STREAMLINE

YOUR PRACTICE

WITH MEDICAL

MANAGEMENT

SOFTWARE

If you want to invest in Medical Management Software, you are on the right track. The right package can help you create less work for your staff. It can also increase patient satisfaction. With new technology, Medical Management Software can help to streamline your practice and improve efficiency in a number of ways. This guide will help you compare the various options on the market and make sure the software you choose has the capabilities you need.

Important Facts About Medical Management Software

To keep the administrative side of their practice up to date and effective, medical professionals are increasingly turning to medical practice management software systems. These solutions are designed to organize the administrative and billing functions of your practice, so you can be assured of the most accurate and efficient data management.

If you are a health care professional, you know that certain processes involved in medical practice management are undergoing some significant changes. Recent developments in medical management technology have produced systems that provide many additional features, and can integrate several functions that allow medical and administrative staff to access vital information faster and more easily than ever before. Practice management systems typically include useful features such as:

Billing process manager Appointment scheduler Patient demographics capture Patient pre-registration Insurance eligibility check Insurance payer database Reports generation

Key Benefits of Medical Management Software

Using a good medical practice management solution can completely eliminate the type of errors that often occur with obsolete filing systems or outdated technology. Practices that implement this technology typically see that it results in much more efficient billing, increased staff productivity, reduced operating costs and improved overall practice management.

Here are a few key improvements you can expect: Simple and Effective Data Management – Medical offices produce a significant amount of information, all of which needs to be carefully and properly managed to ensure accurate records. Practice management software stores detailed patient data in one place and allows for quick and easy retrieval. Medical records can be created with minimal time and effort on the part of your staff. And patient medical information and notes can be linked with their scheduled appointments along with their billing and payment records. Efficient Billing and Claims Procedures – Medical management software effectively streamlines the billing, payment and insurance claim filing processes. Accuracy in this area is vital in order to track revenue and eliminate billing inaccuracies. The system will create an electronic billing statement and can pinpoint errors that could otherwise delay payment. A good medical management system can reduce the time gap between billing to and payment from an insurance company by 50 percent or more. Greater Scheduling Efficiency – Appointment scheduling hassles can be the bane of your office staff’s existence. Medical practice management software will effectively streamline the scheduling process and keep the patient schedule flowing smoothly. When your staff can retrieve a medical record before the patient has time to open a magazine, you can handle more appointments each day, and your practice can produce more revenue.

Better Quality Patient Care – This is what it’s all about, after all. With managerial and administrative tasks handled with minimal time and effort, medical staff can focus all that time and attention where it should be; on the patient. And when your system is linked to other medical facilities like medical labs and hospitals, vital information exchanges between multiple health care providers can literally take place within seconds, so important details involving patient care can be easily communicated and coordinated.

Drawbacks to Consider Start-up costs when setting up a new practice management system can vary, and it can be easy to over-extend your budget when purchasing and installing the software. This is especially true if you opt for a client server model, which would require you to purchase or finance server equipment and user workstations. You will also need to factor in the ongoing cost of running the server. Getting a detailed quote before making a purchase is the best way to ensure that you stay within your budget. Also, be sure the provider offers adequate training, so you won’t need to add staff training costs on top of your software purchase.

Some practice management software products will meet the needs of your practice but fail to comply with HIPAA rules and regulations. If you find yourself in this situation, the transition can be complex and time-consuming. The best way to prevent this is to thoroughly research your software provider to ensure that their product is in full compliance with current HIPAA requirements.

Some practice management solutions might not integrate well with your EMR system. This is something you will want to include in your vendor comparison and research to ensure that you won’t have unnecessary hassles when you attempt to integrate the two.

Questions to Ask When Comparing Providers

1. Does the vendor provide training? As noted above, the vendor who supplies the software should also provide ongoing support and training to help you and your staff get the most from your system. Look for a package that includes the services of consultants who can personally train anyone who will be using the system. The better the training, the easier it will be for your staff to transition to the system. Be sure you’ll have access to training and support whenever you need it.

