Choosing the right EMR for your practice

The biggest challenge each private practice needs to overcome All health professionals share the responsibility of providing the best possible care to their patients. However, professionals that work in private practices are often self-employed, and as a result have the additional challenge of running a successful business. The responsibilities that come with running a business are numerous, and often misleading in how complex they can be. For those new to handling these administrative challenges, the best strategy is to purchase inexpensive tools to manage the admin or hire the right staff to compliment your skills, so you can focus on patient care. However, even a rockstar team is going to struggle to keep up with a growing practice without the right tools to tackle daily operations, and choosing the right technology (the most important being a Practice Management System and Electronic Medical Record) to partner with your practice can often be a challenge as the internet can often be divisive in this area. Rest assured, it is worth spending the extra time to decide, as a commitment to technology can often last for years. To that end, a strong PMS and EMR can change the way you interact with your team (if it is a multi-member practice) and your patients, to create a thoughtful and transformative experience. What is a Practice Management System? Simply put, a PMS helps business administrators handle the day-to-day operations of a private practice office or clinic. There are dozens of tools that would label themselves as a practice management system while having vastly different tools available. Running a successful practice becomes a lot easier when technology can help make the basic activities automatic with minimal maintenance. Let’s break down what these activities are to give you a better idea of what to look for. Basic features in Practice Management Systems To help figure out what to focus on, let’s start with the basic features that PMS should have. or Scheduling Managing schedules and appointments for various care team members in the practice is a staple of a traditional PMS, as every practice needs the ability to book appointments on a daily basis, across multiple providers, locations, and days. This goes hand-in-hand with patient-led booking systems. For more complex private practices, one of the biggest challenges administrators face is ensuring that calendars are optimized to maximize patient visits, while ensuring that enough time is available for miscellaneous business engagements. The ability to see these different verticals of time allocation and evaluate them in more complex tools can ensure efficient and optimal performance of clinical operations. Patient Data Management In the past, a private practice would select an Electronic Medical Record to manage all patient data. But in recent years you can find most essential EMR tools baked right into your PMS, giving each patient a unique record available to track their progress over time. The ability to access and update everything from basic information to the inclusion of new session notes using an organized method is important to keep things moving. Billing and Invoicing Preparing billing statements is also another example of a baseline feature that is used so heavily that it can’t be ignored by most practices. To have this included in a PMS streamlines another administrative hurdle for private practices that can otherwise be a major challenge. There are some tools that integrate this with claims management, but not many do this well. We'll cover claims more under advance features. Secure Data Management and Compliance Digital security is a necessity in both Canada and the United States when it comes to PHI. Keeping this in mind, PMS should be HIPAA or PIPEDA compliant by geography. With the essentials out of the way, let’s move onto some more niche features that can really set your practice apart. Intermediate features in Practice Management Systems Not all PMS will have the following features, but if you’re really trying to set yourself apart from the competition and start diving deeper into your patients and increase automation, the following will definitely be a great start! Reporting Having access to practice performance can lead to tremendous advantages over time as staff can react to trends and dramatically improve clinical operations. Key performance indicators can include: The number of no-show appointments over time Length of time before payor reimbursement Delinquent payments in AR Time spent on miscellaneous tasks by staff Net promoter scores from patients Identification of opportunities to improve the practice is essential to growing the business over time, and is often an overlooked facet of the business, even when the information is available. Take advantage of it! Video Conferencing As society moves towards remote work, having the ability to see patients from the comfort of their own home can be the difference between growth and stagnant patient volumes. Creating a comfortable virtual experience is essential to maintaining patient engagement. This can include: Simple experience joining a meeting room Good audio and video quality A lobby to wait in when joining early The ability to interact with notes while video is engaged The better the experience in video, the more likely your patient will be satisfied and continue to come back. Flexible Templates It can become a chore to recreate note formatting for every session. Having simple templates to start off new documents can save a lot of time and allow you to spend your time and attention engaging within the session. Outcome Measures Validated questionnaires are important for patient care, but can be hard to administer without the right tooling. If your PMS can implement these tools directly into the user experience, it can save a tonne of time for providers and impress patients with the simple-to-use design of your clinical operations. Streamlined Intake and Discharge Flow They say first impressions are lasting, and this is no different when a patient joins your clinic. Having an amazing and simple experience, whether in-person or virtually, can do a lot to garner good will with new patients. Having a digital interaction to replace these aspects of the care journey will simplify a lot of the manual work required by both your team and your patients. Advanced features in Practice Management Systems Now we start treading into some of the most rare features that can be found amongst PMS, especially those targeted towards Allied Health Professionals - tools that support collaborative care and patient integration. These are often the first features to be dismissed by typical technologies in today’s market because they do not add immediate value to clinical operations when the previous features are absent. But when implemented correctly, collaborative care can transform the patient experience and reinforce therapeutic alliance. With patients acting as stewards of their own health data with greater access to their personal health information, we are empowering therapists to make better treatment decisions. Integrated Patient Session Notes The core principles that drive collaborative care is one of therapeutic alliance. Platforms that integrate patient perspective throughout the course of care do a lot to break down barriers and create value in the relationship between patients and providers. Technologies that assist providers with adding patient thoughts from sessions into the session note are few and far between, despite being the most simple iteration of integrated notes. More innovative products start to explore allowing patients to do prep work prior to each session, and retrospective notes after each session, through simplified and automated workflows that then get integrated straight into the session note for compilation and review. These tools can also automate the sign-off process from the professional and patient to make sure both parties have had a chance to read the combined session note content. Claims Processing Generating electronic claims that automatically interface with insurance providers is a fairly advance feature. Although some billing platforms help this process, the last five years has seen a rise in dedicated technologies that specialize in this process. These systems scan bills and claims to ensure that they not only follow payor regulations, but also include correct diagnosis codes. Coupled with the ability to point out obvious errors and remind clinicians and administrative staff when payments are overdue can reduce a lot of administrative burden that would otherwise have to be shouldered manually. Cloud-based systems also have the additional benefit of automatically updating as new billing and procedural codes are implemented in their region and country. Patient Bookend Notes This is a continuation of the previous feature, where patients are able to do some work before and after each session. This gives therapists an idea of what has happened since last session and whether or not there are specific issues or topics that should be focused on during the upcoming session. Similarly, the patient notes reflecting on the session after it has occurred gives therapists insight into how their patient interpreted the entire session, along with specific topics of discussion, giving the therapist unique insight into what kind of progress has been made. When certain strategies seem to not be effective, it allows therapists to react and adapt quickly, bringing things back on track rapidly. The inclusion of collaboration directly into PMS offer patients a vastly differentiated experience compared to a majority of traditional PMS powered private practices in North America. Giving them greater access and control of their own health information ultimately empowers them to engage with their own health journey proactively, leading to reduced administration by care team members over time and more productive time in-session. Thankfully, choosing an EMR has never been simpler. With Speakbox, therapists have access not only to a product focused on collaborative care, but to a team of developers who are constantly on the lookout for new inspiration and research on how to improve patient experience and care outcomes. If you want to learn more about Speakbox, check out the website, or email us at hello@speakbox.ca.

Choosing the right EMR for your practice

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