Gaining Practice Efficiency

Gaining practice efficiency is essential to engaging patients, building relationships and, ultimately, creating successful health outcomes.

Betty Murray, CN, IFMCP, CHC, is the Founder and CEO of a busy Functional Medicine practice, The Living Well Health and Wellness Center, in Dallas, Texas. The center started on a foundation of Functional Nutrition, and over the years has evolved into a multi-disciplinary center with physicians, nutritionists, counselors and health coaches all working together. The practice has two fully certified functional medicine practitioners, Betty Murray and Suzanne Mack, MD, and provides a unique and comprehensive approach for patients with continuity of care regardless of which practitioner they see first.

“Our patients love the high-value care and the consistency in message, engagement and experience that they receive, and this has resulted in very high levels of patient retention and engagement.” – Betty Murray, CN, IFMCP, CHC

Challenges experienced by the practice include:

• Significant time spent gathering patient intake information and organizing into a paper timeline and matrix to get accurate, complete patient narratives and difficulty getting the patient intake information from paper into the EMR
• Long wait lists for patients getting in to see the two certified functional medicine practitioners
• Fast growth with a need for new practitioners and non-clinical staff to get quickly educated on the principals of functional medicine, as well as gaining familiarity with the functional medicine timeline and matrix

“Gaining practice efficiency is important, but I’m also very focused on looking for ways to improve patient engagement and experience and for ways the practice can continue to differentiate itself as the leading Functional Medicine practice in Dallas.” – Betty Murray, CN, IFMCP, CHC

Since time is extremely precious to Betty, given her busy schedule seeing patients and running the practice, she immediately saw the potential that the LivingMatrix application had to gain back hours and gain practice efficiency overall. The nominal cost of the subscription made it a very easy decision.

Working closely with the LivingMatrix team, Betty was able to get buy-in from her front desk staff, and after a couple of training sessions the practice was up and running in a little over a week. They had some challenges with a few patients due to the variability in tech sophistication and how outdated patients’ computers can be but have successfully worked through those and have developed strategies to work with the differing capabilities.

As a result of implementing LivingMatrix:

• Betty is saving 8-10 hours per week and documentation time has shrunk from 30-40 minutes to 15 minutes. This allows her to spend some of the saved time to have more meaningful conversations with patients and seeing new patients, shrinking the wait list.
• Using LivingMatrix has changed the way she interacts with patients. She now has them sitting on the same side of the desk as her, and on the second or third visit she walks them through their timeline and matrix on a 32-inch monitor.
• She has also been able to shrink the time it takes to educate new staff and practitioners on the Functional Medicine methodology and tools, improving collaboration between practitioners.

“It’s remarkable, using LivingMatrix – for every hour I spend I’ve gained back 20 min – a significant gain in practice efficiency. I can add one new patient a day without working any harder. Patients love LivingMatrix; most people are visual learners, and it is very beneficial for them to see the graphics.” – Betty Murray, CN, IFMCP, CHC

In Betty’s view, many practitioners that have not been using the Functional Medicine Timeline and Matrix in their practice or have been implementing only bits and pieces of Functional Medicine, mainly due to the additional time that it takes.

“The LivingMatrix application will help you integrate the information better and deliver a more complete functional medicine model. You can go from functional medicine “light” and be more thorough and comprehensive with your care plan and approach.” – Betty Murray, CN, IFMCP, CHC

To learn more about how LivingMatrix can help you gain efficiency in your practice along with improved patient engagement, click here.