2. Is the system user friendly? The software should be easy for employees to use and master. Will the Software Improve Workflow? The system you choose should have the ability to streamline the workflow within your office. Patient scheduling as well as charting and record-keeping should be all in one location, for example, and should easily integrate with billing and other aspects of your practice. Everything you need in order to make the workflow in your practice run as smoothly as possible should be included within the system.

3. Is the system Cloud-based? If so, you’ll be able to access the entire system from any location that has an internet connection. Online systems can really save you if you ever need to access any of the information outside of your primary location.

4. How robust is the security? The software you choose should also have substantial security to ensure that the sensitive patient information it will contain is well protected. Security measures should comply with regulations and possibly even go above and beyond those requirements.

5. Does the system include personalized user dashboards? You should have a different login and password for every user on the system and those people should also have personalized home pages. This will give them access to the tools and functions that they use the most often, making the entire system easier for each person to use.

Making Your Final Selection Below are several key factors to consider when choosing a vendor. Although there may be some variables depending on the type of services you need, these principles can be applied to any category of service provider you seek.

Cost – Since cost savings is one of the main advantages of outsourcing, business managers naturally place this factor as a high priority when choosing service providers. Provide the vendor with adequate documentation regarding your requirements. This will enable them to furnish you with a more accurate estimate. The proposal you receive from a medical management software vendor should detail the cost of every feature needed to fulfill your requirements, allowing you to select the features you need most and remain within your budget.

Financial Strength – Check the vendor’s Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) ratings and reports. If

possible, obtain a copy of the company’s annual report and recently audited financial records and other

indicators to help you assess the company’s financial health. Find out how long the company has been in

business, its market share for a particular service, and how it has fluctuated. Startup companies or those

with dubious financial stability would not be a good choice, especially for core business functions.

Operation and Controls –Will your data be safe with the company you’re considering? What type of background checks do they perform when hiring new employees? Research the vendor’s policies and standards on functions that could have a residual effect on your business, such as security, internal controls, facilities management, privacy protection, record keeping, and system maintenance.

Scalability –Can the vendor accommodate the increased needs of a growing company, or even a sudden surge in demand? It is advisable to select a service provider with the ability to handle changes in your company’s needs. The vendor should have the infrastructure to handle an increased need.

Commitment to a Relationship –Whether you are running a major global corporation or a small business, you should partner with a vendor who values your relationship and demonstrates an interest in the success of all of their clients, large or small.

Quality Certifications –Vendors who have achieved a high level of adherence to certain standards of quality are often awarded quality certificates from independent auditors. Companies that carry such certificates can usually be counted on to deliver excellent service.

How to Perform a Reliable Reference Check

The best way to evaluate whether a vendor meets all of the standards listed above is to check the company’s references. This will give you a good idea of how well a vendor meets deadlines, responds to queries, and provides support. You should especially seek out companies that have used the vendor’s services, but are not listed as references by the vendor. Here are a few tips on finding such companies:

Look at the vendor’s press releases for information about business partnerships and

relationships. Perform a simple search engine search. Browse a vendor’s LinkedIn profile. Attend industry trade events to find companies that work with the vendor you’re considering

(this is especially useful if a business is large or well-known). Look for references from businesses that are similar to yours in terms of type, size, and/or

location.

Whenever possible, speak to the person who actually deals with the company you’re inquiring about. They should be able to give you more in-depth information about what it’s like to do business with this vendor.

Once you have gathered several unbiased sources, prepare a few key questions to ask. Delve for details by asking specific questions about what the company has done to fill their needs. Ask them to rate the vendor’s business services on factors such as timeliness, expertise, reliability, customer support, communication, and availability. When comparing more than one vendor, remember to record your findings for later review.

Pay attention to the company’s track record. Case studies regarding previous projects are excellent sources of companies who you can contact are good indicators to check the working history of the company.

Search for news on the Internet pertaining to the vendor you are researching. You can do this by setting up a Google account to receive Google Alerts with the company’s name. Google will periodically send you reports with any new online information about the vendor in question.

Performing such due diligence will take effort, but it will definitely be time well spent, and a worthwhile investment in the future of your business.

With so many medical software applications available, choosing the right solution for your practice can be challenging. InsideUp makes the process much easier by providing free, no-obligation quotes from top medical billing software vendors.

