Nitin Chhoda discusses the specific benefits of using electronic medical records in all aspects of your physical therapy business. Useful advantages can be found in a variety of areas such as documentation, billing, scheduling, and reporting purposes.
While hospitals are struggling with a huge web of information to be managed by medical EMRs, physical therapy private practices have an advantage when implementing physical therapy software.
A private practice has a smaller number of employees to train. But most importantly, a physical therapy private practice has a very specific set of needs that physical therapy software can meet.
Reporting
For physical therapy management, nothing can compete with the reporting capabilities of physical therapy software. If reporting is used optimally, the average number of visits per patient can be easily checked.
This number can also be correlated with referral statistics. Inefficiencies can be identified where patients are most likely to self-discharge. In the past, this kind of detailed reporting would take a lot of time to compile. With physical therapy software, reports can be generated in minutes.
Billing Efficacy
Another realm where reporting does a very important job is within the billing department. Medical billing is notoriously cumbersome, with insurance companies paying roughly half of all submitted claims.
Physical therapy EMRs actually improve the success of submissions. Physical therapy software can help eliminate errors, increase the efficiency of the process, and make identifying the reasons for rejected or denied claims much simpler.
Medical billing staff will have access to tools that can track the insurance companies that reject or deny claims with the most regularity. Health care practice management can make decisions about keeping or dropping insurance companies based on real numbers.
Scheduling
Scheduling in a physical therapy private practice is also a place where inefficiency costs money. What happens when a patient cancels? How often do cancelled appointments get re-scheduled?
Do cancelled appointment slots get filled regularly? Are there patients who often do not show up for appointments? Physical therapy software review makes answering these questions simple, and provides solutions to fix problems with scheduling.
The Essentials
Managing a private practice is not a simple or easy job. Scheduling, medical billing and coding, and identification of inefficiencies can turn into time wasting tasks that lose money for the practice.
Handling these essential tasks is usually the job of the staff, but they can only do so much if they are still using outdated and flawed systems.
Inevitably, it is easy to tell which practices are using physical therapy software or a medical EMR.
When walking through the door of a modern physical therapy private practice, it is clear that an office has streamlined their practice management since they use a physical therapy software. Patients aren’t left waiting and the receptionist or medical assistant has the time to answer questions.
Of course, physical therapy private practices that use physical therapy software are more efficient, have better insurance claim acceptance rates, and tend to adjust quickly to problems that arise. The initial transition period always presents challenges. But the value of adding physical therapy software to your practice is well worth the work and time.
