How PMS Creates a Transparent and Dynamic Culture in Our Clinic

Medesk actively strives to collaborate with all manner of clinics. We try as hard as we can to help clinics by developing new features and adapting our existing toolset to match their needs. Here is a case study of a clinic that has been working with Medesk for the past year and a half. For us, working with Prime Clinic represented a unique challenge in many ways. We have certainly been through our ups and downs together as we learned to collaborate, resulting in an incredible synergy. In the end, we are pleased to report that Medesk naturally slotted into the clinic’s existing business model and now we have come together to share the experience with you.

Can you describe your clinic in your own words?

Prime Clinic is a multidisciplinary clinic that focuses on outpatient appointments and minimally invasive procedures. We first opened in September 2018 and now we have more than 30 doctors from different specialities, 4 of whom have PhDs and 1 of whom has an M.D. on top of the usual Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery degree.

Key to our mission statement is the concept of not giving out unnecessary appointments. Our clinicians are not interested in over-diagnosing patients and do not receive any incentives to do so from the clinic, pharmaceutical companies or laboratories. We feel that any interference like this would simply disrupt patient care. We came to Medesk in search of practice management software (PMS) that would help us achieve this goal while simplifying our day-to-day work.

How did you search for practice management software?

A few years before opening the clinic, I read an article in The Journal of mHealth where I found out about Medesk. I happened to save the article as a bookmark on my computer and when it came to planning my new venture and hunting far and wide for suitable software, I remembered about the article. I took another look at it and analysed our situation a bit more before deciding that our clinic should use Medesk.

Why Medesk?

Complete transparency gives people the chance to keep their finger on the pulse and react to changes and generally keep an eye on one another

The choice was obvious to me as the most important factor in our decision was the ease of use closely followed by the ability to organise and display our workload transparently.

In this sense, Medesk helps to use solve several problems:

• Clinicians could quickly find the necessary patient information from any location in the world;
• The intuitive interface allowed us to train new users in very little time at all;
• The ability to organise transparent workflows for all of our colleagues meant that everyone could see the results of their actions in the Reports, EHR and Schedule sections.

The final point is the most crucial as complete transparency gives people the chance to keep their finger on the pulse and react to changes and generally keep an eye on one another. It turns out that Medesk was one of the main factors in helping us to create a healthy, transparent and dynamic culture in our clinic.

How did you carry out training in Medesk for your team?

Since we were opening the clinic from scratch at the same time as implementing Medesk, we ended up having to find a way to train more than 30 team members in one go. Our clinical director was the first to get to grips with the platform. Then, we gradually introduced training sessions for everyone else. This was easier than it sounds as training only takes a couple of hours in total.

We only ran into difficulties when we found out that some team members did not have the requisite basic IT skills so they would start to panic. Nevertheless, once we were able to get past their fears and mental barriers, a full understanding of how to Medesk did not elude them for long.

Which Medesk features do you consider most useful to your clinic?

As a manager, I feel the value of Medesk lies in the fact that it essentially embodies our clinic itself, just in a digital form

Medesk considers individual roles and responsibilities within the clinic and arranges everything in the just the right way for patients, doctors, receptionists, nurses and practice managers alike.

A major plus point for us is that all patient data is properly organised in the electronic health record.

From a marketing perspective, we benefit from the online booking and patient portal modules. It represents an elegant solution through which our patients can book themselves an appointment over the internet in a couple of clicks. Implementing this functionality helped us to optimise workload at the reception desk, reduce our phone bill, increase patient acquisition via our website, as well as become more available to our patients.

Prime Clinic

We integrated our phone system with Medesk to allow us to address patients personally whenever they call us. Also, this optimised the time spent on booking patients in for appointments.

Our doctors find it very convenient to work with consultation notes templates in Medesk. They are easy to complete, so clinicians can structure information and reach a diagnosis before recording it with the ICD-10 database. Then they can move on to a treatment plan.

As a manager, I feel the value of Medesk lies in the fact that it essentially embodies our clinic itself, just in a digital form. It’s as if I can see the clinic breathing in front of me and can make the right decisions based on business intelligence data.

Using the Stock Control module gives a sense of full control over the clinic’s resources.

Last year, Medesk updated its Stock Control module. This greatly simplified the way we managed incoming and outgoing items. Now we can understand exactly when we entered a new delivery into the system, when these items were written off, how much was used, and how much remains.

In your opinion, what could we do to improve?

We appreciate your support team’s lightning-fast response to our questions even out of hours

Medesk is clearly a professional company with top-class tech support. We appreciate your support team’s lightning-fast response to our questions even out of hours. I think you should look at developing the Patient Portal function so that patients can see their medical history and invoices. Given the increasing influence of IT and digital solutions on modern medicine, it’s only a matter of time before patients will have complete control over their medical data so they can use it as they see fit.

What else do you think the ideal practice management software should have?

The ideal practice management software should be able to create an organisational culture that is dynamic and transparent. It should contribute to your clinic being a pleasant place to work. It should improve the patient experience and generally make it easier for patients to interact with doctors.