During my consulting engagement with a functional medicine provider I was tasked with helping give leadership more time back in their day to drive other business needs forward and expand the client roster. To meet this objective, I outlined several key goals including:

• Create a better patient experience by increasing consistency and aligning team members to a single process for onboarding.

• Decrease time spent on data hygiene within the provider’s EMR in order to allow for more patients to join the practice.

• Drive efficiency in onboarding patients to allow the primary practitioner to open new service lines.

As I met with staff and stakeholders during my needs analysis I found several primary issues that were causing the bottleneck in their EMR. Various team members voiced frustrations at the current processes and as I investigated these I uncovered several root causes including:

• Many resources had duplicate versions that were not correctly tied to automations within the tool, leading to frustrated patients not receiving forms on time.

• Variations among the note templates were not pulling in chart data correctly causing duplicate work for providers for data entry.

• Team members were creating resources independently rather than utilizing existing resources or following a managed process to request new ones.

Solving these challenges required several significant changes across both the EMR software itself as well as the process of how patients go through the onboarding phase of their lifecycle. To address these needs I implemented several key solutions:

• Creation of a standard user onboarding workflow which identified where automation would be implemented and which resources would be leveraged.

• Deleted duplicate resources and ensured the remaining templates correctly pulled data from patient charts.

• Creation of new automations to send patient forms, import paperwork into client files and assign tasks to providers throughout the onboarding process.

After the new workflow had been implemented the team needed training on what changes had been made and how to correctly use the tools and resources going forward. To aid in this, I created several different resources and spend time training specific team members on the processes. These resources included:

• Workflow mapping SOP documentation to outline exactly what process should be followed and what steps are required of the team vs what happens automatically behind the scenes.

• Microlearning “how to” video modules that walk through a variety of features and uses with the EMR to enable team members to correctly use and adjust settings appropriately.

With the new processes implemented and the team properly trained to follow the workflows, we saw a significant shift in the day to day operations of the clinic. The increase in efficiency driven by these changes led to:

• A reduced amount of manual work needed to successfully onboard new patients.

• An increase in the number of patients the clinic could serve by cutting down the amount of time spent cleaning up the EMR data.

• More time for the clinic owner to strategize on opening new service lines for their business.

• An improved patient experience by driving consistency and efficiency of onboarding.