Best Medical Practice Management Software

What You Should Know About Medical Practice Management Software

Medical practice management software alleviates the daily activities of hospitals, clinics, medical practices, and other health care organizations, helping them run as efficiently as possible. Medical practice software is a comprehensive solution that provides better oversight, task management, recordkeeping, and interfacing with standalone or supplementary solutions. The software automates pesky but necessary responsibilities such as keeping up with changing state and industry regulations. The ultimate goals of medical practice management software are to provide patients with a better experience, maintain security standards, and improve the quality of life for medical professionals.

Medical practice management software can either be deployed in the cloud, on a desktop, or on a server. Each deployment type comes with its own pros and cons, but regardless of whether the practice management solution is tethered to a physical desktop or can be accessed simply via the internet, any type of software can still manage daily operations.

Key Benefits of Medical Practice Management Software

• Organizes and optimizes administrative, operational, and financial workflows and processes
• Captures and centralizes sensitive data such as patient information, billing data, and disease and treatment information
• Reduces time spent manually writing or searching for clinical documentation
• Simplifies clinical and patient-facing communication
• Prioritizes patient care

Why Use Medical Practice Management Software?

Reduce paper-based workflows — Even though regulation required all hospitals to switch over to EHRs, not every aspect of a medical practice became automatically digital. Medical practice management software collects patient information in a digital format, supporting the creation and organization of paperless charts that can be easily navigated and searched through.

Optimize operations — Practice management software optimizes overall operations via streamlined communication, automated processes, and helpful notifications and triggers that can be set up according to your practice’s needs. Software also helps medical staff, physicians, practitioners, and other health care professionals centralize and coordinate administrative, logistical, and financial operations.

Prioritize patient care — The automation capabilities of medical practice management software help free up medical staff’s precious time. The less time physicians have to spend on transcribing their notes, following up on appointments, and sharing patient information, the more time they can spend on delivering the best level of care to their patients.

Compliance — Maintaining compliance is made easier with medical practice management software, especially software that has built-in safeguards and risk assessment functionalities.

Customization — Medical practice management software is not intended to be a one-size-fits-all tool. Different medical specialties have differing needs, and many solutions are either tailored to the needs of specific specialties or are flexible enough to accept your practice’s specific workflows.

Who Uses Medical Practice Management Software?

Administrative staff, physicians, practitioners, nurses, and other medical staff all use medical practice management software. Anyone who pulls up a patient file from the master index repository, inputs charting notes, creates patient appointments, submits insurance verifications and claims, or generates reports comes into contact with the practice management software. Even health care clearinghouses, pharmacies, and software support teams are exposed to the practice management solution via solution integration and communication.

Kinds of Medical Practice Management Software

Medical practice management solutions either exist as flexible software that can fit the needs of any practice or are designed to support particular specialties (such as physical therapy, mental health, or assisted living facilities) or different sizes of practices (for example, a smaller office or practice, regardless of specialty, will most likely utilize an all-in-one solution).

Medical Practice Management Software Features

As mentioned before, medical practice management software is a comprehensive solution designed to streamline your health care organization’s everyday processes. However, not all practice management solutions are built the same: some may lean more heavily toward financial optimization while others are designed for decluttering the administrative space. The demographics and needs of your practice will also help guide you toward one solution over another. Regardless, a few features consistently crop up across all practice management solutions, and they include:

Scheduling — Both patient scheduling and medical staff scheduling tasks are simplified with comprehensive practice management software. Scheduling functionality can also simplify room and equipment allotment processes.

Patient information management — Medical practice management solutions are built to capture and securely store patient information. The software allows you to create a searchable, master patient index that administrators can use to keep track of medications, visit history, referral tracking, and more.

Document management — Medical practice management software can store shared and scanned documents, images, lab results, and other patient-related records into a centralized repository.

Reporting — Because medical practice management works overtime to automate and streamline operational and administrative duties, it has the ability to extract performance and financial data to create reports. The generated reports help health care organizations monitor and track performance, which in turn help with identifying both trends and gaps in performance.

Integration with EHR software — EHR integration capability amps up the efficiency and effectiveness of a medical practice management system. A practice management software that can easily integrate with your EHR makes workflows and processes more efficient.

Financial management — While standalone medical billing, health care credentialing, and revenue cycle management solutions exist, some comprehensive medical practice management solutions provide functionality to streamline and automate tasks such as claim submissions and invoice and billing tracking.

Patient portal — Empowering patients to keep track of their health progress as well as keep in contact with their primary or ancillary care providers is one way that hospitals and practices can ensure the active role that their patients play in their own health. Providing patients with a portal can also result in less confusion and intimidation around topics like medication and treatment plans.

Trends Related to Medical Practice Management Software

Modern technology is finally impacting the health care industry and its approaches to “nice to have" and “must have" when it comes to technological requirements. Bettering patient experience has been on the forefront of health care for a few years now, and its influence is clear in the evolution of patient portals, medical apps, and other forms of patient engagement. But what other trends are impacting the world of medical practice management software?

