Your Practice’s Task Management System: A Guide to Office Staff Productivity

Have you ever woken up at 2 am and remembered that you forgot to do something important at work? What are your chances of going back to sleep?

“Centralized task management not only gives me and my staff the ability to keep track of things in one place, it allows full transparency into who is doing the work for our clients,” says Jason Barnes. “You know who is sitting on tasks and who is completing them.”

Sixty percent (60%) of voters in a recent LinkedIn poll agreed with Jason. Only 11% use memory or paper to manage their task, while the remaining 29% use email.

What are the specific benefits of a centralized task management system?

David Allen, management consultant and author of “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity,” provides information on how to achieve maximum efficiency while relaxing, to focus energies strategically and tactically without letting anything slip. . . Your workflow management plan has two basic components: capture all the things that need to be done in a dependable, workable system; and discipline yourself to make initial decisions with a plan of action for all inputs into that system. In short, do it (quickly), delegate it (appropriately), defer it, or leave it.

teamwork

The most basic aspect of any task management system is task capture or documentation. An undocumented task is not worth tracking or talking about. Unless we capture all tasks in a single system, we will have to rely on multiple tools, hurting our efficiency and effectiveness. A centralized task management system also enables transparency. If your documented task ticket is placed in a central task repository, all members of our team will see its status.

That level of transparency across the board creates peer pressure and offers an opportunity to build a framework for formal accountability. If you have to attend regular meetings with your team to review your backlog, your entire reputation and credibility depends on the timely completion or update of every task assigned to you.

These two characteristics, transparency and accountability, formalize the concepts of teamwork and team player. In an organization that uses a centralized task tracking system, teamwork means eliminating backlogs, and a better team player is the member with the fewest backlogs. Plus, when one team member doesn’t complete a task, the other team members know precisely who needs help and when. Teamwork takes on a specific meaning in terms of helping a specific member accomplish a specific task at a specific time. A centralized ticketing system eliminates the fluff usually associated with the word “teamwork” and offers a simple way to measure the degree of teamwork.

Management of the relationship with the patient

“If you really want to get things done, I recommend you go to IQtell,” says Bryan Koslow, MBA. “The best task management system integrated with email, calendars and Evernote.”

There are two types of task management systems:

• General Purpose: A system integrated with email and calendars, but not directly integrated with your existing practice management solution.
• Specialized – A task management system integrated with a patient appointment system, an EMR system, and a billing system, turning your regular practice management system into a patient relationship management system.

To be operational and meet customer requirements, both types of systems must maintain a high degree of integration. The difference between general purpose and specialized task tracking systems is defined by the type of systems integrated with your task tracking system.

Coming back to practice management systems, a task tracking system integrated with patient appointment system, EMR system and billing system turns your usual practice management system into a patient relationship management system . How? Tickets can be automatically generated upon finding an issue and attached directly to patient records.

With a specialized system, each patient has a set of tickets distributed among various members of the team. The backlog associated with any particular patient defines the management risk of the relationship, while the backlog associated with each team member defines the quality of that member’s teamwork. The total of all delays in all patients defines the risk of current practice. The task of practice management is reduced to prioritizing tickets and reducing the backlog of tickets to zero.

pull versus push

If you use a patient relationship management system to manage your practice, you will receive tickets in your workbench related to your responsibilities. It does not depend on outdated reports and states. So if a patient owes you a balance, an integrated ticketing system will let you know when that patient is in front of you and without having to look up their balance in the system. In other words, a centralized ticketing system turns your query management system into a just-in-time information system. The ticketing system changes the information delivery mechanism from Pull to Push, where the system sends information to you instead of having you pull it from the system.

To use David Allen’s analogy, a patient relationship management system unloads all those to-dos clogging up your brain into an effective framework of action items. In other words, it’s a system that gives you action items, frees your mind from the minutiae, and allows you to focus on the big picture and important ideas.