Practice Management Solutions

In today's competitive environment, medical practices face unprecedented demands to reduce clinical and administrative costs while meeting tighter compliance and security mandates. To create a high-performance organization that provides excellent care at lower cost, with the highest possible viability, you need a practice management system you can trust.

Software to help medical practices manage their offices has been around for decades. However, today's medical practice management software allow for staffers to track patient demographics, visits, and diagnoses; collect, transmit, and track billing information and insurance payments; manage appointment scheduling; and generate a variety of reports. By taking on such a wide range of tasks, practice management solutions can improve the efficiency of an entire practice: from physicians and nurses to clerks and billing specialists.

The much-maligned Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which among other things set standards for electronic patient data, is a driving force behind many practice management solution decisions. Most of those shopping for medical practice management software are upgrading from older software that are not capable of complying with HIPAA regulations.

Technology Options

Go Local or Web-based?

What is right?

One important decision to make when choosing practice management software is whether you want the program and data to reside on your computers or on computers owned and maintained by the software vendor. If you run it in-house, the solution can be referred to as a local, client-server, or desktop system; vendor-run applications are called application service provider (ASP), remote, or online solutions. Both options provide distinct advantages: consider which are more important to you.

Local solutions

Most of the software you use today is locally hosted - the program runs on your computer and stores the data either on your hard drive or on a network server in your office. This familiar setup gives you the greatest control over every aspect of your practice management software since the data resides on a computer in your office.

Having this total control can be a drawback, though. To meet HIPAA's stringent data security standards, your computer network will need to employ advanced technologies including Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security, firewalls, and variable access control which grants different permissions to each user. Installing these technologies and maintaining the patient information database can take considerable expertise and effort - not to mention considerable expense for consultants and hardware. In addition, keeping the data in-house gives you the responsibility of making regular backups - preferably daily - in case of a system crash.

Web-based solutions

There are two slightly different approaches to online practice management software. In the most common model, an ASP, both the application and the data reside on the supplier's servers, and your staff uses a regular web browser to access the software. A relatively new variation is a hybrid between the local and online models: client software is installed on your computer, but the critical data still resides on the vendor's computers. Both options provide the same main advantage: the database is maintained by IT professionals at the vendor's office. Multiple layers of firewalls and security, uninterruptible power supplies, fail-over (instant switching from one computer to another in case of a crash) and reliable backups are all standard operating procedures for these vendors - and they combine to virtually guarantee that your data will always be secure and available.

The biggest risk of online solutions is that they require an active Internet connection, which is no small requirement. No Internet connection works 100% of the time: your internal network may fail, your ISP may experience an outage, or an Internet worm may cause congestion that prevents you from accessing your data for a while. Online medical systems offer various workarounds for this potential bottleneck - some allow you to download some patient info, work with it, then re-upload, but this is only useful if you can anticipate outages before they occur. Others work in batch mode, pulling down a whole set of data you are likely to need (that day's patients, for example), then re-uploading it at the end of the day.

Customized Solutions

• Selection of a new practice management software
• Installation and implementation of new systems
• Optimizing utilization and results of existing systems
• Post go-live support

At BroadviewHealth we offer several practice management solutions customized and configured to the individual practice's needs. There are several packages on the market, targeted at every type and size of practice. With our diverse experiences in these solutions we can facilitate selection of the most appropriate solution and lead the implementation process with post go-live support.