Making Time for Patients

We've come so far!

Hahn and Nelson Family Medicine is committed to spending quality time with patients. We're always looking for ways to cut down on the time that we must spend other than seeing patients in the office: billing, filling prescriptions, answering the phone, getting referrals, stocking our supply room.  Instead of simply throwing money at a problem, or hiring more people, we like to try to find creative, innovative solutions. Many times, technology is the answer: for example, we recently implemented electronic fax retrieval which saves time and paper. Other times, a low tech solutions such as altering a schedule, may work just as well to solve a problem. Some of these improvements may take a little getting used to, both for our patients, and for us.

It seems that our phone is always ringing! Most calls are for one of several common issues. One of those is patients needing refills. We recently asked Rick, our Teleplus representative, to add an option to our phone line to allow you to leave your refill information as a message.
New Refill Line!
Refills should ideally be handled through your pharmacy. You should be able to call your pharmacy for any refills you have available; if there are none, the pharmacy should call us directly to make arrangements. However, if this is not possible (in the case of prescriptions that must be on paper), when you call us, just press "1" when prompted and you'll be greeted with the questions you'll need to answer in order for us to refill your prescription. Please remember, it usually takes at least one business day for prescriptions to be taken care of from the time we receive your message until the pharmacy completes the order.

The other common reason patients call us is to get an appointment. We know that a lot of our patients would love to book appointments online, and we're getting ready to make that happen.

 Online Appointment Scheduling Coming Soon!
We already enjoy Oxbow, our state-of-the-art EMR software (Electronic Medical Record) and the advantages it gives us over old-fashioned paper charts. We use PracticeMate software to schedule patients quickly and easily and file our insurance claims electronically. Now we're getting ready to extend the ability to schedule appointments to our patients with the online PatientAlly service. PatientAlly allows enrolled patients to register their information, and then schedule an appointment. Patients can also send their provider messages. We're looking for some patients to "beta-test" this new service, so if you're interested, please email us at bibi@hahnandnelson.com to setup a training session.