77% of providers thought their patients understood their diagnosis. However, only 57% of patients actually did.
(JAMA Network)
While manual note-taking has become the staple method of point-of-care documentation, it is becoming increasingly ineffective in the face of growing demands for better quality of care. Efficiency and customer service are no longer selling points — they have become the standard, and your practice must catch up.
To do this, you should streamline and optimize every aspect of your practice. This includes patient documentation, which continues to be challenging for providers as they must also match their patients’ expectations of care standards. To that end, manual note-taking can be detrimental to your patient satisfaction.
Here’s what you should know:
Why Manual Note-Taking Affects Patient Satisfaction
It Distracts You From Engaging With The Patient
Providers often face the dilemma of engaging with their patients or focusing on their notes. Choosing the former compromises documentation quality, while choosing the latter leads to patient dissatisfaction.
Unfortunately, focusing on note-taking may be the preferred choice, as insufficient documentation can lead to billing issues like claim denials in the long run. Patients can feel unaccommodated when providers seem to give more attention to their notes.
It Can Be Difficult To Write Notes Consistently
A provider may see multiple patients in a single day. This means that they must efficiently finish each appointment to accommodate every patient.
Oftentimes, providers resort to manual note-taking techniques to quickly record every important detail while managing the patient flow. In practice, however, this tends to be difficult for the provider to perform consistently, as they must also manually input their notes into the EMR.
It May Lead To Long-Term Administrative Stress
Even with the most effective manual note-taking techniques, providers can feel inundated by the challenges of documentation. In fact, it takes up a lot of time for providers every day — a 2014 study on administrative work among U.S. clinicians has shown that administrative work consumes at least 16% of a physician’s working hours. Left unchecked, this can lead to stress and burnout.
How To Improve Patient Documentation And Satisfaction
Manual note-taking may still be effective for you, though it may be insufficient and inflexible to cope with the challenges of patient care standards. If you want to improve satisfaction and manage your PT documentation at the same time, modifying your workflow for efficiency is a must.
Here are some tips you can implement:
- Lighten up your scheduling. Indicate your availability so you can have ample time to focus on your patients and write SOAP notes without worrying about the next patient in the queue. You can also decrease your daily working hours to make your workload more manageable.
- Record the appointment instead. With correct placement, an audio recording device can capture all vital information clearly while allowing you to engage your patients fully. Make sure your recording device is HIPAA-compliant and has clear audio quality.
- Take consistent, ample breaks. Taking notes involves consuming large amounts of information, especially across multiple patients. Allowing yourself sufficient rest between patients lets you take on the next appointment with a fresh mind. A 5-10 minute break after each session should suffice.
- Use an AI scribe tool. AI-powered documentation is on the rise, streamlining note-taking and giving providers a lot of breathing room with documentation and patient care. Tools like ScribePT can minimize your documenting workflow to as few as four steps per patient.
Learn more about medical scribes on this blog!
Never Compromise On Documentation And Engagement
Balancing accurate documentation and patient care is one of the most difficult challenges in physical therapy practices. Some providers opt to compromise one to secure the other. But with the advent of AI empowering patient documentation, mastering both documentation and patient satisfaction is possible and manageable.
Discover ScribePT, the leading scribe tool for AI documentation for physical therapy. Streamline your medical documentation and reclaim over 40 hours of your time each month. With ScribePT, creating SOAP notes for physical therapy has never been easier.
