Using Technology to Improve Patient Care

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Hi, Dr Pelto here, welcome to healthy living. Today I want to talk to you about using technology to increase patient care. Basically, this is a presentation we're going to go over, how to use technology to give great care as a physician, how to save you time, how to reduce complexity and give your patients a WOW experience and who basically this has guided towards would be anyone that's in, in care with patients, whether it be your primary care internist, a generalist, or a specialist, nurse practitioner, physician's assistant anyone that's having contact with patients.

We all have kind of the same concerns, and I want to go over some of them today. This isn't going to go over all the details, how to use each one at the bottom of this YouTube video, you're going to find links to these different companies. And you're going to have different videos that I've put together on those topics.

This is kind of a general one. We'll go over and give you some ideas, some ways that maybe you can use technology.

So, let's look here. We're gonna look at the problem, the solution that might be an option for you to consider some technologies, uh, kind of a way of dividing up your patient encounters before, during and after, and then ways to get started with these.

So, let's start looking at the problem. Really, as doctors, we need to see more patients in less time. We need to include technology in patient care, using an electronic medical record, and this can increase complexity and stress and time outside of patient care without reimbursement and as well, we are dependent on online reviews and public rankings that can affect our profitability and reputation. These are the same issues that we all have, and we're not really looking to do a ton more work, but we're wanting to take better care of the patients we have using more technology as it has an option,  instead of hiring more staff or using other things.

So, here's some technological options here. What do we do today? Well today we try to see more patients. Once again, more patients can sometimes cause reduced patients. Uh, I guess while with us, cause we're trying to run from one patient to another. We're trying to document with computers many times in the treatment room. So, we might be having our face turned to the patient or not looking at the patient or spending a lot of our time looking and filling into the computer. Um, we want to get good online rankings. That's what most of us need, because regardless if your patient is referred to you, they're going to always Google your name, you're going to spend hours documenting after time in the clinic, which can be frustrating, and then we kind of, a lot of times we blame the EMR or we use a staff to scribe.

So, let's look here. This is a quote, I found it, it talks about theory and practice. So, in theory, everything is possible. However, I live in practice and the road to theory has been washed out. These are actual things that I do in everyday practice. And I'm going to tell you about practice, not about theory. There are some great ideas I have, like using a virtual scribe, which I don't do. There's a drip campaigns with marketing, which I don't really utilize. These are all things that I use every single day in here to give you some options. What are some of the technologies that you may already use? And here are just some, just a way to start some things that you could consider already using them. So, if you use gmail or someone similar, some other similar function, uh, you could, there's a function on gmail right down by the send button.

It's a little button next to it, it's a send later function. So, let me just give you an idea as we start out, if you're seeing a patient in the treatment room and let's say due to right now, we're in 2020 here with this whole issue of Corona. And you're not going to want people to come into the office in two weeks for the follow up. What you can do here is you can send them a little email and then you can actually hit send later and it'll send it to them in two weeks. So, you don't have to remember to send it to them. That's a very easy function. That's you're already using templates. There's something called, it used to be called canned responses. Now it's called templates. Basically, what that is, is when you use a little button on the bottom that says kind of templates and you pick the one, you pre-make these and email.

And I have one that I use pretty much every day on patients. It's like a patient follow up. Hey, this is Dr Pelto. I'm just checking to see how you're doing. Please send me a little reply. If there is anything that is, care related, please, send it via the patient portal. And then I'll send them the link to the patient portal to avoid any breaking of any HIPAA. Also be aware with gmail there’s different types. There's your own private one, a personal one. And then there's a business class that can be HIPAA secure as well. So, something that you need to be, be aware of, also videos in email, there's a cool function with gmail. They have different add-ons. And so a way to kind of wow a patient is let's say, after you see them, you want to see how they're doing.

