each open appointment you have with no PAs scheduled costs you money. You base your "charges per visit" on your costs, therefore, when you have empty slots on your schedule, you're losing money required to keep your practice afloat.
3. Increase Patient Satisfaction
Patients often complain about two things:
- How long it takes to schedule an appointment
- How long they have to wait on the phone
Emergency medicine scheduling software can help you address these concerns and improve your patients' experience.
4. Ensures Fair Scheduling Rotations
Fair scheduling rotations are the essence of any medical practice's physician scheduling requirements. Many PAs feel they're not receiving a fair rotation. You can set shift scheduling software to provide specific rotations of weekends and holidays. And, it can even keep records so if any accusations arise regarding fair rotations not taking place, you'll have the documentation you need to support your rotation process fairness.
5. Reduce Manual Tasks
Many technology products make the bold statement of reducing your practice’s manual tasks, but not all deliver. However, physician assistant scheduling software does and allows patients to book online appointments. And, the more you introduce it to your patients, the more they'll make use of it, resulting in fewer calls over time into the practice.
Let's say each patient call takes around 10 minutes. That's a lot of saved time by allowing your patients to use online scheduling software to book their own appointments. You may reallocate this saved time to other important revenue-generating tasks like patient collections follow-up calls, patient recalls or online reputation management.
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