Practice Management Software: Advantage, Benefits, and USPs

Posted in Healthcare Management

Practice Management Software

Medical practice management (PM) software or an electronic medical records (EMR) program is always available in the healthcare facility for coordination and management with a wide range of advantages. Here are the major benefits PM and EHR software will offer to medical practice in the industry. Our experts present comprehensive details on what is practice management software and all relevant questions.

Overview

Are you looking to improve the efficiency of your medical practice and design a smooth billing workflow with a streamlined management process?

If yes, you may need medical practice management software.

According to the American Medical Association, medical practice management software is meant to improve the healthcare services to patients and improve the efficiency of clinics and hospitals. Various hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare institutions implement healthcare CRM to automate their routine tasks like patients’ registrations, tracking, reporting, accounting, and other tasks through a well-integrated workflow process. This helps in increasing the overall quality and efficiency of healthcare services, enabling healthcare institutions to also increase profitability.

What is Practice Management Software/System Definition?

Wondering about what is a practice management software? Well, let’s start with the basics; the practice management system is a specialized digital health solution and a type of healthcare software development that is designed to assist healthcare services of all sizes to operate smoothly. Healthcare institutions of all sizes implement practice management software to improve their financial, operational, administrative, billing, and other functions, whereas, many healthcare institutions also integrate it with the electronic medical records (EMR).

So, while the basics are out of the way, you might ask what functions are performed in practice management software.

To answer your confusion, some of the common functionalities that come with practice management software include:

• Patients’ records storing
• Tracking patients’ medical history
• Scheduling appointments
• Streamlining billing procedure
• Managing insurance claims
• Payment processes from patients, and insurance providers
• Reporting

The best part of the practice management system is that there is no specific hardware involved in the system. All it needs is a functional internet connection with a computer. The system can be deployed easily as either:

• Desktop-only software

This approach is taken to just install the system on just one personal computer with few people to share with

• Client-server software

Under this setting, the system can be shared and accessed by multiple-users via an onsite server, which has to be purchased or leased by the hospital/clinic or any other healthcare institution

• Internet-based software

Under this setting, the system can be accessed by multiple users over the internet. This means that there is no need to purchase or lease an on-site service. However, a disadvantage of this approach is the fact that here the private and confidential data remains outside the practice office.

With the internet-based software, the PM systems won’t just be able to maintain patients’ records but also other data including insurance companies’ records, ICD codes, procedures, and much more.

3 Important Things You Need to Know About Practice Management Software

What is Practice Management Software in Healthcare?

Practice management in healthcare is all about ensuring efficient operations at healthcare facilities. For this purpose, practice management software is used (medium-scale and small-scale healthcare facilities use such systems). The practice management software helps manage the administrative and financial functions, while some hospitals also integrate it with EMRs. 

In essence, practice management in healthcare is about recording patient information, ensuring seamless appointment scheduling, performing the billing steps, and ensuring on-time insurance claim submission. In addition, it covers the report development for personnel working at the hospital. As far as the software is concerned, it’s installed on the computer and works with an internet connection.

What Is Medical Practice Management Software Used for in a Medical Office?

The medical practice management software is widely used by medium-scale and large-scale healthcare facilities. It is a combination of computerized features, and it’s known to streamline the daily activities at healthcare facilities. The implementation of medical practice management software in healthcare promises efficient operations and enhanced patient care.

What does Practice Management Software do?

Managing healthcare facilities and hospitals can be challenging, with so many patients requiring your attention. In addition, hiring support staff to manage administrative tasks and related activities can be expensive. For this reason, practice management software can be deployed since it has the following features to offer;

• Scheduling The Appointments

The medical practice management software allows healthcare providers to confirm and book new appointments while managing the previous ones. This is an excellent feature since it enables healthcare providers to identify the clashes in appointments and eliminate the chances of double bookings.

• Data Organization

With the practice management software, the healthcare providers can easily store the patient information and access it whenever they want. What’s best about the software is that it helps feed extensive data, such as medical history, treatments, and basic information. In addition, it can check for insurance coverage automatically.

