Practice Reputation: Why Your EHR Matters

When you’re looking to boost your practice’s brand, you might go through a mental checklist of areas to cover. Knowledgeable and personable staff? Check. Clean, inviting reception areas and patient rooms? Check. The latest specialty-specific EHR? Check?

Reputation Depends on More Than Medical Expertise

It’s critical to the image of an aesthetic practice to demonstrate that you keep up-to-date with the latest beauty trends, treatments, and procedures. However, upholding your practice’s image extends beyond your actual services. It includes the technology you use to support overall patient engagement and experience. Leading-edge technology can help your practice’s operations run more smoothly to holistically support the best end-to-end patient experience. That’s why taking advantage of the right solutions serves to elevate an aesthetic practice’s reputation, both online (as patients now have multiple avenues to deliver feedback) and in person (through direct feedback and word-of-mouth reputation building).

The Right Technology Can Drive an Enhanced Patient Experience

What is the connection between purpose-built health care technology and enhanced brand equity? There are several significant ways innovative tools can positively impact your practice.

Enhanced, high-touch patient interaction. This should be the cornerstone of any aesthetics practice, and a next-generation EHR solution with a user-friendly interface helps providers easily traverse the patient chart so they can spend more time interacting with the patient with undivided attention. Features such as quick access to relevant, most commonly used screens allow physicians to move efficiently and intuitively through the documenting process, which means medical professionals can spend less time on administrative tasks. This, in turn, improves patient satisfaction as it supports the level of service they expect from an aesthetics practice.

Improved lead response time. Multiple research studies show that prompt response and follow-up to sales inquiries is critical to optimizing lead conversion rates, and while automated messages can certainly play a role in replying to inquiries, an aesthetics practice must include personalized communication as part of lead response to convey the right individualized attention. Advanced lead management solutions converge technological and human elements by instantly alerting the practice’s staff of new inquiries and tracking response time. Further, these solutions generate helpful follow-up lists and daily to-do items and can send automated email campaigns to unconverted leads. The result? More responsiveness, a referenceable audit trail for contacts—and more leads that become patients.

Reduced friction in the payment process. Consumer expectations have expanded as technology has become a seamless part of daily life, and this is no different with patients of an aesthetics practice. Making the payment process a “non-event” (meaning that it is as unobtrusive and easy as possible) goes a long way in conveying the right brand image. This might include features such as a convenient and user-friendly online payment interface or in-room payment capabilities at the practice’s physical location, for example. As data privacy and security become an increasing concern for patients, it’s also critical that the practice’s digital payment solution communicates the safety and confidentiality of their sensitive information. Leading aesthetic practices make the transaction process simple, streamlined, and safe by implementing advanced technologies.

Increased visibility and engagement. The last few years have witnessed an increase in health care consumerism, coupled with a wide spectrum of digital behaviors and preferences among different adult generations. From Baby Boomers to Gen-Xers to Millennials and beyond, aesthetic practices can meet patients’ varying needs by using feature-rich patient portals. With online and mobile capabilities such as digital forms, appointment scheduling, and more, practices provide greater transparency and interaction with patients, which studies have shown support better overall satisfaction. Not only are patient portals important in extending excellent service beyond the walls of the practice, but they also support financial objectives, as digital and self-service payment options have shown to boost patient accounts receivable.

Multichannel touchpoints. Lastly, aesthetics practices may consider the use of teleconsultation as a way of offering alternate methods for contacting physicians if an in-person appointment is not feasible. As part of a future-facing patient experience, this offers an additional option for patients to interact with physicians and expresses the practice’s modernity. Again, this an additional way of catering to different patient behaviors and preferences.

Better Operations, Better Experience, Better Satisfaction

Make sure the technology you’re using is helping, not hurting, your brand reputation. If your EHR and related technologies aren’t enabling your practice to convey the right image from all angles, consider transitioning to the right tools for a consistent, positive patient experience. The boost you need in patient satisfaction—and your reputation—is at your fingertips.