You can send them a premade video. Hey, just checking to see how you're doing very similar to this. You can also do one specifically with their name. There's a lot of different ways of doing these videos. There's just ways to kind of wow, your patients and something you're already doing with emails. There's a lot of different add ons and I'll put some of those links underneath for add-ons to make these videos, Google slides or PowerPoint, something that we're already using, but it can be used in patient care. How many times do we repeat the same thing over and over again? We repeat, for example, my specialty is podiatry. So, I'll explain about plantar fasciitis. Every time I see a new patient, I'm going to explain it prior to surgery. There's a presurgical discussion. When we talk about, ingrown toenails, where we talk about fungus, certain things that tend to be more complex.

You may want to consider using Google slides or PowerPoint to make presentations that you can kind of share with the patients. And you can share that during the patient encounter. Uh, there's also a kind of a couple of other nuances that you could use within as well. And that's using zoom. So, for example, what I'm using now is zoom with a record function and I'm taking a PowerPoint and I'm recording it. And I am going to put it on YouTube. You can also record patient education videos, the same way you would make a little PowerPoint presentation and you would put it on zoom on full screen, and then you would record it. And then you could either send it to a patient via another method one's called patient education genius. Or you can put it up on your YouTube account, or you can just send it to them as an attachment.

There's a lot of different ways, but for example, certain things that take a long time to explain, and there's a lot of nuances, a lot of complexities and were rushed in our patient encounter. It's a way of using a video to really take your time, slow down, explain something to say, Hey, you know, Mrs. Jones, I really want to go into talking to you about your diabetes, that you were recently diagnosed with our hypertension. But what I'm going to use is I'm going to use this video. I'm going to send you a video. I'd like you to watch it. And then we can talk more about it when I see you in a couple of months, or you can send me any questions via the portal. So just another way of these are technologies we're already used to using that you can kind of multiply on and I'm going to share a couple of other new technologies.

Now I don't want you to go get overwhelmed with all of these. There's a lot of them and I'm going to go kind of one by one. And then afterwards, you're going to find some individual videos. You're gonna have links to these technologies. Some cost money, others don't cost money. I'm going to go over my disclosures at the end. I think I earned like a couple of dollars from some of these, if you go to those links, but it's, you know, it's not, it's not much at all. Okay, so let's, let's talk a little bit about some of these new technologies.

So, some of the technologies we're going to go over are fancy hands. So, starting out on top, fancy hands is a way to use a virtual assistant, having them do different types of tasks for you. Patient education genius is basically a platform where you can upload PDFs, videos, links to different web pages, and you can put them in different folders based on the diagnosis.

And then you can send that information to patients afterwards, either via email or via text message. If this, then that, what is that? That it's a way of compiling different data and sharing it from one source to another. I put a QR code there because when I do my presentations at the end of the presentation, I have a little QR code if a patient wants to download their own presentation. And, that's kind of a cool thing as well that you can do that. People like, um, I should have done it at the end of the video. I'm going to try to find a way I can do it still. But usually at the end of my videos, I'll put a little QR code. Hey, do you want to download this? Why? Because in this day and age, patients love to use their devices.

And one of the habits I've gotten into when I'll do an X Ray, I'll have them take a picture of it with their phone. Or if I do a diagnostic ultrasound and take a picture, or when I do a presentation, there's a, they can take a picture of that QR code and they can get that presentation so they can review it at home. What we just talked about, patients love to interact. Uh, another neat thing is when my patients are walking, I'll take their video camera and video then walking. So, I can show any abnormalities like pronation or things like that. It kind of, it wows them a little bit. A Fiver is another technology. We're going to talk a little bit about… basically that's a virtual assistant for a specific task, and there's a lot of good marketing things that you can use fiver for follow up.

Then this is my favorite by far favorite website. It's a way that you can send things to show up to you later. For example, I have a patient to come in and I'm gonna want to follow up with them in a couple of weeks. I might send them a quick email that day, and then I'll put in the blind carbon copy line two weeks at follow-up then and it'll send me that email back in two weeks just to see if they got it or I'll send it. If I'm talking to someone else or an email to a colleague, and I want to send the email, but I'm scared. They're not going to get back to me. It sends it back to me. And a lot of times I find that we're inundated with so many emails, just like everyone else's. And so you send it and then you send it back to yourself. And about three days ago, it'll send everything back and then you can just send it out again and they'll get back to you a lot easier with that.

