Exclusive Article by Dennis Hung at EMRIndustry.com
One of the biggest obstacles that private medical practices run into is a lack of resources. Though it focuses on providing healthcare, a private practice is still a business, and it requires a lot of administrative work to keep things running. Even if a practice has the best physicians and the most efficient staff, there’s only so much that a small team can do. As the practice grows, the administrative tasks of running the practice multiply, requiring more attention. In order to handle these growing administrative needs, private practices are forced to either hire additional staff—not always a possibility—or find alternative solutions.
Fortunately, there are several services that exist for just such a purpose. Many companies provide specialized services that private practices can outsource while still retaining administrative control. Meanwhile, this frees up personnel and resources at the medical practice to focus on the practice’s intended goal—providing its patients with the best healthcare available.
Growth Platforms
Arguably the most important step in growing a medical practice is bringing in new patients while keeping the old ones returning regularly. Medical practice growth platforms, such as PatientPop, work toward both ends.
When a patient has scheduled an appointment, the appointment is entered into the system, and as the appointment nears, the system sends the patient reminders so that they will arrive on time. The system also works to make sure patients don’t let future appointments fall through the cracks. When it is time for the patient to schedule another appointment, the system sends him or her a message that leads directly to a page where they can schedule their next visit.
In order to reach an even wider audience, growth platforms often contact patients soon after each appointment, asking the patient to review the clinic’s services online. As potential patients seek a medical practice, these positive reviews improve the practice’s reputation and online presence.
Managed Billing
Medical practices deal with patients from all walks of life, which can mean they have to handle several different types of payment methods—from standard health insurance, to government programs, to customers without insurance. This can make the financial side of running a medical practice incredibly complicated. To address this problem, healthcare billing services such as athenahealth work with medical practices to remove a lot of confusion and even automate a significant portion of the process.
There are several benefits to working with a billing company like this, but one of the biggest is that they can reduce the amount of time between when the patient comes in for an appointment and when the practice gets paid. Teams of experts work with wide networks of insurance providers, submitting claims, posting payments, and handling denied claims. These experts also offer coaching and suggestions to eliminate recurring issues.
Managed Security
Medical records are among the most sensitive types of data, so medical practices must be diligent in preventing data breaches. According to a study by the Ponemon Institute, 90 percent of healthcare organizations have had a data breach in the past two years, with about half that amount (45 percent) having more than five breaches in the same time period.
At the same time, however, keeping an IT or security professional on a small clinic’s staff can be expensive—often even prohibitively so. Fortunately, many security or IT companies, such as Symantec (who recently acquired Blue Coat) and IBM, offer Managed Security Services (MSS) to monitor the clinic’s security
MSS providers monitor security for smaller businesses around the clock, comparing alerts from the clinic’s internal network with insights based on global activity. Many MSS services are even specifically made to cater to medical professionals. As such, they are familiar both with the types of records being kept and the legislation that surrounds medical records. Meanwhile, if anyone at the medical practice has any questions, the MSS provider remains available to answer those questions, as well as address new issues that arise, at any time.
