Healthcare IT Blog

How much thought do you give to the various computer systems that have been set up to enable staff to keep track of and manage patient data as well as communicate and connect with other entities, such as insurance providers and referring physicians? While the computer setup is the main concern for your IT department, being aware of how these systems connect and work together is a matter of importance for everyone on staff regardless of their position. To that end, healthcare organizations must stay aware of interoperability and how it supports their team as well as the patients they serve.

The number of patients seeking health care for mental health issues from your organization seems to be increasing as of late, prompting you and fellow stakeholders to consider options for expanding service. Or, you are aware of changes in regional demographics and you have determined that many patients struggling with mental health are too far away for you to realistically provide service on an ongoing basis. 

You and fellow stakeholders at your medical organization have done your due diligence and determined that now is the time to switch over from an antiquated paper-based system for handling patient information and are now ready to deploy Electronic Health Records software.  However, before you choose a vendor and EHR system to install, there are potential issues that you should be aware of. In particular, it’s prudent to consider security problems, reductions in data flow, the need for extra staff training and the prospect of slowdowns for novices when inputting the patient data in the first place.

President Trump just signed into law the “Special Registration for Telemedicine Act of 2018” (the Act), requiring the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to activate a special registration allowing physicians and nurse practitioners to prescribe controlled substances via telemedicine without an in-person exam. The DEA has no more than one year to complete the task.

During the course of your normal duties at the office diagnosing and taking care of patients, you know that as a physician, you need to be aware of paperwork requirements regarding the treatment of those patients who happen to be covered by Medicare. The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 and Merit-Based Incentives must be adhered to in order for your medical organization to receive proper compensation from the government.

In medicine, as is the case with any professional endeavor, you need to have the right tool for the job in order to get the best results. When it comes to the flow of revenue in your organization, if you’re not using the right tool for billing, chances are you are actually hampering your bottom line. Practices that try to get by just using some kind of generic billing software suitable for any type of business are doing themselves a disservice.

Knowledge is power, the saying goes, and access to more information about the quality of care that we provide to patients will help improve the way we deliver healthcare in this country. To that end, the U.S. government established the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS. The PQRS was designed to help eligible providers provide a higher standard of care to each patient they treat, as well as to quantify their ability to meet various quality metrics.

What Is EHR Software? You’ve either recently installed Electronic Health Record software at your thriving practice, or you are about to deploy an EHR for the first time. While you may be familiar with the basics of how EHR applications function, there may some features that you are unaware of or are not currently taking advantage of.

Physicians who started their practices well before the dawn of the Internet naturally have a different perspective than those doctors who grew up while the world was already online, in terms of how we communicate complex and sensitive information about patients.

While you are primarily in the healthcare business, part of your work as a medical office manager also has to do with “customer service” (even though in this case, of course, the customers are referred to as “patients"). And savvy business people are aware that one of the keys to success in any operation is maintaining if not boosting engagement with the people being served.