Patient pop is a platform for a website, and it also has the best thing about it though, is it called patient pop? So, it works with online reputation. It's kind of a cool, a cool website slash addition to your website for getting good online recommendations. YouTube, you may not use YouTube. It's pretty easy to do now. And I'll give you some tips with that. And then the last one is Athena. This is the medical record that we use, and there are certain types of integration that can go into it. For example, patient pop integrates into our Athena, just like probably many other medical records, patient education genius integrates into Athena. And so these are ways to use, uh, use these dually.

I want to simplify the patient experience a little bit for you. Um, I like to simplify it and this isn't my idea. This is actually, I got from some marketing people, Dean Jackson and Joe Polish. They talk about the whole before, during and after sequence. And if you think about it with a patient encounter, you have the before sequence, the during sequence, and then the after sequence. And if we divide up using technology in each of these, it's going to make it a little bit easier. I always say the more work you do before you see a patient, the easier it's going to be to see them and follow up with them after. So all of the work is on the front end, and this is great for you, especially if you're a young doctor, a young healthcare professional out there, and you're wanting to wanting something to do before you have many patients it's harder to do once you're really, really busy. It's hard to do kind of on the fly with patients.

Let's talk about this before sequence. So, it's everything that happens to patients prior to you seeing them in the office for care. And this is where I put all of the work on the marketing that you're doing. Um, also how they find you, whether it be online, their doctor, a friend, or a family member, how they reach for you online and scheduling. So, let's talk first about even before they look you up, how they kind of find you, and that would be the marketing component. So, one of the components here is, is patient pop, what patient pop does, and you can find their link on the bottom of the video. They actually go and they log all of the online reputation with your name and your practice. And then they kind of optimize it.

They make sure everything is consistent and make sure everything looks good, but not only that after a patient makes an appointment with their online scheduler. So, it's an online scheduler. They make the appointment. Then afterwards they send them an email. Hey, just was wondering how, how your experience was. And the neat thing about patient pop is they give them like a five star ranking and, they're always changing it. So, it may change by the time you watch this video. But what happens is if they get people, give you a ranking of one, two or three, or I think, yeah, one, two or three, it'll go kind of like your office manager. And if it's four or five, it will go, uh, to say, Hey, would you mind going somewhere and telling them about your experience? Basically it'll send it to Gmail or Google or, um, health grades, or one of these other, other ones, maybe Yelp, and it'll send it there and they'll put a good online review for you.

So, it's kind of a cool way of getting good online reviews. That's their whole focus is patient, but they do have a website that's attached to it that you, that may help. It's helpful for making appointments. And you can track everything. How many online requests, how many new patients, how many follow-up patients, patient pop works really great for the online reputation marketing. And it doesn't really have anything to do with social media. It's all the online. How do you get your name? Because when they're Googling you, that's, what they're going to find is the online, your Google reviews and things like that. Um, another thing that, before I would say would be YouTube. YouTube is where I have a lot of my online videos and those populate both on YouTube, but they also go into the search. When they're looking for your name, they're going to find the videos that you have putting a lot of your online presentations that you've made.

You can then put them on YouTube and that's helpful for patients, something that I do quite frequently. You can do it, not only with your presentations. You can also just get a, uh, stand in your office where you put your cell phone or whatever you want to use your device of recording. And you can record patient encounters as long as you have the proper paperwork filled out as well. So, if you want that paperwork, just let me know. Okay. And I can, I can add this to the bottom or I can send it to you individually.

Another thing that can be used prior to the visit is fancy hands. So, I use fancy hands and fiver prior to the visit. What do they help me out with? Well, fiver, they helped me out when I make up my presentation. It never looks really good.

