Create Checklists for your Patients

Read the transcript:

Jason: All right. Welcome. We’re gonna kick off. For those of you just joined us, my name’s Jason Barnes. And I’m here joined by the head of our…both our training team as well as our Help Desk, Jessica Pancoast. And today we’re gonna talk about…so I’ll talk about the feature but we’re gonna get mostly into why this feature involves great practice management and making sure that your patients get the same health care delivered to them day in and day out.

So healthcare delivery is not just, you know, treating a patient but it’s also making sure that the right things happen to the patient, gains an understanding of why they’re there, what is their experience is gonna be like, and then duplicating it over and over and over again. So that’s what today’s topic is, and our webinar for this week. So to kick that off, I’m gonna bring up the term “checklist”. I’ve been to many practices across this great land have seen lots of checklists. I know you have as well. What form did you see them in?

Jessica: Paper.

Jason: Paper?

Jessica: Post-it note.

Jason: Post-it notes are my favorite. Post-it notes. And where are those post-it notes located?

Jessica: Usually around the monitor.

Jason: The monitor has been the place. But I actually see them on paper charts as well. I see them on doors. I’ve actually seen one stuck to a kid. All right. Where these are the things that need to get done with this kid, and that was only one time. It was in Texas and the kid didn’t mind. But there’s a better way. What kinds of things need to happen for a patient? Well, we’re gonna explore that for just a moment or two here. And Jess, while we’re doing that, you mind finding that day one? Check those so we can look at it.

And what kind of things have to happen to your patients? Verifications. Patient comes in. You want to make sure that if they have insurance to, you know, “Can they use it? What’s their deductible?” You know, so the doctor knows when they go to have a financial discussion with that patient. You know, what’s happening? I’m not gonna put a comprehensive list together today as an example, but we are going to start talking about the things that need to happen. Scheduling, treatment plans needed to be given, do they need to sign waivers or ABNs. Whatever has to happen for that patient, it’s usually not a list of two or three things, but a list of 10 plus things.

How many times does it have to happen? It has to happen with every patient. There’s no time that you want a patient to miss that process. Even if a step doesn’t apply to them, like an ABM because they’re not a Medicare patient, it’s not the worst thing in the world to make sure that we have a task list listed for that patient. So most of the clients that come and talk to us are ones who have those checklists via paper or we didn’t talk about the most dreaded way, Jess, just committed to memory. I knew you’d get it. Committed to memory, right? How did the practice owner, how does an office manager, how does a staff member remember all those steps that need to happen? They’re on the mission. They’re there for the right reasons, but it doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen every single time. There’s too many things that happen in a busy practice for someone to competently and very systematically remember every step that needs to happen.

So, we wanna show you today how you’ll address missed steps in your patient health care delivery process. Is it foolproof? No. But is this provided a much, much better automated framework for you and your staff to do two things, remember the steps and then measure which steps are or are not being completed for those patients. So that’s gonna be the rest of the focus today. So we wanna make sure that every single patient gets their insurance verified. Every single patient has a recorded finding schedule. Every single patient has a care plan put in there. Every single patient signs all the things that they need to sign. Every single patient has a tour of the office, if that’s something that you wanna have happen. It can be customized for the patient process that you would like to have happen.

Now today, I’m only talking about…patients are accusing me right now while I’m talking about patients. These checklists can apply to a lot of other scenarios. Now, we can get into some of those but I’ll just list a few right now that come to mind. How about discharging a patient or how about when a patient needs to be re-signed? There are specific things that we need to do. Deductibles need to be checked again. Are there any additional business? Did their insurance change? Did they attend an event? Did they get their family members involved? Have you remembered to talk to them about their home treatment plans? We have lots of things that we want to ask patients about. Most of the time excellent practice owners get away with, doing some of it is good enough.

Here we’re making them suggestion and we found, working with a huge network of providers, that doing more of it or dare I say all of it, you can really impact a patient’s life. So Jess is gonna help us by showing us what a checklist is and helping us understand how we can use a checklist by looking at it in play, and then she’s gonna show us how we could make one of those.

