Learn More About Medical Practice Management Software
What is 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 necessary responsibilities such as keeping up with changing industry regulations. The ultimate goals of medical practice management software are to provide a better healthcare experience for patients, a better work experience for medical providers, and maintain security standards.
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.
Medical practice management solutions either exist as flexible software that can fit the needs of any healthcare 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 as this would be more cost effective.
What are the Common Features of Medical Practice Management Software?
Manage patient information: Users can manage patient intake and update patient information on a regular basis and the software is able to correct and update any mistakes it finds in the data. This alleviates the administrative burden and manual data entry for both the patient and medical practice managers.
Schedule appointments: Online patient scheduling can increase appointment requests and free up essential staff time that can be devoted to the patient experience. Providing patients with an online booking option allows them to select the best dates and times for their schedules. Patients can also receive appointment reminders, which helps decrease missed appointments. It’s important to keep in mind that not all medical practice management software has patient-facing appointment creation capabilities.
Track the patient journey: Care teams and medical practice managers can track a patient's interaction with the healthcare system which starts with the patient developing symptoms, seeking information and eventually care from a healthcare provider and continues from there through diagnosis and treatment, to recovery, adjustment to a new way of life alerts and escalations and all in real time. Real-time information empowers users to better manage the patient journey across physical and digital channels.
Telemedicine: When appropriate, telemedicine or telehealth enables healthcare practitioners to effectively evaluate, diagnose, and treat patients remotely. Telemedicine leverages smart devices and electronic technologies (such as web conferencing and mobile applications) to provide an alternative mode of treatment to in-person clinic visits. With telemedicine built into a medical practice management system, health care professionals can provide real-time treatment and care to their patients around the clock, in addition to offering their patients convenience, bettering patient follow-up and engagement, and reducing the number of missed appointments and cancellations.
Perform billing procedures: Bettering the patient experience is a key focus across all departments in medical practice. Changing up the methods and means by which patients can pay for medical services can lend to convenience and ensure a user-friendly experience. Patients may be able to take advantage of payment plans and they won’t have to struggle to submit payments on time, and practices won’t need to track down overdue payments via collections.
Submit insurance claims: Electronically processing and scrubbing claims enables a medical practice’s financial department to operate at a higher volume, more efficiently, and in a timely manner. By submitting claims to be scrubbed and processed, medical practices can avoid the time-consuming process of resubmitting them due to error.
Insurance verification: Verifying the status of a patient’s insurance coverage and eligibility prior to their arrival helps minimize any uncomfortable or confrontational situations. This benefits front desk staff, especially if the chosen solution makes it an easy, simple process to check eligibility and manage the reimbursement process.
Generate reports: Reporting is a critical function that helps practices stay on track with goals and objectives. It identifies medical practice financial performance such as charges, payments, and adjustments. Through reports and data visualization, medical practices can gain an understanding and a bird’s-eye view of their operations.
What are the Benefits of Medical Practice Management Software?
Reduce paper-based workflows: Even though regulation required all hospitals to switch over to electronic health records (EHR), not every aspect of a healthcare 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 the practice’s needs. The software also increases practice efficiency, helps staff members, 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 fewer 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—therefore, increasing patient satisfaction. A medical practice management software can handle administrative tasks so physicians can focus on patient care.
Compliance: Maintaining compliance and regulatory standards 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 the practice’s specific workflows.
Who Uses Medical Practice Management Software?
Healthcare providers: Healthcare providers can utilize medical practice management software to communicate with patients via secure messages, add post-visit notes, keep track of patients’ medications and medical issues, and monitor the patient journey.
Medical office staff: Healthcare support staff and medical practice managers can utilize the solution to manage appointments, prescriptions, notes, and other patient-related data. There should be an option to create and maintain a comprehensive and detailed patient profile that can be used for follow-ups and communication.
Patients: Patients can utilize the medical practice management software to play an active role in their healthcare journey and overall well being, including sending messages to their care team, scheduling appointments, reviewing test results, and updating their personal information.
Healthcare HR: Healthcare human resources departments must meet compliance challenges with tools that offer streamlined, trackable methods for monitoring clinical outcomes and compliance. A medical practice management software can help reduce the administrative burden, centralize materials, and improve tracking of data.
Software Related to Medical Practice Management Software
Medical staff scheduling software: 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 software: 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 the 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 software: 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 software: 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 software: 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) software: 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 software: Utilization management software helps 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 software: Most communication that a healthcare 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.
