As a health professional or clinic owner, our time and energy is limited – so it’s important to ensure that we get the most out of our work days and the experience our patients have with us. This can look like anything from time-saving hacks that still create an ideal outcome in the clinic, to enhancing our appointments and the relationships we build with our patients, and therefore our reputations and the organic referrals that come from that experience.

So what are the apps that New Zealand health professionals are using to help boost their productivity, patient satisfaction, and are playing an important role in the growth of their business? Here are five that come highly recommended.

Complete Anatomy

We know that patients are more likely to adhere to treatment plans and make decisions that support their health and recovery when they understand the how’s, what’s and why’s. While explaining medical terminology in simple terms works well for some it can still leave others somewhat confused, many practitioners are opting to now show their patients exactly what they mean with 3D learning, which is where Complete Anatomy comes in. 

This app allows you to show your patients 3D anatomic images of the human body and explain exactly what’s happening, why it’s occurring, and the areas of the body that are being affected – allowing your patients to visualise exactly what’s happening when they move their bodies and understand their symptoms in a new and resonating way.

Complete Anatomy has a great deal of detail including muscle motion, a beating heart and detailed organ systems, an anatomy model, dissection simulation, and origin path features. The professional plan also includes over 1,500 clinical videos and the ability to annotate the model as you’re showing it to your patients. More than all of that – it’s very easy to use and can quickly differentiate your experience from others who are verbally explaining conditions and accompanying these with a text-based handout.

Otter.ai

There’s a lot of note-taking, letter writing, content updating and general documentation that goes into being a health professional – both to comply with legal requirements as well as ensure optimum documentation to reflect back on, use for referral relationship building, enhancing our marketing – and much more. This is where Otter.ai, an automated and highly accurate transcription service, is saving health professionals a lot of time and money, even against alternatives like sending voice memos away for professional transcriptions.

Otter.ai can be used on both audio and video content by converting it to searchable, editable and interactive transcripts that also offer summary keywords and highlights. It has a high level of accuracy, being trusted by over 10 million users worldwide. While no AI transcription service is perfect just yet, it goes a long way in saving health professionals time and money, while ensuring their thoughts and ideas don’t get lost, and allowing them to make use of the spare minutes when waiting for a patient to arrive.

Visual DX

Most health professionals regularly come across patients whose symptoms or clinical presentation don’t fit the norm. For many, the process in these instances may be to consult their colleagues available in the clinic, make referrals to other specialties, take the time to explore differential diagnoses, as well as consult colleagues after the appointment. This is where Visual DX can support you in real-time, during the appointment.

This app gives you access to the world’s most comprehensive digital medical image library that includes over 90,000 peer-reviewed images (and is ever-growing) to enhance diagnostic accuracy across a wide range of health specialties. To add further value, the images have a wide representation of ages, skin types, and disease variations, based on severity and stage. It is designed to be easy to use when you need it, having smart search features and a diagnosis builder.

Using this app is enabling clinicians to leverage a wealth of information to confidently inform their clinical decision making, and the information they are able to relay to their patients during the appointment, enhancing patient confidence and improving the patient experience.

CliniqApps

Reliable, accurate automation is one of the biggest time savers and satisfaction boosters across all industries, and enabling automation across a wide range of areas in your clinic – from the welcome email with parking instructions the moment someone books an online appointment – to the follow-up email that gets sent the afternoon after an appointment which asks the patient if they had any unanswered questions that someone could clarify with them via a phone call.

While we love solutions like AutopilotHQ for marketing automations, finding a healthcare-specific solution that integrates with practice management software like Cliniko is trickier. This is one of the key roles that CliniqApps fills, alongside their many other features designed to “grow your practice, reduce your workload and build deeper relationships with your patients” – as per their tagline. 

While any automation software needs time to be set up with specific segments and actions, CliniqApps successfully delivers this, giving you access to KPI’s, patient satisfaction metrics, digital patient forms and much more. This can enable you, if you choose, to automate your new patient forms to be completed at home prior the appointment, allowing you to go into the appointment informed and maximise the time you have listening to the patient and their concerns. There’s a lot of other ways it can help – but ultimately, the result is the same: more automation means less admin time by both health professionals and their admin teams, more reliable processes, and when used effectively, it can improve patient satisfaction outcomes.

HealthNow

One other key user of time in a medical or allied health clinic includes both financial administrative tasks like managing payment plans or discussing pricing on phone calls, as well as marketing tasks to assist new patient acquisition. HealthNow is an innovative way of addressing both of these issues to save your clinic time and money, while also improving accessibility through offering an ethical, health-specific Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) solution.

HealthNow eliminates the need to offer and manage payment plans by offering a digital solution that is entirely free for your patients, choosing to split the cost of their health services or products with you over up to six weeks. As you get paid in full on the day of the services by HealthNow, there is no time needed for follow-ups, chasing payments, or coming to payment arrangements. HealthNow can also be used anywhere with internet availability, eliminating financial paperwork from accepting payments in remote locations without a dedicated clinic. Additionally, as HealthNow users search their database for the wide selection of clinics that this payment method can be used at across New Zealand, it works as an in-built marketing tool, directing local customers to you without a cent spent on advertising.

Moreover, when the stress of having to find the full upfront cost is removed, users increase the amount they spend on health products and services which not only helps improve the bottom line for the clinic, but also helps contribute to better long-term health outcomes for the patient and improves patient satisfaction throughout the course of their care.

The Bottom Line

The benefits, accessibility and versatility of apps and automation software in medical clinics are only improving, while their costs grow more and more competitive and affordable. Getting started with these apps is easy – and HealthNow even offers a free $10.00 credit to your health wallet to get started.