Practice Management Systems ARE For Everyone!

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Every week a health care therapist decides to take the plunge into private practice - either starting out fresh out of school or after working for another practice for a while and deciding that the time is right to try entrepreneurship.

So they visit their local commercial realtor and find the perfect small office space, just the right size for a therapy room and a reception area.  The next call is to the telephone company to arrange office telephone service and probably Internet service. They go to their local office furniture outlet and but a few pieces of attractive, but affordable furniture.  And then they either purchase an answering machine or voice mail service, a photocopier or all-in-one printer/copier/fax machine, and one or two computers for the office, or they round up castaways from friends and family members that will suffice for a while.  Microsoft Office and perhaps QuickBooks will get them through.

Finally they go about spreading the word among friends, colleagues and former patients that they are in business and welcoming patients in their new practice.

It might look like they have closed the startup circle quite properly, but we would suggest that they need to add one more item to their practice technology suite - a practice management system.

Let's define exactly what a practice management system is, and what it does for your practice.

We will use The Practice Resource, the practice management system developed and marketed by Tech 2 Go, as our model for this discussion.  The "complete" practice management solution automates the management of all of the critical data required to manage your practice - patient records, appointment scheduling, patient and insurance billing and collections, therapy notes and documentation, document management, practice financial tracking and analysis and personnel records management.  And as the standards are defined and released by the federal government, outlining the requirements for a national electronic medical records (EMR) system, it is critical that the practice management system provides the necessary procedures for bringing your practice into the loop on this pending federal mandate and that you have the necessary tools to participate in the EMR data exchange.

You have a diploma hanging on the wall that proves that you are trained to provide therapy services to patients in your chosen discipline.  You probably also have a license issued to you that permits you to practice in your state.  But a therapy practice is much more than just so many therapy sessions provided per week.  It is a business and needs to be run as a business.  And for a business to be run successfully, it must be organized and must use proper business procedures - you need the right forms, the right files, the right inputs and outputs to allow you to keep on top of the information flow that your practice will generate. 

You need to be able to

• Capture information from your patients when they pay their first visit to your office - their intake information.  This includes demographics, responsible party data, insurance coverage and contact information.
• Capture your evaluation findings and progress notes during your therapy sessions.
• Schedule patient appointments with an appointment scheduling system that is integrated with your patient records and can share data with your Outlook calendar, your PDA or your smart phone.
• Generate invoices or payment receipts for self-pay patients, preferably to be handed to the patient at the time of service to assure prompt payment.
• Generate insurance claims for patients with insurance coverage and to submit those claims to the insurance companies as quickly as possible to shorten the time from therapy to payment.
• Submit your insurance claims electronically via a clearinghouse.  Do not waste your valuable time re-keying data (that you have already entered into your computer) into an insurance company web portal.  With a practice management system you enter the data ONCE and it flows to all of the necessary places automatically.
• Collect copays from insurance patients whose policies provide for collection of copays, and to track those patients who have not paid those copays at the time of service.
• Generate and mail accounts receivable statements usually on a monthly cycle to patients with outstanding balances to speed up collection.
• Track therapy session activity for patients being treated under a managed care authorization to assure that you are not treating them "free of charge" because they have exceeded the limits of their authorizations.  You need to request extensions or replacements of those authorizations before they are exceeded to avoid non-payment.
• Bill third party agencies such as school districts responsible for certain patient charges on the proper forms and on the proper calendar cycle.
• Prepare year-end tax reports requested by patients listing therapy payments made to you during the year to assist them in filing their personal tax returns.
• Prepare and distribute referral reports to referring professionals usually including information from your therapy progress notes.
• Comply with an increasing  number of government agencies, health care professionals and other individuals requiring that documents from your practice are digitally signed to prove their provenance and to prevent unauthorized modification or tampering.
• Maintain and manage your patient records with a system that is fully compliant with HIPAA privacy regulations and standards.
• Generate an awareness of the referral sources of your patients and the value brought to your practice by each of those referral sources.  You need to thank your referral sources for their referrals.
• Analyze the profitability of your practice and its components (patients, therapists, procedures, payment forms, diagnoses, service locations) so you can make the right choices to help maximize your profits.
• Organize patient records and documents on your computer to facilitate quick retrieval of individual patient documents when needed.  This should include the capability of storing scanned documents, images, videos, digital photographs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and documents in Adobe PDF format on your computer network and accessible from the individual patient charts.

Operating a private therapy practice, and doing it properly, involves much more than you ever anticipated when you decided to start up your practice.  The good news is that the right practice management system will help you perform all of these tasks with a minimum amount of your scarce free time, leaving you free to do what you need to do - provide therapy services to your patients.

Your practice, your business, needs all of these tasks - these jobs - to be performed by someone (or something) in your practice.  They are not optional.  But they can be performed by your practice management system, as long as you have one installed and as long as you use it properly and faithfully.

And you do not need a large staff to qualify as a practice management system user.  The single practitioner (with or without a clerical assistant) benefits from a practice management system just as much - and often even more - than a larger practice.  You are all in the same business and you all have the same requirements.  You all need to become and remain organized.  You all need to manage the financial aspects of a private practice.  You all need a practice management system.  Probably a lot more than you need that framed lithograph that you saw in an art gallery on your recent vacation.

A good practice management system is intuitive.  You know what you do for a living.  You know what the daily data elements are that you need to manage.  With the right practice management system you need only to be shown where to put the data, because there is already a place that has been provided for everything that you need to capture.  You just need to know where it goes.

The right time to install a practice management system is TODAY.  Get it up and running before you are overwhelmed by the information flow.  Put it in place the day you start up your new practice.  Start out doing things the right way, the organized way.  Have it in place to help you as you grow.  You might decide to always be a one-person practice or you might decide to expand as the opportunity presents itself.  Your practice management system will support you whichever path you follow.

And practice management systems are not all beyond your limited budget.  Check out The Practice Resource, The Affordable Practice Management System For Therapy Practices.