Increasing patient & study volume and adopting new modalities allows your radiology practice to be more profitable and expand the patient care you provide. But pursuing these changes requires strategic planning to execute an efficient implementation as there are many components to these additions. Creating a plan with set benchmarks will ensure the changes to your workflow will run smoothly. Planning ensures that as growth occurs, wait times don’t increase and you maintain a high level of quality care. This will assist you in surpassing your targets. But what do you have to take into consideration when creating your strategy?
1. Communicate, communicate, communicate – Communicating the changes with staff and training on the changes ensures every user is ready for changes in the workflow. When growing your practice, it’s important to understand your staff’s capabilities and to see if they have the necessary skills to accomplish your master plan. Start with internal staff surveys to assess their skills and abilities to see where they need extra training. Surveys are a great opportunity to remind them of the organizational goals of the practice. Plus, it gives them a chance to provide you with feedback. Use RamSoft e-Learning to get your staff front-line ready!
2. Do an infrastructure analysis – As you pursue changes to your practice, it’s essential to spend some time creating an inventory spreadsheet of your current hardware. Solutions that improve patient care and productivity need to be built on a robust framework, so all its features can efficiently operate.
3. Workflow changes – As your organization grows and more modalities and facilities are added to accommodate the growth, you may find the need to modify your radiology workflow. Workflow consideration is the area most overlooked in the planning process, as imaging centers work to keep up with their ever-expanding communities. Fortunately, RamSoft Universal Worklist, our customizable query builder engine, enables you to build almost any worklist without the need for programming or SQL knowledge. This means you can quickly adjust RamSoft to your growing imaging center and as you change, develop and transform your facility; you are safe in the knowledge that you will not outgrow RamSoft!
Conclusion:
Try your best to eliminate ad-hoc behavior by writing out and communicating to staff your vision and changes. As you grow your practice, your team may feel uncertainty, and so, creating a plan, a strategy, and assessing their abilities will prevent your clinic from facing hurdles. The technical aspect of growing your practice is essential to plan as well. Taking the time to project manage changes to the workflow when adapting to user role changes and new modalities will prevent your team from facing setbacks. If you plan all these things, as your practice grows, you will surpass your targets.