And then on fiver, there are different places that they can actually design your presentation. So, I do a quick little PowerPoint, add some pictures in there, and then I send it to them and they send something that looks really, really good back to me. And there's a couple of different people. What I to recommend is you let's say it's $5 or $10. You've picked two different companies to try. And then based on the results you can use one or the other, because you might not always get the best thing, I've used fiver for that. I've used it to develop like a patient form.  I've used it for an intro to a podcast or a voiceover. Uh, I've had it. They've helped me with some of my active campaign, which is something else to do, kind of like a drip sequences where you send a series of emails to people.

So that's kind of a cool thing that you can use, along that would be fiver or, then fancy hands what's Fancy hands. What they do is they do repetitive tasks. So, you get so many credits a month. Let's say the basic is five credits a month, and they're usually tasks of 20 minutes or more. So, let's say you want them to call different primary cares in town to see who they referring their current podiatry patients to, or let's say you want them to do a task of editing a document. Let's say you do your PowerPoint and you want them to edit it, make it look better. Or you're writing an article, a blog, and you want them to edit your blog or you transcribe a blog and you want them to transcribe it. Fancy hands can do all those types of tasks for you.

I'm saving you time. Another one is this, then that. And basically that's the one I talked about before, how I use it is when I post a video to YouTube, it then sends it to my blog. That's how I typically use it. It can send it to your blog. You can send it to your LinkedIn. It's a way of making social media a lot easier. There is something else called Hoot Sweet. There's a lot of different ones, but I like to keep it simple. So, when I posted at one place, I think of it as the hub and spokes method. So, you have the, the hub, which would be for me, YouTube, or it could be your blog. And then the spokes are, it's sending that same content to Twitter, to LinkedIn, to we used to have Google plus we don't want anymore. And it sends it everywhere else.

You make one body of content. And for me, it's easiest to make videos and then it sends it to other places. So that's how I use, if this, then that it kind of automatically sends it to different places. Then we also up on top, we have zoom. The way I use zoom before is I use it to make these videos. So, I'll make a PowerPoint and then I'll make the video. So, that's a kind of a neat way of recording it on zoom. You say, record your computer and then you can download it and then upload it to YouTube. It's pretty easy. You can also stream it to YouTube live. If you want to do, for example, a lecture for patients, I am doing a lecture, just practical examples. I'm doing a lecture at the library because of everything that's going on. Now, it's going to be done via zoom.

And so I sent a link and I'm going to do it. Then I can record it. Then I can upload it to YouTube. There's a lot of different ways you can do these group, lectures and the lecture. This lecture is going to be on intermittent fasting. So just kind of an interesting thing that I help my patients with. Then the last thing down there that's kind of hidden is follow up then. So what is follow up then? Once again, it's that email sequence basically, it's a way, it does what I use it for every single day is for example, it reminds me at 5:00 PM to tell my wife, I'm leaving to go home. So, what you do is you do 5:00 PM, dash SMS, which means text message at follow-up then, or every 5:00 PM. So does every 5:00 PM. So, every 5:00 PM, it sends me a message and I'll tell my wife what time I'm going to be home.

Or for example, I get a reminder. I have to stop and get eggs. When I go home, I'll send it to 5:00 PM slash FSMs. And so it'll send me a text message at 5:00 PM. So, it has a text message function, which I think is $5 a month, which is nothing. And then it also has this way of when I have, when I send emails and I want something done, or I want to reply, I'll send it back to me in one week or two weeks. And you put that in the blind carbon copy at one week or two weeks, and it'll send it back to you. That's really cool because you can always have, you can almost have a, an inbox zero. And I don't know if any of you have ever had an inbox at zero. It really gives you a lot of confidence.

So those are kind of the, the marketing things. Um, as we talked about, we say here, how they will find you online. Once again, the patient pop can help with that. YouTube can help with it. The doctor, they might find you with the doctor. And so, these, these resources, can be helpful. You can even give some of these to the doctor and friends or family. Those that have come to see you may provide these resources and then they can share them with the patients. How to research you online and then scheduling? I think having an online scheduler is great patient pop offers that there's a lot of other companies, but the easier it is for patients to make appointments with you, the better it is. Okay. So that's kind of the before that's, before they see you, how you can kind of wow them before.

