How to avoid overloading the clinic doctors

Professional overload is one of the main reasons that lead people to health problems. These problems are usually related to tiredness and stress, as is the case for example with Burnout Syndrome. Recognizing this problem and intervening when it occurs is critical to saving your medical team because even health professionals suffer from this problem.

In general, when we talk about professional overload, we are referring to the excess of activities performed by the same person in a short period. Great demands and long working hours are some examples of what can overwhelm an individual in their work environment.

Before we continue, we need to know: Do you already use medical software to perform your consultations at the clinic? We invite you to get to know Ninsaúde Apolo, online software that can be used on a tablet, smartphone, or in the traditional way, on computers. Learn more on our website apolo.app.

It is important to know that when there is an overload of work for one or more professionals in the company, these professionals are not the only ones affected, and this also applies to healthcare professionals and clinics where they work. Overload can slow down the professional who, consequently, may perform services inappropriately.

The way a health professional provides care does not only impact the relationship between him and the patient, because if the service is not done properly, both the doctor's reputation and the clinic's reputation may also be at risk. For this and other reasons, the clinic administrator must frequently check the number of visits by professionals and how patients are being distributed in the medical agenda.

To assist in this task, it is always important to use medical management software, like Ninsaúde Apolo. In addition to making life easier for professionals when caring for their patients, As an administrator, you will find some features capable of gathering information that will be used in the organization of the clinical staff and distribution of consultations.

When starting to use software, your team must understand that each step carried out within the system is very important, and all these actions carried out will accumulate relevant information for decision making. Both doctors and secretaries must be careful when entering information into the system, never forgetting to skip steps. For example, in the schedule, there are the statuses (confirmed, canceled, missing, attended, among others), and if the secretary does not modify these statuses correctly, the information generated in clinic reports will not be correct about the appointments.

Following this same logic, health professionals must also play their part within the system. We know that many people are technology averse and that even includes healthcare professionals. Many of them refuse to use the software in their care, and in many clinics some professionals end up using paper to write down patient information, causing the delivery of information through the software to stop at reception. In these cases, it is up to the clinic administrator to show all the advantages that the use of software offers, as well as inform the importance that this will have for the clinic as a whole.

Having passed these instructions to the team, let's go to the analysis to find out if the health professionals in your clinic are overloaded. The first tip we have for you to access this information is to use the Ninsaúde Apolo professional overload chart. To do so, just access the Schedules menu, and Graphics submenu.

By accessing the professional overload chart, you will have an overview of the number of appointments made at the clinic in the last 12 months for each health professional. You can adjust the view by clicking on the icon on the right so that you can see results from more or fewer professionals. By hovering the mouse over the graph, you also have access to the exact number of appointments for each professional on the list.

Another point to highlight is that you can also change the period through filters, that is, you will not necessarily only see the last 12 months, but you can also do a monthly follow-up, for example. If the clinic has more than one service unit, you will also be able to choose which unit you want to track the results on.

As you can see in the example above, Dr. Karina is the one who is more overloaded with work concerning the other health professionals at the clinic, and some don't even have half the number of appointments she has. In another comparison, where the period referring to January was applied in the filter, It is possible to observe that in this period Dr. Karina and Dr. Michele were the ones who had the busiest schedule, being that Dr. Karina still has approximately 20 more appointments than Dr. Michelle.

Given the data generated by the graph, the clinic administrator will be able to use this information to instruct his team, and in this way, when a new patient wants to schedule an appointment, she can better distribute the appointments among the clinic's professionals so that there is no overload on one or more of them. Some details must be taken into accounts, such as the average number of calls made per period and the specialty of the professionals (specialty x may be more in demand than specialty y, therefore, there is no way to compare the number of visits between professionals from different specialties).

In Ninsaúde Apolo you will also find reports that help in this function, and one of them is in the Calls menu, Reports submenu. By choosing the Summary information option on this screen, you will have access to the professionals' schedule report by period. With this report, it is possible to know how many canceled appointments, no-shows, and attended patients each health professional had. For this reason, it is so important not to skip the scheduling steps within the system, as we mentioned at the beginning of this article.

The information from the schedule report by period together with the data from the professional overload chart help when analyzing the results and making changes that aim to contribute to the success of the clinic. So, if you still don't use software to manage your clinic, meet Ninsaúde Apolo. Go to apolo.app and request a demo.