The use of medical clinic management software, also referred to as medical practice management software, has become increasingly popular throughout recent years. As health organizations look to become more efficient, software vendors, too, are constantly adapting to meet this goal. Medical facilities use these solutions to streamline workflows, automate tedious tasks and provide greater quality health care.
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The benefits of a properly implemented medical clinic management software solution cannot be understated for small family practices and large clinics alike. The ability to automate a number of your administrative and management tasks can completely change the way practices allocate their time and resources.
Inefficient time management is a big problem in the medical industry. One of the biggest struggles health care professionals face involves the ratio of time spent with patients as opposed to other obligations – it’s too low compared to the time spent dealing with administrative tasks. This trend has been consistent for 50 years and, until recently, there didn’t seem to be an easy solution.
Without an efficient and digitized system, it’s easy for clinics to get stuck in an endless cycle of filing, sorting, storing and handling paperwork by administrative staff. With the innovations in clinic software, this doesn’t have to be the case any longer.
What is Medical Clinic Management Software?
The primary purpose of clinic management software is to help clinics and medical practices efficiently handle their day-to-day operations.
According to Statista, “In March 2021, 80 percent of healthcare providers reported that implementing virtual care improved their ability to provide care to patients, while 55 percent also said it improved their ability to spend adequate time with patients.”
Medical clinic software can completely change how health care organizations operate. It provides efficient solutions for billing, scheduling, outreach and patient reminders. It also allows clinics to automate the numerous time-consuming tasks that otherwise require manual labor, saving precious time.
In some instances, medical clinic software offers extensive features that go beyond the scheduling and revenue cycle functions. They can incorporate electronic medical records (EMR) systems into the functionality.
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Medical Clinic Management Software vs. EMR Systems
While EMR systems are very connected with medical clinic software (they’re often provided by the same vendor, using the same patient data), they serve different functions at a medical facility.
To put it simply, EMR systems cater to the clinical aspects of the practice, such as managing medical records. On the other hand, health clinic software focuses on the administrative and day-to-day operations of a medical practice. Integrating the two can sometimes be challenging, as medical practices often require assistance from the vendors to ensure a smooth implementation of each solution.
That said, solutions that combine EMR and clinic management software solutions are growing in popularity. Many EMR vendors now incorporate clinic software features, such as scheduling, medical billing, documentation and outreach, combined with traditional EMR features, such as clinical documentation.
Essential Features
Medical practice management software needs to have a wide range of features to satisfy the needs of today’s medical clinics. While there’s an abundance of software solutions available on the market, the provided functionality needs to match up well with your practice’s needs.
Carefully analyzing the core functions and consulting on the implementation process can help medical clinics make informed decisions and reap the most benefits from these systems. While the ultimate goal of any clinic management software is to reduce time spent filling out paperwork and increase patient interactions, the best programs on the market include additional features.
Here are some of the top MPM software features a comprehensive health clinic software should have:
Scheduling
With the technology available today, it’s inexcusable for medical practices to continue wasting time by making appointments manually over the phone or at the front desk. Modern medical clinic software allows you to completely automate appointment scheduling tasks, making them as simple as pressing a few buttons.
Instead of relying on spreadsheets or paper records, medical clinics can have an all-in-one solution for all appointments. Health clinic software can log new patient appointments according to the schedules of each doctor, maintain a history of all past appointments, send automated appointment reminders and follow up with patients. The software can assign a patient to the correct physician, exam room and specialty equipment needed, preventing delays. Patients can also cancel or reschedule their appointments easily online.
The Scheduling Feature helps the staff to stay up to date with the upcoming appointments.
This not only saves a lot of time but can also significantly reduce expenses. Missed appointments can end up costing hundreds of billions of dollars to the U.S. health care system. With the help of clinic management software, clinics can reduce missed appointments. The functionalities that assist scheduling include:
- Patient appointment scheduling
- Appointment reminders
- Online scheduling
- Dynamic scheduling
- Color-coded calendar
- Patient intake forms
- Telehealth appointments
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Billing/Payment
Most medical clinic management software allows practices to efficiently handle all of their billing tasks in-house rather than outsourcing them. The system can quickly submit claims to payers, respond to rejections, collect and analyze data that helps evaluate fiscal numbers, and generate comprehensive reports.
One of the biggest and most robust tools involving billing/payment includes claims management. Insurance claims can be time-consuming for medical administrators, and clinic management software makes it much simpler. The system can help make the entire process run almost completely autonomously, freeing up a lot of time for other tasks such as properly answering patient questions or dealing with other administrative issues. Insurance claims can automatically be swept and scrubbed of any mistakes or coding errors which often lead to denied claims. This leads to higher first-time acceptance rates. In addition, you can submit claims and track them automatically.
Clinic management software can check to make sure a patient’s insurance is eligible and verified beforehand. Tools are available to provide financial checks on patients as well as track balances. Many solutions will provide patients with options for payment plans as well.
You might require a certified medical coder on staff in order to bill through the medical clinic software and comply with the numerous regulations. However, this is a far cheaper expense than completely outsourcing the billing process. You can also purchase billing software separately from health clinic software. However, many solutions provide tools fully capable of managing billing and payment, such as:
- Insurance verification
- Claims management
- Paperless claims
- Automated billing
- Patient statements
- Credit card processing
- Denial management
- Collections
- Patient financial checks
Patient Information
One of the biggest advantages of health clinic software, especially when considering a physician’s time, is the accessibility of patient records. Medical clinic software allows physicians to easily access patient information such as medical history, medications, diagnoses, allergies and more. Rather than having to sift through paperwork to find a patient’s record (if it even exists), users can access this sensitive information with the click of a button.
