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Stages to a Successful Pre-Office Visit Clinic Planning

As the year draws to a close, it’s an excellent time to review your pre-office visit planning workflows and plan for the following year. This depends on when your fiscal year begins, whether it is a calendar year or mid-year (July 1st to June 30th). Start by asking yourself whether the current pre-visit planning workflow is effective. Identify what is not working and consider practical ways to improve the process. To ensure success, it’s recommended that you take a care-team approach and involve all clinical and non-clinical staff that have direct patient contact at your practice. Remember that each physician practice has unique sizes, scopes, staffing resources, roles, and patient volumes. Therefore, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, focus on your practice’s current infrastructure to determine which pre-office visit planning stages are suitable and can apply to your practice.

Planning for an office visit can be helpful in several ways. By performing a pre-office visit planning workflow, clinicians and clinical staff can prepare the patient’s chart in advance with diagnostic lab or radiology orders, results retrieved, and medication management. This helps save time, reduce stress, and lower costs while allowing the care team to manage any unexpected issues that may arise during the visit. Overall, pre-office visit planning can help things run smoothly and ensure a better patient experience. If the practice is struggling with this, try a pilot.

Let us do a deep dive into the stages of successful pre-visit planning.

Before Patient Check-Out Chart Preparation for the Upcoming Visit On the Day of the Patient Visit
The practitioner wraps up the office visit and indicates interval care by ordering lab values, radiology studies, or referral to a specialist for the next visit. Use Pre-Visit Check List:

  • Review the chief complaint – the agenda/reason for the visit.
  • Review lab and radiology tests ordered by the practitioner; then retrieve the results from the facility where they were done unless they are integrated into the EMR lab and radiology results.
  • Retrieve specialist referral notes if not received yet.
  • Share any abnormal results with the ordering practitioner.
  • During clinic hours, clinic staff should be assigned to practitioners based on their practice staffing resources. It is recommended that a care team huddle be held to discuss and exchange information about the busy clinic schedule and any foreseeable challenges.
Indicate to the patient that the next visit should be scheduled before leaving the practice (only, if necessary, as instructed by the practitioner).
  • Send patient reminders, EMR dependent on this functionality, whether automated via the patient portal (if active) or SMS Text Message.
  • When rooming the patient, clinical staff will review their completed pre-appointment questionnaire with the patient.
  • Place orders now for future appointments to save time.
  • Arrange for lab values and diagnostic radiology studies (when applicable) and highlight the following action items in the patient’s after-visit summary before the next visit.
  • Practice is dependent on assigned clinical staff support for the physician’s clinic schedule.
  • For complex patients and patients with chronic conditions, consider a pre-visit phone call to gather and update the information, plus the reason for the visit, which clinical staff (RN, LPN, and MA) can do.
  • Clinical staff to quickly update the practitioner through a warm hand-off.
  • Utilizing this method focuses on the practitioner’s portion of the visit.
  • Also set up to meet patient expectations and needs.

Pre-office visit planning aims to make clinic chart preparation more efficient. This saves practitioners and staff time because the preparation allows the care team to work more smoothly with practitioners and physicians, reducing frustration and wasting time.

8 Comments

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    • Thank you I am glad. I do take the time to make sure the reader has a comprehensive understanding. If they choose to take the information I provided to improve front desk pre-visit planning, they can take some helpful tips to utilize and to implement.

  • Turbo Tigert says:

    Fantastic article! I appreciate how clearly you explained the topic. Your insights are both informative and thought-provoking. I’m curious about your thoughts on the future implications of this. How do you see this evolving over time? Looking forward to more discussions and perspectives from others. Thanks for sharing!

    • Thank you! I do believe there is still merit in the front desk pre-visit planning in the future. While automation and technology continues to evolve impacting physician practices front desk workflow, being prepped and taking into account the impact of front end accuracy and patient information collection is still important. Especially, when back end claim filing charges are held or rejected due to inaccurate information for timely payment of the expected reimbursement affecting revenue.

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