• Billing 

It can prepare the bills and develop the claim papers. The practice management software can scan the claims and bills to ensure compliance with regulations and for the identification of errors. In addition, the staff members tend to receive automated alerts in case of errors or conflicts in the bills and claims. Not to forget, the cloud-based practice management software also updates the regulations and new codes automatically.

• Reporting 

In-depth information and data are essential to ensure proper treatment and diagnosis. That being said, the practice management software can provide comprehensive information about the patients, clinics, and related activities. Also, access to such reports helps improve healthcare services. 

What Are The Features Of Practice Management System?

Some of the features that make PM systems an essential medical tool include:

• Appointment Scheduling

The medical management software enables healthcare practitioners, paramedic staff and other administrative and support staff to easily manage appointments and schedules for patients across multiple providers. In fact, some medical management software also enables patients to book an appointment for themselves.

Scheduling is one of the most pressing challenges faced by the hospital and clinic staff, especially when they have to consider the availability days and times of multiple practitioners and allot the slots appropriately to patients. The medical management system enables administrative staff and paramedics to get real-time insights into the availability of each doctor in the hospital, thus minimizing the chances of giving conflicting appointments and avoiding double bookings.

To further enhance the patient’s experience with the healthcare services, the medical management system also has a reminder function, which automatically sends appointment reminders to patients to minimize no-shows.

• Organizing Patient Data

A medical practice management software enables doctors and other administrative staff to conveniently store all relevant patients’ information, as well as, access the information easily whenever required. Some of the basic fields that can be stored with a practice management system include patients’ names, addresses, contact information, insurance provider, employer, medical history, and various other detailed information like medication, past tests, lab results, and much more.

The system is also able to automatically verify the insurance coverage of patients to make for streamlined and fast billing processes.

• Billing and Claims Processing

Apart from verifying the insurance coverage of the patients, the medical PM system also enables smooth billing and claims processes by generating electronic billing statements, as well as, electronic claims for any dispute. The system comes with a scanning ability, where bills and claims can be easily scanned to analyze all the diagnosis codes and compliance with the regulations.

The automated billing and claim processing system is also able to identify any conflicts or errors in bills and claims, which may delay the payment process. In any case, where conflict is identified, the system sends an automated notification to the staff, so it can be resolved in time. The system will also send the notification for overdue payments from patients.

In case a cloud-based system is implemented, the hospital or medical facility would be able to remotely update any billing or procedural codes and rules, ensuring that there is never any outdated codes.

• Reporting

To ensure smooth and efficient hospital operations, doctors and administrative staff needs to have detailed and real-time access to all the information they may need on practice performance.

The medical practice management system ensures access to comprehensive data for all relevant persons. The data accessed can be highly filtered and may include:

• Patient’s no-show frequency against their appointment
• Time spent on specific tasks by staff members
• Time is taken to reimburse claims
• Clinic performance
• The time taken for claims to pass through the accounts receivable

By accessing such customized and filtered data, doctors and medical facilities have a great chance to assess their performance level and find out opportunities to boost productivity and cut out of inefficiencies.

What are the Advantages and Benefits of Practice Management Software

  Integrated workflows and processes

The biggest strength of PMS systems is their strength to create robust and highly integrated workflows and processes to boost the efficiency and productivity of medical institutions. This is a crucial success secret for all medical institutions in today’s world where consumers are increasingly looking for personalized, fast, and high-value healthcare services.

The PM system is able to optimize performance levels by automating various routine and administrative tasks through a dynamic and standardized system that keeps redundancies and errors minimum. To further improve the efficiency and productivity of institutions, the medical practice management system offers reporting and monitoring capabilities that are able to identify potential threats early before they can disrupt the system and bring down the efficiency of the institution.

–     Improve Patient Care

Automating the workflows and processes through the medical practice management system not only helps institutions to maximize their efficiency and productivity, but it also helps them to offer personalized and better healthcare services to patients. The medical management system comes with various advanced features and functionalities like an appointment scheduler, billing, and claim process, notification alerts, and reminders, the system takes off much burden from doctors, paramedics, and other administrative staff; subsequently enabling them to offer better quality healthcare services to patients.