These systems also capture personal information such as a patient’s name, address, contact information and insurance details. By giving physicians access to a patient’s entire medical history, less time is spent on background questions, allowing for more focus on providing treatment. Suppose a patient switches providers for whatever reason. In that case, their medical information can easily follow them, enabling each clinician across a patient’s medical spectrum to connect and share up-to-date, accurate data.
Medical clinic software allows physicians to easily access patient information.
Patients can update their personal information online in addition to viewing lab results, requesting prescription refills and communicating with their physician. Education materials and preventative guidelines are often provided for patients as well, allowing them to play a bigger role in their overall health care and treatment process. Patient information features often consist of:
- Patient demographics
- Patient portal
- Medical history
- MPI (master patient index)
- Medication lists
- Insurance information
- Allergy lists
- Lab/imaging results
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Reporting
The ability to quickly generate and store reports in one place makes it easy to ensure good communication between the clinic, its patients and insurance companies. The leading medical clinic management software systems have comprehensive reporting functionality. Users can leverage pre-made reports or create their own, compiling administrative data and patient information into timely, easy-to-read reports.
Reporting allows your staff members to extract data on financial performance and a patient’s financial history to identify performance gaps and trends as well as make financial estimates.
Many health clinic software come with built-in reports and enable users to create their own customized reports. User-friendly dashboards let you interpret data through visualizations such as graphs and charts. Reporting functions include:
- Custom reports
- Built-in templates
- Ad-hoc reports
- Physician dashboard
Inventory Management
Inventory management in medical clinics can be a complicated process. Making sure that numerous supplies, such as durable medical equipment (DME) or pharmaceutical samples, are in stock and conveniently stored can be a challenge. Clinic management software can streamline the process by providing an efficient way to track inventory orders, manage inventory storage and generate comprehensive reports — all without the need for manual data entry.
With easy-to-use barcode-scanning equipment, clinics can significantly reduce the time and number of people required for inventory management.
The cost containment features of the software allow tracking inventory from purchase order to delivery to the patient. This provides valuable data, helping make more accurate cost-per-patient predictions.
Communication
An increasingly popular feature regarding health clinic software revolves around patient-physician communication. For patients, communication tools include instant messaging, phone appointments and automatic reminders for check-ups or preventative care visits. As more and more patients demand increased communication with their physicians, health care organizations have to do their best to meet this need.
Medical Clinic Software helps to keep communication smooth between patient and the provide.
More recently, telehealth appointments are becoming more and more common. Think about it: why would you schedule an in-office appointment with a physician just to ask for a prescription refill? This not only wastes the patients time, but it wastes the health care providers’ time as well. Physicians are able to accomplish many more minor patient tasks electronically or over the phone. Common telehealth feature include:
- E-prescribing
- Online patient check-in
- Patient communication
- Electronic fax function
- Internal messaging
- Notifications and reminders
- Video chats
Best Medical Clinic Management Software
We’ve created a list of the top medical clinic management software options to help you in your search. Let’s break down those options:
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Kareo Billing
Kareo was created for independent practices and medical specialties. Cloud deployment makes it so you can use the system anywhere you have internet access. It manages scheduling, submitting claims, billing and payment, revenue, and more.
NextGen Office
NextGen provides in-depth practice management focused on improving the patient experience. It easily integrates with electronic health records (EHR) systems and can be used from any device. The solution provides several functions: scheduling, claims submissions, front-and-back office administration and patient collections.
Centricity EMR
Centricity focuses on creating a health care experience personalized to each patient’s needs. They specialize in ambulatory clinics and offer on-premise or cloud deployment. Key features include appointment management, e-prescribing, health analytics, billing management and a self-service portal.
CureMD
CureMD offers a multitude of functionalities for users and integrates with their EHR system. A customizable dashboard offers several capabilities: scheduling, billing, point of sale, messaging, denial management, document management, collections and eligibility. It allows you to book appointments online, speed up the check-in process, send texts to patients to confirm appointments and more.
NueMD
NueMD is a robust, cloud-based PM software. It handles billing, patient registration, patient scheduling, reimbursement management, patient statements, claim scrubbing, reporting and analysis. Updating patient details such as their billing history is made very simple with this solution.
AdvancedMD
AdvancedMD offers front-office, billing, claims management, scheduling and reporting software. The system maximizes revenue while improving provider performance.
drChrono
DrChrono is an EHR system that provides an end-to-end practice management solution. They aim to help run a patient-first practice and offer a patient portal that includes online scheduling, appointment reminders and more. The system also supplies you with the tools to drive profitability and customize your app with their APIs.
eClinicalWorks
eClinicalWorks is EHR software with solutions for clinical documentation, practice management, patient engagement and more. This solution assists with billing, and they offer separate solutions for practices and hospitals.
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Wrapping Up
Medical clinic management software is a popular solution for health care organizations of various sizes and specialties to improve operational efficiency and provide higher quality patient care. These solutions help organizations manage their administrative tasks, allowing physicians to focus more of their energy on dealing with patients. While clinic software isn’t a necessity, facilities that choose not to implement these systems can expect to fall behind.
Knowing what tools you do and don’t need is the first step toward increasing your organization’s productivity. Remember, every health organization is different, as is every practice management solution. Determining your unique needs and wants prior to your selection process is vital.
Still have any questions relating to clinic management software? How has your organization benefited from the implementation of these systems? Let us know below.