Jessica: All right. So I’m actually going to go…I was on the page looking up in the name of an example checklist for you guys, but I’m actually going to bring out to the task workbench to open off this checklist. Most of the people have this workbench open anyway so you’re not going to a separate place in the system to create and open up a checklist. To open up the checklist, all you have to do is click the new button at the top of your task workbench and select checklist. On this page, you can then use the drop-down down at the bottom to select which checklist you wanna open it up to. Most of the time it’s going to be about a specific patient so you can go ahead and attach a patient to the checklist. And then, if you happen to have a checklist that you needed to send an owner or a requester for, you can go ahead and do that here as well. Some of the ones that you can create can have these automatically filled in for you. And then you can…

Jason: There’s a manual way of opening your checklist?

Jessica: Yes. This is the manual way. And then you just hit execute, and you can see up at the top yellow notification that tickets were opened based on you executing this checklist. The user that I am right now will actually only get two of those checklists or task from that checklist because you can have a task with open different tasks to different individuals depending on who needs to complete that particular task. Right now I am logged in as the doctor, and he only gets two of this task from the checklist that I opened up.

Jason: So, we’ll stop right there. So in memory management, we’re hoping that these things get done. If we remember to ask your staff member, you know, there’s really…we have to take them at their word. And the only time you’ll find out that something didn’t happen like making a follow-up call or having an x-ray reports when you remember to go and look at a patient list, and see whether or not something did or didn’t happen with memory management.

With your paper management, you can know…we’ve seen practices successfully, you know, do this. It’s a lot of discipline, right? You’re gonna go look to your piece of paper. You now look at the patients. You’re gonna go patient by patient and check out what needs to be done. In this particular case, when Jess shows you how to manually open up one of these, now you’ve got the task on people’s work benches. Like any other task, as soon as it’s done it is pended to that requester that she was just talking about to verify that the work stepped up.

So now we have not only transparency into what tasks are assigned to people, but when something is completed is no longer a memory management. Verification step is added. Practice owner, office managers, members assigned in that moment. They can now check to make sure that that process that’s supposed to happen for every one of your patients in a situation is taking place. And we can show you in a little while actually how you would measure that.

Jessica: All right. So, this is a very manual way of opening up this checklist. You went in and you hit new, you selected, it and you were the one actually going in and opening up this checklist and opening up all this task for that checklist to the individuals. But I wanna show you a way that it can happen automatically for you, and you can check that out by gonna configuration practice schedule and it’s connected with the alerts that can pop up on the schedule when a patient checks in. Rather than having an alert pop up when a patient checks in when certain conditions are met, you instead can have a checklist automatically open. And I am actually on the newer version of our notification page but it works very similar on the older version as well.

To create a new alert, I’m just going to go ahead and hit the plus sign, and this over on the right-hand side will probably look a little bit more familiar. I’m going to give it a name, New Patient, and I actually don’t wanna pop up message because I want this to execute a checklist instead. So instead of filling in a pop-up messages, I’m going to turn off the pop-ups. I’m gonna turn off the Patient Facing Stop which means that the patient will not get a red screen at the kiosk when they check in, and instead I’m going to go down to the execute checklist, and I’m going to select the checklist that I want to pop up or to automatically open when the patient checks in.

Now I want it to happen for certain conditions, so I’m going to add the rule that it is the first visit. Actually not that one. I’m gonna do that one. On the first visit since a particular date, and I’m going to say that, you know, I’ve been using the system for a year, so let’s say first visit since last November 1st, and then I’m going go Done Editing, and Save. Now, oops. It won’t let me save it. No note. All right. I’m gonna hit save. Now I have this automatic checklist. As soon as the patient checks in for the first time since last November, which, at this point, is basically going to indicate a new patient, this new patient checklist is going to automatically execute, and the people who are set up to receive those tasks in a checklist will find those task now on their Workbench.

Jason: So previous methods, you’re hoping that your staff members remember this or look at the piece of paper and then stay disciplined enough to actually do it, or the sticky note on the monitor, right? In the new system, if they forget to do it, you don’t have a sticky note to look at. The practice owner or the office manager is able to look at outstanding tasks that are not completed and say, “These are the ones that happen,” and or “That didn’t happen.” Every single time a new patient is checked in, this is going to be triggered. And so you know if somebody wants to memory manage it, they can still go do it but they’re gonna have to come back and then actually write down “Did it”, “Didn’t do it”, “Missed it”, whatever happened and then send that task back to the requester of it, and in that way we can make sure that we measure what things happen or didn’t happen.