Glossary of Key Terms

Agents– Software programs designed to interact or work together with a degree of autonomy to perform a set of tasks or satisfy a set of goals. Agents are typically capable of flexible, autonomous action in a changeable and unpredictable environment.

Application – A computer program or system designed to offer support for managing a specific clinical problem typically through the performance of a series of tasks.

Argumentation –A decision making procedure based on constructing logical arguments for and against a number of available choices, assessing their relative merits and weighing their relative strengths.

Artificial Intelligence –Typically, computational techniques to automate tasks that require human intelligence and the ability to reason.

Clinical algorithm – Any computation, formula, survey, or look-up table, useful in healthcare.Clinical Pathways See Integrated Care Pathways

Clinical protocol – A standard set of tasks that define precisely how classes of patients should be managed or treated.

Clinical practice guideline – Validated policy statements representing best clinical practice. Used to support standardised patient care.

Code –The unique numerical identifier for a medical concept in a medical terminology system.

Concept–A term to define a class of objects. The "unit of symbolic processing" [Manchester University Medical Informatics Group] in a medical terminology.

Critical appraisal –The process of assessing and interpreting medical research results systematically paying particular attention to their validity and relevance.

Data Dictionary – A set of data declarations and definitions stored in a database management system

Data mining –The use of tools and techniques, often from Artificial Intelligence, to determine patterns from a set of data.

(Clinical) Decision support –Automated tools that help clinicians deliver or manage patient care.

(Clinical) Decision support system–Computer system typically consisting of a knowledge base and an inference engine (ideally integrated with workflow components and clinical data embedded in a electronic medical record system) that is able to generate advice based on case-specific data.

Decision Theory –A formal framework for making logical decisions in problem areas containing risk, uncertainty and probabilities, typically employing Bayesian inference methods.

Decision tree –A method of representing knowledge, widely used for classification tasks, which makes structured decisions in a hierarchical tree-like fashion. Decision tree algorithms include Bayes.

Description logic –Logic-based knowledge representation formalism for modelling a domain in terms of concepts (classes), roles (properties and relations) and individuals (instances of classes).

eHealth –New computer and networking technologies applied to healthcare.

Electronic Medical Record– A computerised health care record.

Expert System – A computer system, typically based on artificial intelligence techniques, that represents and applies knowledge to provide expert quality advice, diagnoses and recommendations for solving real world problems. Typically made up of knowledge bases and an inference engine.

Health (medical) informatics –The use of computers for managing of clinical knowledge, information and data.

Induction – A form of logical inference which allows generalisations to be made from particular examples.

Inference –A logical reasoning process to draw conclusions from facts, suppositions and data.

Inference engine – The 'reasoning' part of a computer program which interprets knowledge and data to determine logical conclusions.

Integrated Care Pathways –Integrated Care Pathways (or Clinical Pathways) are multidisciplinary plans of care, drawn along a timeline, to support the implementation of clinical guidelines and protocols.

Knowledge Acquisition –The definition and transfer of expert knowledge from a human to a computer program (typically a knowledge base).

Knowledge base – A systematically structured set of knowledge from an individual field stored in an AI program, typically as concepts, facts and rules.

Knowledge representation –Mapping techniques which can formalise the knowledge of the objects in a domain and how to reason in that domain in order to support automated inferencing.

Neural Networks –Artificial neural networks are information processing systems composed of a large number of highly interconnected processing elements (modelled on neurons in the brain) linked by weighted connections (mirroring synapses).

Ontology – A set of concepts, their attributes and the relationships between them within a given application area, typically represented as a knowledge base. Within health informatics, an ontology would be a formal, computer-understandable description of a domain.

Patient safety –"Freedom from accidental injury" [To Err is Human].

Systematic review – A summary and critical appraisal of medical research literature in a specified domain to establish the effects (potential benefits and harms) of an intervention.

Tacit knowledge – Knowledge that is difficult to express and/or communicate formally. Includes subjective insights and thoughts.

Term – An agreed name in a medical terminology for a medical condition or treatment

Terminology– A controlled set of standard terms used to describe clinical activities. e.g. Workflow The process of co-ordinating patients, resources, information and clinical and administrative procedures in order to streamline care delivery.