Cybersecurity — Data security breaches and cyberattacks have directly impacted the health care industry. More precautions and deliberate measures are being taken to protect patient information and any piece of hardware or software that makes a hospital or practice run. Health care software, in general, are adapting their functionalities and strengthening any security-related features, so medical practice management software vendors are no different.

Machine earning — Machine learning (ML) advances have the potential to further automate and streamline daily processes. For example, form and charting templates are already common features of medical practice management software, but ML can take that one step further and begin autofilling the content of templates based on recurring language. ML can also help with data processing, optimize clinical outcomes, and incorporate predictive algorithms into clinical tasks.

Population health — Creating a centralized repository of patient information makes it easier to generate reports on trends in diseases, treatments, and overall patient health. Seamless integration between EHR and medical practice management software captures accurate trends in patient health. Accuracy in translating that kind of patient data can lead to better treatment options and value-based care offerings, which can further reduce overhead costs or unnecessary strain on human or physical resources.

Multiple practice reconciliation — A medical practice isn’t necessarily a single facility. Add in telemedicine, and your practice may very well require a deft solution to keep track of all incoming data. Cloud-based medical practice management software makes it easy for clinical documentation to be stored and shared. Leveraging the software to promote reconciliation and continuity between practices is the logical next step.

Potential Issues with Medical Practice Management Software

Lack of access levels — Not all medical staff (should) have the same access levels when it comes to accessing and sharing sensitive patient data. Medical practice management software should support the creation and enforcement of differing access levels.

Noncompliance — One perk of any piece of software is that it can be programmed to mine networks for information and set up relevant notification parameters. One of the benefits of medical practice management software is its ability to automate current compliance measures. However, if the software is incapable of monitoring for compliance regulation updates or setting up workflows to keep the practice in compliance, then it’s creating more vulnerabilities and risk for the health care organization.

Difficult database navigation — While the creation of a centralized database of patient information or facility inventory is helpful, that repository is only useful going forward if it has a working search function. If the search functionality is difficult or clunky to use, then the supposed time-saving promise of the solution is gone.

Lack of interoperability — Streamlined integration with standalone medical software is paramount to the effectiveness of medical practice management software. If your chosen software doesn’t communicate well with other existing solutions or networks, then the practice management solution is a dud. The software is supposed to reduce administrative fatigue.

Lack of vendor support — Medical practice management software is designed to automate front-end tasks. When medical staff is unable to easily or consistently simplify those tasks, they contribute to bottlenecks. Users should be able to turn to the software vendor for customer support any time they come across issues or troubleshooting.

Software and Services Related to Medical Practice Management Software

To reiterate, medical practice management is a comprehensive solution that eases the day-to-day activities of medical staff while ultimately improving patient care delivery and clinical outcomes. It makes sense, then, that there is either overlap in functionality or easy integration with a standalone medical solution. The following solutions may offer features that are covered by the overall medical practice management solution, but they’re still worth checking out. (For example, if your health care organization already has a strong EHR in place, you might only be looking for an effective medical billing and invoicing solution.)

Medical staff scheduling — Medical staff scheduling software ensures that the schedules of medical staff are maintained, properly generated, and fairly distributed. Medical staff scheduling software is exclusively internal and can exist as a standalone tool or as an offering of the overall medical practice management solution.

Patient scheduling — Patients can use patient scheduling software to request and schedule appointments with their physician or doctor. Health care organizations use patient scheduling software to improve patient experience as well as ease the burden of manually taking on patient appointment requests. Patient scheduling software integrates with those medical practice management solutions that don’t offer a patient-facing appointment creator.

Medical billing — Hospitals, clinics, and practices use medical billing software to create and send out invoices for health care services rendered. While medical billing software can and does exist as a tool outside of revenue cycle management and medical practice management solutions, it must integrate with the latter to access its patient database.

Revenue cycle management — With revenue cycle management software, health care organizations can effectively keep track of their patients’ entire financial cycle. Revenue cycle management software unifies the business and clinical sides of health care, so it would benefit from the centralized repositories created and maintained by medical practice management systems.

Health care credentialing — While some medical practice management solutions provide a credentialing module, health care credentialing software exists specifically to take on the process of verifying and validating patients’ insurance information.

Patient relationship management (PRM) — Patient relationship management software, also known as healthcare CRM, aggregates patient data from any database that it can connect to. Integration with a medical practice management solution’s patient repository will bolster PRM’s own database and effectiveness in fostering productive relationships between patient and doctor.

Utilization management — Utilization management software helped health care organizations minimize unnecessary procedures, diagnoses, and treatments, ultimately reducing expenses. Both utilization management and medical practice management solutions must integrate with EHRs to be as effective as possible. Utilization management software automates approvals of medical services, which leads directly to benefits in staff scheduling and patient care.

HIPAA compliant messaging — Most communication that a health care organization has with its patients must adhere to HIPAA, which is where HIPAA compliant messaging software comes into play. Medical practice management software streamlines the flow in communication and benefits from a tool that is designed to uphold HIPAA when sending out texts or emails.