Jessica: All right. So I’m gonna open up how to see all those?

Jason: Yeah. Absolutely.

Jessica: All right. So if you wanna see which tasks in those checklists are currently outstanding, you can go to Reports, Workflow, and Task Manager Console. I’m going to select from the second drop-down, My Practice, which means that it will show all the roles at your practice. And because my checklist had a category of Day 1, I’m going to select that category and hit go. Now, obviously we have had many of these tickets opened in the past, but you can see right on the left-hand side, you can see how many of these tickets are open and still outstanding. Right now, I am on Current Stats which means that it’s showing you the open tickets.

Jason: But when that go outstanding, the ones that need to be addressed.

Jessica: Right. They’re not closed. They’re not in pending status. They are still out there waiting for someone to address those tickets.

Jason: And again, I wanna keep comparing and contrasting. When a step is missed in an intake process or a new patient process, right? It’s a most delicate time you have because not every patient signs up for care. Is it because a step is missed? Is it because we weren’t able to get that patient the information that they needed? Did they miss an email? Did we not put them on our marketing campaign? Do we not enter their number…their cell phone number into the patient account so we can text message them? All these, you know, need to be done in order for that patient to increase their chances to actually retain their care at that practice. So we want to make sure that everyone understands what’s at stake when we’re doing this

Jessica: All right. So next we will show you guys how to actually create one of these test checklists yourself. So to do that, you’re gonna go to the Configuration, System, Task, Checklist. I’m actually already on that page, so here you’re going to click Add Task Checklist up at the top. You’re going to be able to give this checklist the name. Remember, if you’re going to ever be manually executing this checklist, you want to make sure that the name is descriptive as to which one to pick. So I’m just going name this one a Day Two Checklist.

The Active button is automatically checked for you. Obviously, if it’s inactive it’s not gonna show up anywhere and be able to be used, so you want to leave that checked. The next option, Act Show on Travelcard, there is actually a way to execute a checklist manually on the Travelcard as well, I’m just gonna go ahead and check that. And then you just hit Save. You now have a checklist to add tasks to. You find that checklist that you just named in your list and down at the bottom is where you’re going to add the tasks for that checklist. Each one, you’re gonna click Add. And you’re going get mad at me because we priority with unfilled that’s all right. Click Add, and in the first field, you’re going to click and you’re gonna give it a title. What is the information that’s going show up at the top of that particular task? What does…whoever is gonna get this task, what do they need to do in order to complete this task?

Jason: I want to be as clear as possible. And you know, if you look at any other given task, you have a complete checklist or make sure you have insurance card and driver’s license. You know, upload it into the Consents tab so those are the types of very specific task that you wanted to utilize here. So they’re gonna help at both billing as well as making sure that you have the patient record complete.

Jessica: Right. So, when you do click in here, you actually get the message about which fields are required. You need to give it a title. I’m just going to give a very general title into my example, but again you’ll wanna be very specific in what they need to do. You need to fill in the owner role. Which role is this particular task in the checklist need to go to? Remember each task can go to a different user. You just need to select who it needs to go to. So books that one to the office manager and the priority is going to be normal.

Jason: Now, if you want it towards a specific person, could you do that?

Jessica: Yes, you can. One thing to be aware of is that user with the practice, you do need to come in here and update the owner to someone else otherwise, you will get an error. We can’t open up a task to someone who’s no longer active in the system. You can also fill in the requester if you want the requester to always be the same person otherwise, you’ll need to fill that in when you’re manually opening it up.

Jason: Like we showed before.

Jessica: Yeah. The category is how you’re gonna be able to easily see those tasks on the Task Manager Console. We do have a number of options in here for you to pick from. And the start date and due date of that. You can have some of the tasks not pop up as soon as you execute the checklist. You can have it set so they don’t open for a week after, a couple days after, however, many make sense for the particular task that that row is asking someone to do. So if you do wanted to, instead of opening today, open up tomorrow, you can just go ahead and fill that in as a one.

