The following article first appeared on Medical Laboratory Observer (MLO) on September 25th, 2018. It was written by Advanced Data System's Vice President, Marc Klar. Like virtually every other entity in healthcare today, laboratories need to stay engaged and connected with the two groups of people most important to them: their referring physicians or sources (such as hospitals or companies that require employee testing), and the laboratory’s patients.

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.

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.

Whether you have been a medical office manager for some time now or are somewhat new on the job, there is always more for you to learn about software and technology to help everything run more smoothly.

You’ve recently come to realize the importance of installing electronic health record software in your medical practice, with advantages ranging from helping your staff work more efficiently to enabling you to share information about patients more readily with consulting physicians.

As a busy healthcare professional, it’s likely that you often find it too difficult to carve some time out of your schedule to keep up with industry news and events. Indeed, with technological advances and new research always coming down the pike, it’s increasingly important to stay on top of developments.

A great deal of financial work goes on behind the scenes at any thriving medical practice. That’s a given, since you cannot keep the doors open and the lights on if you neglect seeing to the timely delivery of payment for each patient you take care of. With that in mind, professionals who are in search of solutions to save their medical organization time and money find themselves turning to revenue cycle management software.

Quality in healthcare over quantity of healthcare delivered is the new focus in these United States. In an effort to boost quality, the government is encouraging health care providers to start using Alternative Payment Models (also known as APMs), as part of a broader effort to curb costs and improve efficiency.

No matter how excellent a job your team is doing in your medical practice, you can’t keep the lights on and the doors open just based on the quality of care being provided. It’s incumbent on you to pay close attention to your financials, too. Those organizations that fail to stay on top of the level of revenue they’re bringing in could find themselves scrambling to remain viable while other practices around them are actually thriving.