Health Care Practice Management: Top 10 Best Tools

Healthcare practice management tools already exist in the market today, but you must choose wisely. Nitin Chhoda points out that the tools you selected should meet the needs and requirements of your physical therapy practice.

Once you have settled on goals for the practice, you can start to explore your options for health care practice management tools.

Many of these tools will offer basic EMR and EHR systems, but there are also features to consider for the future, or that might make sense to implement right now to reach your goals.

No matter which health care practice management solution you select, remember to set your goals first. The wrong system may not improve efficiency as expected and can cause problems instead of offer solutions.

The final decision should also be determined by the size of the practice, your specific needs, and the flexibility of the system as balanced by your budget; if you don’t have the finances to purchase an all-encompassing, health care practice management system, find one that can be expanded upon with other features as you feel ready.

Top 10 Most Popular Health Care Practice Management Tools

While popularity isn’t necessarily the best measure of a good health care practice management tool, companies that have done more installations are going to have worked out more bugs and inefficiencies. You can at least count on them to have evolved to suit their clients. Below is a list of the top ten companies and their market share as of 2011. Data may change in the near future.

The first three in the list above account for over 50% of market share, but that may be because they are used in large hospitals; for that reason it makes sense to review the experiences of practices of a similar size to yours, that have actually installed a health care practice management system you are considering.

Meditech is generally used in large applications of health care practice management, such as in hospitals and medical facilities that see hundreds of patients and have specialists of all kinds on staff. The program is considered very stable and consistent, but users do have some trouble with the interface. The majority of applications are used for medical accounting and lab documentation, but less by physicians and clinicians.

Cerner also ranks fairly low with users for functionality and is used by large hospitals and clinics. But there are quite a large portion of users who find Cerner to be quite useful.

It may be that for the right practice, this is the right health care practice management solution.

Amazing Charts, SOAPware, and e-MDs Chart also rank highly with small practices, although Amazing Charts ranks fairly low for functionality.

Praxis EMR is also highest ranked for satisfaction with support and training, which may be the most important ranking.

For small practices, with between one and five physicians, there are other options which rank very highly with practices that currently use the system. The top user ranked health care practice management consulting tool for small practices is Praxis EMR.