Jason: Anything of an example something like that? I can. That’s pretty specific, you know. We’re on the phone with some providers in Florida just yesterday, and they treat a lot of children who have Medicaid. And so whenever they have a new patient with Medicaid, they have an immediate task that opens up to do a verification, authorization form. Then they have tasks that are off set for both two weeks, one month, and two months for them to check the authorization application, and then recheck benefits. They’ve both one month as well as two months. I mean, excuse me, so much. They actually want to check this for every single Medicaid patient, because the application is so challenging to get through that they know it requires follow-up over 90% of the time, so why would they wait and manually open a task, when they could automate this each and every time a Medicaid patient has checked in?

So we have those rules that you were describing to us very nicely, by the way, where we can choose, you know, for a Medicaid patient on the first visit, execute this checklist automatically. The task to complete the authorization application goes right to somebody’s Workbench, another one to check benefits goes to somebody else’s Workbench, and then their two other tasks, assuming three other tasks got two weeks, one month, and two months set for follow-up. This practice was thrilled with that. And there are lots of other practices that I’ve seen, especially with some of our franchising groups, that want to do interval checks on patients and progresses, you know, regardless of what insurance company they’re with. And so those off set dates become really nice tools because no one has to memory manage those checks. So let’s face it, reports are great, but they’re time-consuming. Here you know which new patients you have, you know what needs to happen to check them because the system automatically identifies which patients are new and assign the task at the time that they checked in. It just doesn’t become an active task for you to complete until the time is correct.

Jessica: All right. So, once you’ve filled in the information for a particular task, you’re gonna hit okay. Be aware that until you hit the space button, this line has not been saved. Those little red triangles at the top left of each field indicate that it’s unsaved information. So you go ahead and hit save. You can complete a number of tasks in the checklist before you hit save. If you want anything to show up in the body of the task that opens, perhaps you don’t want 30 tasks to open up when this checklist executes, maybe you just want 3, but there are a number of steps that need to be completed. You can put those in the body. Just click the Open Editor. Here, you can put it, you know, numbered list, and list out all of the different tasks that need to be completed.

Jason: So let’s get a little bit more into why someone would choose to do that as opposed to opening up an individual task. If that patient comes in, those are all the paperwork, has a conversation. and there are nine tasks associated with that intake process. It becomes cumbersome actually to go into each individual task or write them down. As opposed to doing that, if they are saying that the one task of intake is complete, that includes those nine tasks that were listed in the editor portion or what we call the body of the ticket, a lot of practices have found that lighter skin on the tasks much, much easier to manage. So when somebody pens that one ticket, they’re attesting to the fact that all nine items were completed. It depends on the level of specificity that the practice actually wants to maintain and in measurement of compliance with the practices, standards for administering health care.

Jessica: All right.

Jason: So anything else we wanna show them? The task manager console would be the only other items, so you can go back there Jess, and just kind of talk through it. Now, just talk about those drop-downs at the top with current staff is where I’ll spend a little bit of time, because I mentioned measuring. So if you had, I’m just gonna use a nice easy round number of ten, patients walk through your door and you had a Day One checklist of, again, keeping our math simple here, ten tasks. We could actually run a report on this and we could just do previous months. Would you mind showing the drop-down, Jess? We’ve got a lot of different ways to look at the tasks that not only were assigned, but completed. And you can look at it by patient, by category, etc. And so, here if we are going just look at your, you know, patient and category. Would you choose that, please? And run this particular report, it will actually give you percentages and actually break down for you when the tasks are completed, what’s been done and what hasn’t been. Now, in our demonstration account, we don’t have any of those, you know…

Jessica: Tasks completed.

Jason: So we don’t have a percentage, but it will spit you out of great. You know, you’re 90%, you’re 80%, you’re 100% compliant with the processes. So, this allows you, the practice owner, the administrator, on what basis, whatever interval you want to, to go in there and actually measure how your practice is doing with implementing this process. And we actually do it ourselves. We have processes that we absolutely need. There are new practices that join us to follow, so we’re able to measure how well we’ve done in getting these things done and also will help us measure the time frame. So, it’s an additional measurement tool outside of actually assigning work. You’re gonna see how effective that you’re being. And that really gonna wrap up the demonstration portion of this, Jess. Anything else you can think to show?

Jessica: The only thing else I can think of is maybe showing them how to execute a checklist from the Travelcard.

