In our last blog post, we talked about all of the wonderful benefits of offering a patient portal. Today, we wanted to give you some practical tips and resources to make sure your pediatric therapy practice gets the most out of a patient portal.
1. Set up Payment Processing before you invite your users.
A lot of the features of a patient portal work automatically, but some features have to be configured and turned on first. It’s best to get everything set up before inviting your customers so that when they login for the first time, they’ll be able to experience a fully functional portal rather than a partially functional one. First impressions are huge!
Integrated Payment Processing is often a feature that has to be configured first. It’s very easy, but you’ll often need to submit an application and get approved. Every patient portal is different, but here’s a step-by-step guide of how to get started processing payments in Fusion.
2. Get buy-in from your users.
In order to reap all the potential benefits of a patient portal that we talked about in our last post, you have to get your customers fully on board with it. For instance… to be able to get the added benefit of less printing and emailing, your customers have to be actively accessing this information from the portal.
The next few steps will explain ways you can get buy-in from your customers.
3. Make your portal easy to find and access.
To help get buy-in, put the link to your patient portal somewhere that your customers can easily find it. Here at Fusion, we recommend putting your patient portal link directly at the top of your website in the navigation bar.
One great way to make your portal accessible and tie it in with your branding is to create a short hyperlink that is easy to remember. For instance: http://www.yourdomain.com/portal.
The important thing to remember is you don’t want to bury or hide this link. Make it prominent. An added benefit to this is that when potential customers visit your website, they’ll also clearly see that you offer a portal.
4. Tell your customers and potential customers about it.
Don’t be shy about promoting your patient portal. There are a lot of creative and engaging ways you can share this great feature with your customers. For instance, you could take the short hyperlink you made and put it on business cards to give to all of your customers.
Even better, incorporate the link into a fridge magnet that has all of your clinic’s branding and contact information on it.
Also, if you haven’t already, be sure to check out our post about all of the benefits a patient portal can provide your pediatric therapy clinic.