A new medical office buildout can be a game-changer for the way that you operate your practice every day.
Over the past few decades, the needs of a medical office have shifted. Where once patient charts might take up rooms filled to the brim with filing cabinets, many of these records have been digitized and be accessed by a physician in an exam room. The maze-like corridors of a doctor’s office have in many places been streamlined to suit the needs of practitioners and patients alike.
What considerations do you need to make for your medical office buildout before you break ground? In this blog, we identify areas for improvement in these offices that can be addressed by a buildout.
3 Considerations for Your New Medical Office Buildout
Patient Flow
The pandemic has starkly illustrated how operational inefficiencies can lead to long waiting times and unhappy patients. With surges pushing facilities to the brink, having good patient flow is critical to serving as many people as possible as well as meeting your bottom line.
As older rooms like chartrooms have become obsolete, these spaces can be accommodated for the changing ways in which medical buildings operate. Several trends in medical office design include:
· Larger exam rooms suitable for a patient and potential guests
· Replacing chartrooms with EHR implementation
· Shared physicians’ offices
· Briefing areas for physicians and clinical staff
· Comfortable waiting rooms suitable for social distancing
Ample Storage
Medical facilities, from a doctor’s office to an emergency room, require a lot of equipment to serve their patients effectively. Bad storage design can not only get in the way physically but can lead to operational inefficiencies that slow down business. When floor space is limited, storage is a priority.
Designing a space around the technology that you want to include is much more cost-effective than retrofitting a space around new tools. Speaking to a tech expert can help ensure you have the right amount of room in an area before construction is completed.
Adding Ancillary Services
There are all sorts of ancillary services that can be added into your building, allowing you to keep referrals in-house and prevent patients from having to be referred to others. This can be extremely convenient for both yourself as a practitioner and the patients you serve.
Some ancillary services include:
· Cardiac Monitoring
· Radiology
· Lab Testing
· Sleep Laboratory Services
· Telemedicine
· Behavioral health
· Dialysis
· Physical Therapy
· Speech Therapy
Before implementing ancillary care services into your practice, it is beneficial to consider whether it is practical to add these services into the cost of your medical facility buildout. Are other physicians in your area offering these services? Finding a niche area of service with high demand can be especially lucrative.
In addition, you should consider construction costs inherent to these types of services. Radiology rooms require expensive equipment and special construction methods to implement. Speech therapy, by comparison, has much lower upfront costs.
Finally, you should consider the role telehealth plays in your work. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth has dramatically increased access-to-care for patients across the country and is unlikely to go away any time soon even once the pandemic has drawn to a close. Designating areas for telehealth purposes can be essential for keeping your care accessible to patients. https://www.great-answer.com/
Getting Started with a New Medical Office Buildout
Before starting on a new medical office buildout, you should consult internally to figure out what you need as a business. Depending on the size of your practice, this may be a facility-wide consultation or may be broken down by department. You need to analyze:
· Bottlenecks in addressing the flow of patients
· Services often requested by patients you currently are not providing
· What isn’t working in your current clinical environment
Once these needs have been addressed, plan a budget, and get in touch with an expert who can help design and plan around the specific requirements of medical buildouts.
At Buildout Pros, we are experts at building out facilities for dental and medical practices. Whether you’re looking to remodel, expand, or even build out a new office, we can help. Contact us today for more information about our services.
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