The dreaded situation: sitting in a waiting room at 10:20 a.m. for a 10 o’clock appointment is something that used to happen at All Woman healthcare in Florence, Kentucky.
But not anymore.
Dr. April Tillery worked with Yosi Health to develop a “virtual waiting room” at All Woman – and she says it’s cut down patient wait time by 70% percent.
“All of the stuff that everybody really hates about any doctor’s visit, about coming to the front desk, getting that clipboard and the insurance card, and going back and forth for 20 minutes, we do all of that before a patient even walks in our door,” Dr. Tillery said.
“This is one of the wins that has come out of the pandemic for sure.”
Dr. April Tillery
“When they come in, the waiting room doesn’t exist for them anymore. And so they can feel really safe that they are not going to see another patient in the office. They’re going to come right in through the door and go right back to an exam room, and we can take care of their concerns. And then they leave, they don’t see another patient, and they’re back to their car.”
Yosi’s founder Hari Prasad says the company has grown tremendously during COVID-19, as clinics and patients have looked for ways to limit contact with other people. It’s currently serving 20 different specialties across the medical industry. The software is deployed in more than 38 states.
The COVID-19 pandemic gave patients and providers a wake-up when it comes to the traditional waiting room model. In a recent survey, 74% of respondents rated the typical waiting room experience as fair or poor—meaning it’s time we start reimagining the way we manage patients prior to their appointments.
For patients and providers alike, safety is a critical component of a quality healthcare experience. By promoting a safe environment in the waiting room, you can improve patient satisfaction, your reputation, and your ability to deliver quality healthcare.
Here are three ways to keep your waiting room safe for both patients and providers.
1. Minimize Time Spent in Waiting Rooms
The simplest solution is typically the best, and in this case, Occam’s razor stands: The best way to keep your waiting room safe is by minimizing the time patients spend in waiting rooms.
Minimizing risk of in-person patient exposure was one of the biggest obstacles for healthcare providers during COVID-19. Practices were tasked with finding innovative ways to minimize in-person contact while still delivering top-quality healthcare.
Virtual waiting room solutions like Yosi Health allow providers to avoid long patient wait times and minimize in-office crowding. By collecting and verifying required forms prior to appointments, providers eliminate the need for in-office, in-person paperwork.
2. Implement Telehealth Practices
If you haven’t already, now is the time to introduce telehealth to your healthcare practice.
In one recent survey, more than three-quarters of healthcare providers surveyed say telehealth helped them provide quality care to patients during COVID-19—and 70% are motivated to use more telehealth because of their experience during the pandemic.
For Dr. Rahul Khare, Founder & CEO of Innovative Express Care, launching telehealth services during the COVID-19 pandemic was critical to keeping his practice thriving.
“We were so inundated with patients, for a full month, we had people booked out for telemedicine appointments,” Dr. Khare says. “What was so great about Yosi was that 95% of these people we’d never seen before, so we made it mandatory for them to get their registration done beforehand.”
3. Virtual Waiting Room Solution
The best way to keep your waiting room safe for patients and providers alike is by implementing a premier virtual waiting room solution that allows you to streamline the patient check-in process and minimize in-person contact.
By automating and digitizing the administrative aspects of patient management, you can effectively register and check-in patients well before they arrive to your office in person. Not only will a virtual waiting room solution eliminate the need for physical, in-person forms found in traditional waiting rooms, but will help your staff save time and effort to focus on what matters most: Delivering quality patient care.
With Yosi Health, you get more than a contactless patient intake system. You get:
Fully Automated, Integrated Patient Registration with Your EMR System
Appointment Self-Scheduling Capabilities
Automated Billing & Payment Collection
Patient Surveys & Review Management
Comprehensive Telehealth Platform
3-Click DMA Management Solution
…and so much more.
Interested in seeing how Yosi Health can help you improve the safety of your waiting room? Schedule a free consultation today to see how it works.
Virtual waiting room solutions are revolutionizing the way healthcare providers deliver patient care. By implementing a fully digital registration, intake, and engagement platform, doctors of every and any specialty are able to save time and cut costs across their practices.
In August 2020, Kopolow & Girisgen Doctors of Optometry were looking for a digital patient registration system that fully integrated with RevolutionEHR, their EMR system. That’s when Chris Moran, Director of Business Development, discovered Yosi Health.