Another thing I do with, with Athena, our medical record is that when a patient makes an appointment, it automatically sends them an email. And in that email says, Hey, this is Dr Pelto, so great that you made an appointment. Here are some online resources that you can use even before you come in. Because a lot of times patients, when they want to see you, they have certain things like an ingrown toenail for me, or plantar fasciitis. They want help now. And it's better for you to give them the information than them to Google it. And so that's how I do the before components. Let's talk about during. So, during is everything that happens during the patient visit, to give them a great experience. And it starts when they kind of come into your office, they see your front office staff, they meet them.

These are all kind of regular, just internal marketing things of having a nice person there, greeting them, doing a check in there's different, online check-ins that are available. You may like it online. You might like paper, a lot of the check ins you can actually do prior to the visit, so it'll send them an email and they can fill out everything on their device. That's kind of a neat, wow experience. You bring them back into the treatment room and then the staff works with them. A lot of this is through your medical record, mine, the one I use is Athena, and then you kind of get into the wow experience when you see them. And these are some obvious things that all of us know if we're in healthcare, the first one is to greet them with their name, use their name, just review your chart before you see them and say their name, Mr. or Mrs. so-and-so,  greet them with a name and then get to know them. I think it's very important for the wow experience to not just get to know their foot, but get to know what they have going on with them, or where are they from, what their family is like, how they, how they came to see you, who can you thank for the referral, getting to know them, and then listening, listening, check your watch, you know, about three minutes, let them just talk and share. I know you may have heard about their condition a hundred times, but, they need to share what they're going through and what they're feeling. And these are important things. There's a non, those are low tech things that we should all be doing, but let's go into the high tech things. So once, once you see them and once you're talking to them, okay, um, there are different options right now with this Corona issue that's happening, in 2020, you could say, you know, I'm not going to see you in a couple of weeks. I'm going to set up a zoom follow up for you. Okay. That's one way you can kind of wow them.

The patient presentation is something that I do for most of my complex conditions that are take a little bit more, explaining, I think pictures work better. So, I make a PowerPoint on them. It's called patient presentation. So, I have one that I use on Achilles tendinitis on plantar fasciitis. And then at the end, I also use a checklist. And you can, I'll put an example underneath here, but it's a checklist of just the basic treatment options. Because the first time I showed him the whole presentation, but when they come back, I don't want to go through the whole presentation, but I want to go through the checklist because sometimes things can get complex.

What types of medications, what types of treatments, what they've done, what they haven't done.  There's a lot of you. If you see them five or 10 times, it makes it very frustrating. So, doing a presentation can be helpful, and then they're not going to remember. So either you, they can download the presentation with that QR code that's right there, or even better during the visit, you can say, you know, I've recorded a video of this presentation and I'm going to share it with you, or I'm going to provide this, this patient education information. And that's the after component with the patient education genius. Okay. That's the, that's the let's see is that that's not on yours on the next one, the patient education genius, and then also scheduling in the follow up, that can be done with Gmail. What I do is a lot of times for patients, I'll just show it, I'll flip the screen around and say, you know, I'm not going to be able to see you. I usually like to see how people are doing with whatever you're doing for treatment in a couple of weeks. If you have any questions, I'm going to send you this email. And I actually fill it out. I pull up that template and I show how well, you know, this, we'll send it to you in two weeks. So just in a couple of weeks, you're going to be aware that I got hold of you. And just send me a quick little reply. Once again, you don't want to breach HIPAA with this, but they can also send, you can send the link to the portal really, really easy. So that's how you schedule the follow up. So that's the whole during experience, that uses some different technology that you may not be familiar with. And then the after experience, that's everything that happens after they leave.

So after they leave and before they come back, and this is where you can really set yourself apart, because a lot of times with a lot of doctors, once someone leaves, we just forget them until they come back and they might just cancel and never come back. So, what are some easy, kind of low tech ways? One is that Gmail thing that I said, you send it in two weeks to see how they're doing. You can use follow up, then you can send them a message and a couple of weeks, and if they don't get back to you, it'll send you their reminder. That's kind of a cool thing, with your medical record, ours is Athena. Um, after every new patient comes in three days later, it automatically sends out a message to all of my patients and say, Hey, I was wondering how your experience was, let me know how you're doing.