–     Increased Profitability

With streamlined workflow and processes and automated management of administrative, data keeping, accounting, and billing tasks, the medical practice management system creates a dynamic and integrated system that helps hospitals and medical institutions to maximize efficiency for increased profitability.

–    Automated billing process

Billing and claim processing has remained a pinning challenge for all healthcare institutions. Implementing a practice management system enables hospitals to automate this challenge and improve the operations and processes of billing and claim processing. The system’s in-built features can detect insurance coverage of patients at early stages, as well as, it also analyze claims for any discrepancies, thereby, minimizing the chances of errors, while also ensuring a smooth and streamlined billing process.

What are the Advantages of Practice Management Software for Practitioners

• With a robust medical practice management system implemented, the administrative staff at hospitals and other healthcare institutions will have greatly reduced the responsibility of making copies of patients’ insurance cards. Instead, all they would have to do is scan the card and the system will automatically update the information against the patients’ details
• The medical practice management system also automates the tasks of claim processing, which is otherwise a tedious process for the billing department. The system is able to automatically analyze the claims against the relevant information, thereby not just reducing the time required to resolve the claims but also enhancing the cash flow
• Apart from reducing the burden from administrative and billing departments, the system also greatly assists doctors and physicians in validating the treatment and cure procedure for the diagnosed disease with the insurance company
• The system streamlines the workflow and processes of healthcare services by giving access to doctors and physicians for the detailed medical records of the patients and maintaining the data in relevant categories

What Are The Benefits of Practice Management Software for Patients

PM software doesn’t just help hospitals and medical practitioners in their practice, rather it also greatly improves the healthcare services for patients. The system is able to inform patients about their insurance coverage and benefits offered in the insurance plan, so they are better informed about their eligibility for a treatment, as well as, any overdue balance.

Apart from insurance coverage and services eligibility, the PM software also stores a detailed medical history of the patients’ thus helping them or caregivers with timely medicine intake. The system also sends automated reminders and alerts for appointments, minimizing the chances of missing an appointment.

What Are The Disadvantages of Practice Management Software?

While there are various benefits associated with practice management software in healthcare, some downsides must be understood, such as;

• Lengthy Contracts 

Whenever a healthcare facility has to deploy a practice management system, they must sign a specific contract about using the software for a specified time. Some software solution providers have monthly contracts, while some only offer annual contracts. However, if you sign a lengthy contract, you cannot shift to a new one until the current contract expires.

• New Technology 

The practice management software is an excellent platform for streamlining medical activities and is loaded with tools and functions. However, these tools and functions may be complex and overwhelming for medical staff not well-versed in technology. That being said, the staff is likely to resist the software, and there will be a need for customized staff training.

• Expensive 

It’s no secret that practice management software is a high-utility tool for healthcare facilities, and it’s a significant investment to increase productivity. In addition, it provides value for the money, but the costs of implementation may be too expensive for small and medium-sized healthcare facilities. 

What are the USP and Components of PM Software?

Patient scheduling

The medical management software comes with advanced tools and functionalities to track patients’ visits. These software systems offer a color-coded appointment schedule for easier management of appointments and visits.

–         Claims process

With a practice management system, it is easier than ever to manage claims via an electronic claim management system. The staff just has to scan the copy of the claim and store it in the system, which then analyzes it against the insurance eligibility, diagnosis, and treatment availed by the patient for smooth and faster claim management.

–         Reporting capabilities

The PM system comes with comprehensive reporting functionalities that come with customization parameters. The reporting capabilities offered by the system include reporting for financial performance (billing, claims, insurance eligibility, etc.), ICD codes, appointments, and others. The users of the system also have the option to design their reports as per their needs and requirements.

What Is the Difference between Practice Management Software, Electronic Medical Records, And Telemedicine Solutions?

