Performing Medical Administration Tasks Online

¶ … new patient self-service portal that will serve a number of purposes and functions. In the past, patients have often had to pay their bill, receive medical test results and perform other functions such as confirming appointments through manual and/or verbal means.

The use of an effective online portal could serve all of those functions and in a way that allows for a lot less work and waiting for everyone involved including the patient as well as the professionals that can spend less time working on notifications, billing functions and so forth that can instead be done online and can be done much quicker than through manual and non-online means. The target audience for this new and updated technology would literally be any patient that wishes to take advantage of it.

In all likelihood, it will be the younger and more tech-savvy patients that will prefer and that will make use of it. At the same time, patients that are older and/or simply do not prefer to use technology solutions will probably eschew the technology/portal option. That is perfectly fine and the more traditional options of manual notification through phone calls and follow-up appointment scan still be done for them.

However, for those that do wish to use the online version of the customer service that will be offered, it will be a time- and aggravation-saver for patients that prefer to get their information online and through generally quicker means. The benefits of the project are numerous and include the following: Billing functions and payments can be done via email request and notification rather than being done through manual mailings and people having to write checks and mailing them back to the company.

Rather than either party having to make use of the postal service and so forth to pay bills, the entire process including the notification of the bill and the bill payment itself can all occur through online means. Patients can pay through bank account or credit card. A nominal convenience fee will be necessary for the latter so as to avoid credit card fees being assessed against what the company will receive but most patients are willing to pay those fees (Furr, 2015).

Medical results of tests such as A1C, cholesterol and so forth can be delivered online. The firm will need to be careful in that there are privacy concerns. One main way to deal with this is to make sure that an email address and/or online account is not share between multiple patients when the patients sign up. This can be handled through a simple question that confirms whether their email account is shared or not (Landro, 2015).

Appointments can be listed, confirmed or even cancelled in advance through online means as well. The appointment listings can confirm the provider offering the service, what the service is for and where precisely the appointment is located including street address, floor and suite number. This has obvious benefits for a location that has multiple locations (HealthIT.gov, 2015). The budget justifications and benefits for this project are obvious.

While there will be an initial expense involved, as well an ongoing one, in making this project operate, the money that will be saved through less postage being purchased for bills, less postage being spent for payment reminders, less man-hours being used for appointment reminders and so forth will obviously be of an overall benefit to the firm. The program's efficacy and performance will be measured via a number of different dimensions.

First of all, there will be an assessment of whether the customers that use the service are happy with the way it performs and whether they prefer the self-service and online options over the more conventional phone calls, manual trips to the office and mailing in bills or otherwise having to check the mail. However, there will also be an organizational efficiency verification that will assess whether or not the money spent on the program is getting the returns that it could and should.

The overall goal of the program is to make organizational operations more efficient and streamlined and actual overall costs for billing, notification and appointment setting functions should actually go down or at least slow in growth due to the use of this program.

At the very least, there should be a more streamlined budget and office process that allows the personnel in the office to focus more on other functions and/or to act in a more collaborative function with patients rather than being bogged down with administration functions that are time-consuming and that can be done much.