“Yosi was the first virtual waiting room solution we found that fully integrated with RevolutionEHR,” he says. “We never pulled the trigger on other platforms because they didn’t have the same capability. If it wasn’t something that made it easier, then what was the point?”
With 19 offices across Las Vegas seeing 10,000 patients a month, Moran knew that Yosi Health could be a game-changer for their practice.
Here are five ways Yosi Health’s premier virtual waiting room solution transformed their operations and improved both the patient and provider experience.
1. Automatic Insurance Verification & Medical History
When Moran saw that patients had the ability to upload ID and insurance cards directly to RevolutionEHR prior to their visit, he knew Yosi Health was the right choice.
“Once Yosi came out and we saw patients could take pictures of their driver’s license, their insurance card, and upload it directly to Revolution, it saved us a ton of time,” he says.
Beyond their basic insurance information, Yosi Health took it a step further. Moran worked with their team to fully automate their patient medical history forms—a critical, and typically lengthy, set of paperwork specific to optometry practices.
“We took the workflow directly from RevolutionEHR in the history portal, Yosi re-created it in their platform, and now, the patient is able to fill it out prior to coming in,” he explains. “This way, the staff doesn’t have to sit with the patient and go through the full history in Revolution. That’s been a huge time-saver for us in the office.”
Moran estimates they’re saving roughly 15 minutes per patient by eliminating the need to scan, copy, print, and organize their medical history—let alone the insurance verification.
With those extra 15 minutes, Kopolow & Girisgen Doctors of Optometry has been able to completely revolutionize the way they schedule appointments to accommodate more patients.
2. Flexible Patient Scheduling to Accommodate Walk-Ins & No-Shows
“Yosi has allowed us to completely change the way we schedule,” Moran says.
Before Yosi, Kopolow & Girisgen Doctors of Optometry used to schedule appointments every 15 minutes, seeing four patients per hour. When a patient didn’t show up for an appointment and a walk-in arrived, they didn’t know if they were able to complete their information and verify their insurance quickly enough to fit them in.
With the time Yosi helped them gain back, they’re able to accommodate potential no-shows or last-minute appointments.
“Because of Yosi and how quickly we get things done, what it allows us to do is say, ‘At 9:15am, only two of the four patients showed.’ So now, we can take two walk-ins and we have the time to get it done because Yosi has shortened the time it takes us to complete the paperwork,” he explains. “The insurance cards are already scanned so I can send it over to billing to get verified. Basically, Yosi has allowed us to see more patients because we’re able to schedule differently.”
3. Minimized In-Person Contact
Kopolow & Girisgen Doctors of Optometry adopted Yosi during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—and according to Moran, it was the perfect time.
Across their 19 practices, Moran says, Yosi has helped them minimize in-person contact to not only promote a safer environment and bring patients peace of mind, but also to help them minimize the time spend on patient administration.
“The more paperwork our patients do prior to coming in, the less chance they have of being exposed and of our providers being exposed—and they understand that,” he says. “We tell them that because of COVID, we’re paperless. They cannot come in and we will not see them until their paperwork is done.”
Prior to COVID, many healthcare practices struggled to get patients to complete their paperwork virtually prior to coming in. Today, Moran says, patients accept when you tell them that they’ve gone paperless.
Patients may not understand the efficiency paperless intake and registration grants healthcare providers, but they absolutely understand the importance of minimize in-person contact during a global pandemic.
4. Saved More Than $3,200 a Month on Printed Materials
For larger organizations like Kopolow & Girisgen Doctors of Optometry, there are a significant amount of forms patients are required to fill out—especially in the optometry field.
“You have HIPPA, patient guarantees, ABM forms, medical history….I’d say on average, there are roughly eight forms per patient,” Moran says.
With 10,000 patients a month and his estimate cost of $0.04 per B&W printed form, they’re saving roughly $3,200 per month in printed materials alone—and that’s not including the price of a reliable, quality scanner to then upload each patient form into their EMR system.
“With RevolutionEHR, Yosi uploads all of those forms into the patient chart automatically,” Moran says. “When we’re calculating the costs of not only those printed materials, but also scanners and the time our staff had to spend manually scanning all of the patient documents into our system, the savings are incredible.”
5. The Biggest Benefit of a Virtual Waiting Room Solution
Moran has seen countless benefits come out of using Yosi Health’s premier waiting room solution, but there’s one that outweighs them all.
