The 4 Steps of an Effective Patient Pre-Screening Process

As the number of patients infected with COVID-19 continues to rise, practices must be creative when it comes to providing care. Everyone deserves care, but not all types of infections require an on-site visit. Practice must focus efforts on patients with the most severe symptoms, while still providing remote care to those in need. To get it right, practices should adopt a new pre-screening process that uses technology to help them scale up care, without scaling up staff.

Here are the steps to an approach worth considering:

1.   Online Chat

Using the right software, it’s easy to add a chat tool to your website. This makes it easy to chat with multiple patients, evaluate their symptoms, and begin to understand what types of care they need.

2.   Telephony

While not as scalable as a webchat, traditional phone calls are still an effective way to understand a patient’s needs. Consider using a phone call as a second step for patients that have more urgent needs. If it’s clear they have a severe care the requires a visit, skip to step four.

3.   Telehealth Appointment

You can evaluate patients with a flu, cold, or milder symptoms via a video chat. This keeps them safe at home (away from patients who might carry a more severe infection), but also allows you to give them basic care or even write prescriptions quickly. Check out this post for some tips on using telehealth solutions.

4.   Office Visit

After you’ve evaluated symptoms through one of the methods above, you can schedule office visits for those that need them most. Be sure to set up a remote waiting room so that patients coming to your office keep a safe distance from one another.

Conclusion

Healthcare is changing. The wisest practices are finding ways to accelerate and streamline patient care using some of the latest technologies, such as patient messaging tools and video chat solutions. Using tools like these, practices can maintain excellent patient care even in the face of tremendous demands.

If you’re looking for an easy way to add a WebChat to your site, or to improve the ways you communicate with patients, Swell is offering their communications package free to all practices for 60 days. Check out this page to get started.

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