Developing Your Virtual “Front Desk”

As you pass the one-year anniversary of practices being completely flipped upside down, we all are beginning to recognize there will be a new normal. Compared to pre-covid, we now hear a lot of needs for new workflows, smaller waiting rooms, virtual visits, and drive through immunizations. What an amazing year of change.

At Anytime Pediatrics, we are working hard to help practices take advantage of a new “virtual” front desk in your practice. Our most successful practices are fully integrating Anytime Pediatrics into their workflows, are providing about 30% of their visits virtually and they don’t see this changing any time soon. Virtual walk-in visits, scheduled appointments, instant invites are all the new norm as they report achieving pre-pandemic visit levels.

As you know, we launched the virtual front desk with our last release. The front desk can now start a video visit if you like and then route the patient onto the clinician.

Here are a few simple ways you can innovate with your new virtual front desk:

1. Test the technology and make sure the audio and video are working.
2. See and hear the patient if you want to ask for additional information before the visit instead of text chatting.
3. Open your front desk for virtual walk ins –
   1. Patients could speak to the front desk and either be scheduled later or routed onto an available clinician.
   2. Patients could be assessed by your triage nurse and questions answered, scheduled for a later visit in person or via telemedicine, or be routed onto an available clinician.

Is your virtual front desk working well for your practice? We would love to hear your ideas or ways you are innovating with this new feature. Are you at pre-pandemic levels or making progress to get there? Perhaps it is time to ask if a virtual front desk will offer a few less phone calls and streamline access for your patients.

Of course, we have many more innovations coming and look for more and more ways to improve access to your patients, offer efficiency and grow your practice. Anytime is here to help.

Mick Connors, MD

Co-Founder & CEO