Challenges 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 different access levels.
Noncompliance: 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 risks for the health care organization. Healthcare organizations need to have a proactive approach to security and compliance.
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. Users should test the solution to ensure the search functionality is easy to navigate and increases clinical productivity.
Lack of interoperability: Streamlined integration with standalone medical software, such as EHR or telemedicine software, is essential to the effectiveness of medical practice management software. If the chosen software doesn’t communicate well with other existing solutions or networks, then the practice management solution is not worth the investment. The software should reduce administrative fatigue and increase practice efficiency.
Lack of vendor support: Medical practice management software is designed to automate administrative tasks and consistently simplify administrative workflow. Users should be able to turn to the software vendor for customer support any time they come across issues or troubleshooting.
How to Buy Medical Practice Management Software
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Medical Practice Management Software
There are many issues to consider when choosing a medical practice management software. There are often unique needs to be considered when assessing software to purchase—size and team member count, onboarding process, software cost, vendor customer support options, mobile compatibility, and customization are some of them. Buyers must determine what set of features will help the users be more efficient and meet the needs of the claims management process.
Compare Medical Practice Management Software Products
Create a long list
An initial list of potential medical practice management solutions should include any products that meet the basic feature requirements. At this point, buyers should be aiming to get a sense of the options that meet their essential needs.
Create a short list
After a long list has been created, it’s time to look at each product in more detail to determine if it sounds like it will meet the needs of the healthcare providers interested in purchasing this software. This should include evaluating additional features of each product beyond the ones identified as essential to determine if additional functionality would provide more value, efficiency, and compliance requirements. Scalability is particularly important as is determining if new features can be added in the future, such as more users or more courses.
Conduct demos
Demos are a great opportunity for buyers to see how the software works. Only the shortlisted vendors should be invited to demonstrate their solutions. Demos should be performed live, using the system, and not through slide decks and screenshots. All vendors should follow a predetermined scenario that simulates the business processes of the buyer. Buyers should request to see a walkthrough from the perspective of all users to understand how the interface looks for both sides and ensure it is user friendly for everyone.
When narrowing down the list of vendors, buyers should consider asking questions such as:
- How does the pricing model for this product work? Are there capital and recurring costs? What are the annual licensing and maintenance costs?
- How well known is the vendor? Do they have a sizable amount of clientele in the healthcare market?
- Is the medical practice management software customizable? How much do additional modules or plug-ins cost? Can certain features be turned off or modified?
- Can specific user restrictions be assigned depending on user type?
- How well does the medical practice management software work on mobile devices?
- How easily can the medical practice management software be grown to support a larger number of users and content?
- What types of reporting does the medical practice management software offer?
- Is the medical practice management software compliant with healthcare security and privacy protocols and regulations?
- Is there a disaster recovery plan? Where are the servers hosted?
Selection of Medical Practice Management Software
Choose a selection team
To choose a selection team, decision makers need to involve subject matter experts from all teams that will use the system. For any organization, this will likely involve healthcare practitioners, office managers, staff members, and claims management employees. An IT administrator should also be present to weigh in on technical concerns with the products. The selection team should be a representation of the people who will use the system.
Negotiation
After narrowing in on the preferred product, it’s time to negotiate a pricing package. Buyers must consider the pricing model of the software, such as whether the seller charges a flat monthly fee or, more commonly, charges a fee based on how many user seats the buyer needs. Buyers should also note if they can negotiate to add more user seats to a package that would otherwise meet their needs. They might also consider negotiating a discount in exchange for signing a multi-year contract.
Final decision
The final decision should rest with the primary users of the software, such as physicians, nurses, office managers, and staff members. All parties should consider whether the software is easy to use, easy to implement, improves operational efficiency, and allows for a better patient experience.
Medical Practice Management Software Trends
Modern technology is finally impacting the healthcare industry and its approaches to “nice to have" and “must have" when it comes to technological requirements. Bettering patient experience has been at 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 healthcare 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. Healthcare software, in general, is adapting its functionalities and strengthening any security-related features, so medical practice management software vendors are no different.
Artificial intelligence (AI): AI or 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 AI can take that one step further and begin autofilling the content of templates based on recurring language. AI can also help with data processing, optimize clinical outcomes, and incorporate predictive algorithms into clinical and administrative 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 the practice may very well require multiple solutions 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.
