Focusing on Your Horizon and Braven Health℠ Patients’ Experience: Tools to Help You

Your Horizon and Braven Health patients should always have a great experience when receiving care. That’s why we’ve developed tools and resources that highlight best practices to help you and your staff. Our Playbook for Patient Engagement provides tips on how to help improve your patients’ health and drive optimal outcomes. Here are just a few of the things you’ll find in the Playbook.

Getting Needed Care/Tests/Treatments:

Conduct “pre-visit planning” including a tracking system to ensure labs, tests and referrals are received prior to a patient’s appointment. If missing, call and remind the patient to bring their paperwork.
Conduct team huddles each morning to discuss the previous day, the day’s schedule and patient experience goals.

Care Coordination:

Implement handover reports so the nurse/assistant shares key information with the provider before they enter a patient’s room.
Establish agreements between your practice and specialists to easily exchange information, ensure patients can be seen quickly, and confirm that they participate in a patient’s plan.
Reach out to patients to make them aware of gaps in care and/or recommended vaccinations, and schedule appointments while on the phone.
Pre-register patients and gather information/paperwork prior to the visit. Consider adding a medication list section to the forms.

Getting Appointments and Care Quickly:

Use frozen timeslots for urgent appointments to avoid squeezing patients in, which increases wait times.
Schedule follow-up appointments before patients leave the office.
Encourage patients to sign up for appointment reminders and use the patient portal.
Target seeing patients within 15 minutes of the appointment time. Implement “status boards” with wait times in the reception area.
Encourage patients to use telehealth services and promote this option during visits or by email/text. If a patient cancels a visit, offer a telehealth or off-hours appointment option, if feasible.

Getting Needed Prescriptions:

Consider prescribing 90-day supplies of long-term medications and/or suggest mail order to decrease costs and pharmacy visits.
Use the Drug-Cost Decision-Support at Prescribing (DDP) tool through the ePrescribe function. This tool shows the patient’s benefit data, costs based on their health plan, medication price, whether a prior authorization is needed and lower-cost/therapeutically equivalent alternatives.
Ensure patients have enough refills and that prescriptions have not expired. Encourage patients to enroll in automatic refills.
Reinforce the importance of medication adherence and encourage patients to report side effects.