The electronic medical record (EMR) is a dedicated software that is used to record the medical history of patients. The system is mostly used for individual practice. The EMR technology first gained traction back in 2009, when the government encouraged the healthcare industry to adopt digital technologies and offered incentives for the same.

This resulted in the take up of information technology in the healthcare industry, as well as, the rise of the HITECH ACT, which promoted the use of EMR technology in the healthcare industry. Apart from helping healthcare practitioners to enhance their services, the system also shares some data with public health officials.

While the practice management system may store some of the records that are stored in an EMR, the system is essentially used for different purposes – mainly for financial and administrative practices. The practice management system may be integrated with the EMR systems, however, the integration of the two systems could be difficult because case two systems are from different vendors. This is why some companies specifically work on the integration of these two systems.

Moving to the telemedicine services industry, it is a more generic term that represents the telemedicine software cost to deliver healthcare services to patients. While the term was first used to treat patients in rural or remote areas with no access to quality medical services and a shortage of doctors, today the term is widely encompassing and used to refer to the convenience of healthcare services through technology integration.

What Is The Difference Between EHR and Practice Management Software?

• EHR 

EHR is an electronic health record and can be defined as the digital version of a paper chart (the paper chart of patients). These records are known for documenting and storing the medical information of the patients on electronic systems. EHR is a patient-focused and real-time record management system that ensures secure and instant access to the data. The system may also store patients’ treatment and medical history, but the prime purpose is to collect clinical data in the office.

EHRs are essential for health IT infrastructures and have different bits of information, such as medical history, medications, and diagnoses of patients, along with lab results, immunization schedules, and treatment plans. It can create health information and manage digital formats. In simpler words, it can share information with different healthcare providers and healthcare organizations and has all the information required to ensure the best patient care.

• Practice Management Software 

The PMS system meaning generally includes optimizing daily healthcare operations with efficiency. Practice Management software is known to manage general medical documentation and patient flow at medical facilities. It helps with daily activities and has four primary features, including scheduling, verifying insurance claims and eligibility, financial reporting, and management of claims. In addition, the software also has charge posting, patient demographics, payment posting, worklists, A/R follow-up, reporting, and patient statements. For this reason, practice management software has become a priority technology for healthcare facilities to optimize efficiency and offer better medical services. 

What is the Difference Between EMR and Practice Management Systems?

• EMR 

EMR is a well-known tool for organizing the care provided to patients. It is basically a database that can store information about patients’ treatment histories and medical histories. EMR includes the prescriptions, lab results, and previous visits. The records are digitalized versions of paper charts, and navigation is pretty straightforward. That being said, the entire patient’s information will be readily available with a few clicks.

With the help of EMR, the patient data can be tracked and eventually helps save storage space by reducing the number of files. In addition, it can see when the patients need to schedule the screening or checkups. Not to forget, it can help monitor the vaccinations and blood pressure of the patients. Lastly, it can also analyze patient care.

• Practice Management Software

The practice management software combines digital tools to manage different parts of healthcare activities, such as revenue tracking and lead generation. The practice management software comes with client-server software, a desktop app, and internet-based software. For the most part, practice management software focuses on administrative and financial aspects of healthcare functions.

Practice management software can optimize the day-to-day functions at healthcare facilities. The software can also help with marketing to attract more patients; lead management and calendars can be engineered for different medical activities. Lastly, it can manage healthcare tasks and create useful reports.

To summarize, these are digital software solutions. However, practice management software helps improve healthcare function, while EMR can help store the patients’ records.

Clinically – Best PM Software

Clinically is a smart and robust practice management system that is designed to offer clients loads of functionalities and automation features to enhance the workflow and processes. Some of the features of Clinical practice management software include:

• Lead Management
• Central repository for clients’ records
• Sales tracking

Folio3 Will Help you with a custom Practice Management Solution

At Folio3, we offer our clients robust and comprehensive custom practice management solutions equipped with superior automated functionalities and healthcare intelligence including e-billing, software as a medical device, scheduling, claim to process, and much more that help medical facilities to optimize their workflow and processes for improved efficiency and higher profitability.

FAQs – What is Practice Management Software