Jason: Let’s do that. And while you’re doing it, again, it might spark something else other than what’s on our notes for right now. And if anyone does have a question, then feel free to type it in. We’ll be concluding this portion in a minute or two, but we’ll hang out for an additional, almost, 20 minutes if there’s a…any question that someone has on something else.

Jessica: All right. If you are in the Travelcard and you want to execute a checklist for the particular patient that you have up right now, you can click on the Menu button to the left of the date, and select Run Checklist. You’ll get the option of any of the checklists that do have that checkbox flagged for the checklist being available on the Travelcard. And again you’ll get the little pop-up up the top right, letting you know it executed it. When you open it up from the Travelcard, it actually automatically attaches the patient because it knows what patient you’re in, so it knows who to attach to the checklist.

Jason: So how would a doctor…what situation would they use this in?

Jessica: Well I suppose that there are something that needed to be done on a patient and they were the ones who determine it needs to be done, but it’s the front desk or the office manager who completes the action. They can just go in here and, you know, click two buttons, get that checklist executed and those tasks open up to the front desk and the office manager before the patient even leave the room. Like you know, I need you to do this and that, I’ll all have the front desk help you out.

Jason: Give you another example of one of those. I think that’s an awesome answer. Just to give a real world example, a different practice just a couple weeks ago where we recommended this, who whenever they have an orthotic, where they sell a brace, that brace requires fitting, refitting in over certain time frames, scheduling of those fittings, and sometimes even some additional ordering of materials, etc. So, when they filled out that, they wanted to make sure that somebody, you know, put an email campaign out there for the instructions of how to use the blade- brace, sleep with the brace, etc. you know, when they can take it off, when they’re required to leave it on, or there’s a lot that can go into those braces, more than meets the eye frankly. And so the doctor didn’t wanna create a rule because they don’t know, regardless of insurance company or type of patient, when they’re going to give somebody or recommend upgrades. So we just wanted that checklist to be there when he knew that he was recommending that, he would click on it, open the checklist, the staff to take care of the rest of it.

It was a feature that really was meant to help the doctors, not have to have a separate meeting and go over ins and outs of what they did with a patient to make sure that, but that has the right instructions to actually do this. If you do it enough, like this doctor does, you know, one out of every 20 patients that he sees, it’s a brace. That’s a lot of extra conversations that would be required with a staff member.

All right. If there any questions, please type in the answers, we’ll be happy happy happy together. Oh the No-shows are not today. The no-shows will be next week. So, Linda thank you for asking. We’ll make sure we get that out to you. If you’re not able to show up next week, you’ll be emailed a link to actually access it, so we’ll make sure we get it to you. So at this point, we’ll actually…will draw to conclusion on our current webinar. And if there any other questions, you know, please let us know. Thanks, Jess, for sharing that.

Jessica: No problem.

Jason: More and more we see our practices’ really trust starting to embrace the task system. I mean, last year this time we’d only had about maybe 20,000 tasks found in the month of November, and we had over 50,000 tasks come across our entire network. It’s a lot of work that’s being tracked.

Jessica: Yes. And I can tell you, I mean, just this morning I had an example where someone tried to email something to the help desk and it just was not going through, I don’t know. Typing the address wrong or whatever it might be. I was not getting email. So I walked her through a piece of a ticket attaching the file. I got the ticket. I got the task and right away. And I still have not received the email. So tasks are definitely the preferred way, very easy to check on the status and see where it is.

Jason: They know where to check whether or not somebody got your email and then actually did it, right?

Jessica: Yep.

Jason: You know, unless that person emails back with the task, you know, you gave it to your front desk. You make the assumption that it’s not noted that it’s done it, it’s not done.

Jessica: Still out there. Yeah.

Jason: So, all right. Well, if there are no other questions I will thank you all for showing up. We really do appreciate it. It’s our sincere hope that we’re able to help you guys. If there’s additional information that you like on this topic, please open a ticket to our Help Desk team or your coach and we’ll do our best to have the quick as possible. You’re not a current client and you’d like to learn a little bit more about it, you know, head to our website to ask for a consultation, we’d be happy to share screens and take you through any additional questions that you might have. And lastly, I’ll thank Jess one more time.

Jess: No problem.

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