If you have any questions, because patients, a lot of times, don't remember right out of sight, out of mind, when, when they leave, they have 101 things, they have 20 other things, and you're number 21. They're just not really interested in their health, or they might be, but they just have too many other things.  Patient education genius, this is by far my favorite right now in the after sequence, what it is, as I mentioned it to it's a list of folders and you put documents in each of the folders based on diagnosis. And then it integrates with my medical records. So, I have a little button, I click it, it pulls in the content that I want. And so you can share a lot of really cool things. Kind of one of the things that I've been using a lot is people are wanting to go to Amazon.

So, I started an Amazon storefront. That's I didn't include that icon, but it's an Amazon storefront. And you can put in things that they typically use based on diagnosis, and then I'll send it to them because I might not carry it in the office. I do carry certain things, or they might not want to come into the office. And you do make a little bit on it. Maybe make like, I don't know, $3 a month. It's not that it's nothing, but it really, it's just a place that you can store everything in an organized manner. So that's kind of a cool thing. You can share that on patient education genius, you could say, share a YouTube videos. You can share links to different documents. Everything is right there. And the cool thing is once you share it with patient education genius, it actually stores it in the medical record.

It has a method of saying, you know, doctor so-and-so shared this and this and this and this patient education information, and they're adding some new components to it, which I'm real excited. One is a composer. So, you can actually compose, okay, Cindy, I'd like you to do these stretching exercises and video one. And I'd like you to do this type of treatment video too. So, you can add little things and it's kind of talk about the videos or whatever you want. And there's a lot of cool other features. If you're interested, let me know. I can share more information in, if you're a podiatrist watching this, I can share my content with you if you'd like my content that I use. And then the other one would be YouTube afterwards. Once again, I send these YouTube videos to the patients. You can do books, you can do other types of things as well.

A phone call or email, just a simple one would be, um, calling a patient. And some of the older patients, they don't use email. So sometimes what I'll do is I'll do the follow up then. So, I'll send myself an email and I'll say, call patient so and so, and I, and I'll kind of do it in a way that it won't breach HIPAA, but I'll also, I'll send a little reminder to myself to call that patient, to see how they're doing in a couple of weeks. And then if you want to get more advanced, you could send them out like a newsletter or something else like that. So that's kind of the after sequence of everything. Okay. So those are some cool ways of using technology. How do you get started? You might be a little overwhelmed here. I always say when you're trying to implement something new, try to build on what's already working.

So, if you're already using Gmail, if you're already using YouTube, try to build and just add one thing, don't add too many things at once. Just kind of add one thing at a time. If you want to learn more at the bottom of the video, there's links to all these companies. I have some disclosures with Athena. If you want my templates and everything else like that, they do. I think they do a referral fee for if you're a podiatrist and you want my templates. If you're not a podiatrist, you can use Athena. I don't think I'll get any referral fee, but, if you want to say my name, that's fine. I am, cause you need my code and then fancy hands. That's a, kind of an online virtual assistant type of thing. I'll send you the code there in this and follow up and you might get a dollar or two or something like that.

There's some disclosures with those, the other ones, they're just great apps that I've found that are helpful. There's also links for more explanations because this is really just superficial and different ways of using technology. So, to go deeper, just look at some of the other videos or I'll put the links to the other videos based on the technology that we talked about. And then if you contact me, if you have any other questions or ideas for future videos, just comment here. I have a system you're gonna laugh. A follow up then sends me a link every week to look at my comments. So, it sends me a link to look at my comments. I use follow up then for everything, everything I want to remember. Cause I don't remember otherwise it'll just send me a link. Like every Monday to do that, or I want to write a blog, it'll send me a link, write this blog or write this article or follow up with this person. It just kind of like an external memory. It makes things, makes things a lot easier. So, I hope you enjoyed it. If you did comment below and uh, hope your practice gets better with this video. Okay. Thank you so much.