How to Effectively Partner with Your Medical Group
Whatever type of healthcare facility you run, collaborating with health professionals is crucial for achieving high-quality patient care and ensuring your daily routines go smoothly. For instance, you may need to partner with professionals who have different skills to treat patients with complex chronic diseases. To do so effectively, you need to ensure your medical group is on the same page. That means sharing knowledge and skills, and integrating information, to work well together and create a cohesive and effective healthcare team.
Use Electronic Health Records
When healthcare professionals use electronic health records, they can easily and quickly access individual patients’ health records to review things like medical histories, lab results, and much more. EHRs also make it much easier for healthcare professionals to coordinate, collaborate, and share decision-making processes. Ultimately, switching to using EHRs means you can deliver high-value care. Selecting the right software can be challenging, though. You should carefully evaluate your facility’s precise needs and find a system that supports your specific programs. For instance, you could need software that provides case management systems, practice management software, and billing applications. Spend some time selecting an EHR that suits your requirements and you will be able to effectively partner with your medical group and provide better patient services and care.
Clearly Define the Roles of Each Professional in Your Medical Group
Each healthcare professional you work with will have his or her own roles and responsibilities, but it is vital that those roles are clearly defined and that everyone understands the roles and responsibilities of everyone else. Partnering will then become much more effective and function well. When defining roles of individual professionals, do not simply write up job descriptions. Everyone needs to know exactly how each person will assist others in different situations. When lines are blurred between individuals’ roles, it becomes much more difficult to run smooth operations and put patient care first. By establishing clear roles for professionals like nurses, physicians, pharmacists, physical therapists, dieticians, and physical therapists, you can ensure each team member effectively communicates with each other.
Provide Continual Education and Training
You should provide continuing education and training programs for everyone in your medical group, not just for administrators and top-level healthcare professionals. Patient care problems will always change and evolve, and that can alter who takes on the leadership roles among your medical team for specific cases. By implementing extensive training and education, you can much better determine things like who makes decisions in certain situations and how the information will be shared across different levels of your facility. When you implement training and education, your organization can effectively coordinate, communicate, and share responsibilities, and treat one another as partners rather than as competitors. In turn, that leads to more effective operations and better patient care.
Treat Conflicts as Opportunities to Find Solutions
Differences of opinion between healthcare professionals are inevitable in any organization, but that conflict can actually be used positively to grow and collaborate more and come up with new innovative solutions. Different team members will have different perspectives and areas of expertise, so by communicating and collaborating, different people can solve issues and gain fresh insights. On the other hand, when professionals do not communicate with one another and have unresolved conflicts on how best to pursue courses of action, processes will run much less effectively. The important thing is any conflicts are addressed immediately. When you use conflicts and differences in opinion to create resolutions and improve the services your organization is delivering, your facility’s healthcare professionals will partner with one another much more effectively.