“The bottom line is that we have more time to give to the patient,” he says. “It’s helped us help them.”
Interested in exploring all of the ways Yosi Health revolutionized Kopolow & Girisgen Doctors of Optometry? Explore the case study today to see how our premier virtual waiting room solution helped improve their practice across the board.
When the COVID-19 pandemic swept the nation, healthcare providers nationwide struggled to pivot their practice operations to adjust to a new, socially distanced world. While in-office visit numbers took a nosedive, telehealth appointments skyrocketed—and healthcare providers relied on virtual waiting room solutions more than ever before.
Here’s how one healthcare provider tackled the obstacles COVID-19 presented using Yosi Health’s premier virtual waiting room solution.
Spike in Telehealth
Luckily for Dr. Rahul Khare, Founder & CEO of Innovative Express Care, his practice started using Yosi Health backin 2017—and when the pandemic hit, he breathed a sigh of relief. He was seeing roughly 2,500 telehealth patients a day.
“There’s no way I could’ve had all of those registered beforehand—and 90% of them are pre-registered with Yosi,” Dr. Khare said.
Yosi Health’s innovative patient registration and engagement tools were critical for Innovative Express Care when it came to delivering top-quality patient care during the height of the pandemic. According to Dr. Khare, they managed to cut patient wait times in half with the pre-registration system.
“Patients get antsy if they’re waiting for more than 10 minutes,” he says. “It’s human nature. With Yosi Health, it’s literally so much easier. They don’t have to hand me an insurance card or ID…they can just scan it. Not only is it easier for us and them, but it also decreases potential exposure.”
With up to 1 in 5 patients saying they would switch providers for one that practices better COVID-19 safety protocols, creating a safe, secure patient experience is more important than ever—and virtual waiting room solutions are key to new or existing telehealth services.
Pop-Up COVID-19 Testing Centers
Like many other healthcare providers, Dr. Khare was quick to find ways to help provide COVID-19 testing for regional patients. He set up four pop-up COVID-19 testing centers. “That,” he said, “is where Yosi Health has been huge help.”
In addition to managing the spike in telehealth appointments, Dr. Khare needed to find an innovative way to manage a massive influx of new patients coming in through the testing centers.
“Our name is ‘innovative,’ so one of the things I like to do is use innovative technology like Yosi to enhance the patient experience and change the way healthcare is delivered,” he says. “When we have such a high volume of patients, they can fully pre-register before they arrive and immediately be seen by a provider. They’ve really enabled me to continue pushing the envelope in everything I do.”
Shortly after, Dr. Khare began offering antibody testing services as well. “It was a month after we started doing COVID-19 testing, and everyone wanted to know if they had the antibodies,” he says. “We were one of the first practices in our area to do so.”
Not only was Innovative Express Care booked out a month ahead for telehealth appointments, but they were facing a new hurdle: Most of the testing patients are brand new to the practice. “I think 80%, maybe even 95%, of testing patients we’d never seen before,” Dr. Khare explains.
With Yosi Health’s patient pre-registration system already in place, they were able to quickly and efficiently get these new patients into their system.
Because they’d talk to a provider via telemedicine before their antibody appointment, Dr. Khare made patient pre-registration a universal requirement. “We would send them to the clinic for an appointment. The beautiful thing about Yosi was being able to register them for telehealth, getting their insurance, and everything ahead of time. If they didn’t, our providers or a nurse would’ve had to call or register.
Dr. Khare laughs remembering an appointment he had with his daughter’s pediatrician recently. “Someone called me beforehand and verified everything, and I was kind of like, ‘What are you doing?’ This shouldn’t happen. Why are you calling me to do a telemedicine appointment? You’re increasing work!”
“With Yosi, in one glance, you can see their uploaded card, their uploaded ID, all of their questions are answered, and they’re done,” he continues. “That’s where I was pretty impressed with them as well.”
How Your Practice Can Thrive
With Yosi Health, Dr. Khare was able to easily pivot his practice in the face of COVID-19. With 90% of patients pre-registered out of an average of 2,500 patients seen daily, he was able to help accommodate the new atmosphere of healthcare delivery during a global pandemic.
Discover how Yosi Health helped Innovative Express Care provide a better overall experience for both patients and providers during truly unprecedented times. Access the case study below to learn more.
