Posts Tagged ‘Administrative Tasks’

Why Should My Office Use Patient Scheduling Software?

Scheduling can be one of the most complex administrative tasks that a medical office performs. In offices with multiple medical facilities, keeping track of recalls, finding open times, and being able to remind patients of outstanding amounts, can be very challenging. Fortunately, software manufacturers have recognized the stress of keeping track of all this data and created applications that can efficiently and effectively create schedules for patients and doctors. Known as “patient scheduling software”, these programs are vital for the success of any medical office.

While it is clear that some software is required to schedule appointments, it may not be altogether clear why specific patient scheduling software is required? Why not just simply use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the days? Then, when a patient is scheduled in, you could simply just highlight the date and time. The answer is that this causes a great deal of inefficiency and doesn’t really keep track of much other than the appointments. Good patient scheduling software can not only keep track of the visits, but also find the next available appointment quickly (something that you’d have to keep scrolling for in an Excel spreadsheet). A well-written application can even remind administrators of additional details, such as co-payment amounts, alerts for outstanding balances, or referral information. Having these reminders appear on-screen translates into better service for the patients and easier payment collection for the office.

Some offices may be hesitant to implement such a system because they’ve heard of all the IT costs that are associated with having patient scheduling software. For example, offices may be against the application on the grounds that it will require servers, a lot of setup work, daily backups, and so forth. Then, even after it’s set up, there are likely to be support costs that may outweigh the benefits described above. Fortunately, medical developers are aware of this and have started to create a class of applications that fall under “SaaS” (software-as-a-service). These applications are designed to store all of their data securely online. Consequently, you don’t need any servers in your office and you can access the patient records and schedules from anywhere in the world, provided that you have internet access. If you’re sitting at home at 10pm wondering who you have scheduled for tomorrow, simply open your computer, load the software, and find the info you want. No hassles on the backend – just simple and easy-to-use.

All in all, there are very few reasons not to use patient scheduling software. Especially, in a multiple physician office, there’s truly no other effective way of maintaining your appointment book. Between the block times, appointment types, necessity to know co-payment amounts, recall information, and so on, managing appointments without this software would be horrendous. The best part is that getting all these aspects completely automated comes at no extra IT expense. Simply pay for the software (either one-time or monthly fee) and there are no extra costs above and beyond that basic payment.

Benefits of Medical Manager Software

There’s an old saying that “time is money” and for a doctor’s office this statement could not be more true. Copious amounts of money are wasted on performing monotonous administrative tasks that use up valuable resources that could be used to assist patients. Medical manager software is designed to help physicians and other medical professionals automate many of these tasks so that they can focus more on patient care rather than trivial administrative details.

As an example, consider the amount of time wasted tracking down denied insurance claims. The physician’s office submits the claim to the insurer which is then rejected. The patient claims that the insurance company’s policy is to support this particular procedure. After much going back and forth, you realize that it was a simple mistake on the form that caused the denial, and after submitting it a different way, it was approved.

This is exactly the “wasted time” that medical manager software will minimize. By completely automating your submission procedures to most insurance and government agencies, claim denials will be reduced. In fact, some brands of software that clean up the claims according to insurance company rules, advertise that they can get denied claims to below 5%. Even if you don’t see reductions of this level, it’s still much easier to automate the process and be able to easily track which claims have been approved and which have been denied.

Medical manager software is designed to eliminate much of the administrative wasted time that plagues most practices. While claims management is an important aspect, these applications can maintain patient records, provide up-to-date information on a physician’s smartphone, quickly book appointments for multi-physician offices, and even  manage important documents electronically. It’s not hard to see that implementing one of these systems is essential if your practice is to compete in the modern world.