Even if your practice is using the latest physical therapy software, it’s not enough that it’s automated and meets the standards. It should be flexible to what your practice needs.
Nitin Chhoda imparts the importance of software flexibility in order to maximize the use of your physical therapy EMR, and help your practice continually grow.
While it is important to stick to certain standards of physical therapy documentation, your EMR should allow flexibility.
No two practices work in exactly the same way, so high quality physical therapy software will not restrict your documentation options.
To help make the practice truly more efficient, you will need customizable forms as well as integrated systems for the different aspects of the practice.
Platform Flexibility
Making the most of physical therapy documentation software will require that your practice has all the available tools with which to track patient progress, billing, and scheduling. That means investing in technological tools.
At first, you may not want to invest in portable electronic devices, such as tablet computers. You may feel that the staff can only make a few adjustments at a time, and you may want to wait for a bit of a financial shift before investing in these technologies.
However, if you want to make the most of the physical therapy documentation software that you are investing in, eventually you should allow it to be portable, too. Whether or not you’re ready now, the EMR should include options such as iPhone and iPad apps, cell phone alerts via SMS, and an online browser-based platform.
These options will allow scheduling, billing, and patient care to proceed smoothly and in a timely manner. Time stamping can be incorporated into the daily routine, no matter where a physical therapist is caring for a patient.
Reporting Flexibility
As you can probably imagine already, without flexible and intuitive physical therapy documentation reporting options, many of the benefits of physical therapy documentation software will be lost.
There are so many benefits to having accurate reports on productivity, claims acceptance rates, and referral rates and success, but if the reports system is hard to work with or requires a lot of time, the reporting capabilities will not be used to their maximum effect.
Reporting should be integrated in a way that allows practice management to cross-reference data.
Time stamping and number of patients should be integrated so you can identify the number of patients seen per day by each physical therapist.
Scheduling should also be linked to reports, so you can determine which patients frequently cancel appointments. Physical therapy documentation and billing claims should be reported so you can identify insurance companies that reject an unusually high percentage of claims.
Patient Interaction
Another way that physical therapy documentation and time management can be improved is through patient options. If you want to integrate a patient portal so patients have the option of entering their information online even before they come to the practice.
Intake forms should be flexible and available online or on mobile devices, so that patients have a more streamlined experience when they come for their appointment.
Customizable templates or forms are one of the most important features of any EMR and physical therapy documentation solution. But the entire physical therapy documentation software should be built with flexibility in mind so that you have the option to expand and grow.
