As winter approaches, savvy owners and managers of medical practices are already looking ahead to 2017 with an eye toward seeing what regulations, financial incentives, and other factors will affect their bottom line.

The following is an excerpt from an article originally published on Medical Practice Insider. It was written by Madelyn Kearns. There is a recognized difference between saviors and savers — one being a rescuer of people, while the other salvages bank accounts. But leave it to accountable care organizations to throw distinctions to the wayside. According to Software Advice's recent ACO survival guide, the ACO model not only operates on delivering high quality care to patients — it also aims to provide the utmost in cost-efficiency to participating providers. It’s not the model for everyone, though, and there are numerous requirements and investments a practice must appease for the arrangement to be beneficial.

In order to capitalize on patient engagement, medical organizations must understand the term, and how proactive patients directly and indirectly impact the revenue stream. Vincent Dumez, Faculty of Medicine - Université de Montréal describes robust engagement policies as not just developing a patient-centric healthcare model, but welcoming patients into the care-team, giving them an integral role in their own medical care.

Medicine in the United States has evolved over the past two hundred years from a combination of care delivered by self-taught, country doctors, wives, and mothers using herbs and home remedies and a few formally trained “bone-setters/surgeons” into a complex, computer-assisted network of highly-skilled specialists connected via smartphones and integrated healthcare management technology. As our nation strives to design affordable, value-based care models, the electronic health record (EHR) becomes increasingly more important – for patients and providers. The patient portal is a critical component in every EHR that doesn't always receive the attention it deserves.

The following is an excerpt from an article originally published on EHR Intelligence. It was written by Sara Heath. Through care coordination, population health management, and patient engagement, EHRs help enable successful accountable care organizations. EHRs are an invaluable tool for accountable care organizations, offering a system upon which providers can store and reference important patient information and then easily disseminate that information to other care team members.

The information that is routinely collected and stored in medical practices presents a tempting target to malicious computer criminals bent on stealing patients’ identities. Hackers also keep banging against computer networks as they attempt to install malware to cause chaos and confusion, extort organizations for money, and even gain bragging rights within their community by taking over systems and websites.

Is your practice still using a paper-based records system? Have you wondered if the benefits of implementing an electronic health record (EHR) system are worth the hassles of converting your files to digital format? This article provides a fact-based comparison of paper-based systems and EHR patient files management.

A simple software solution may be right under your nose, ready to help you make life easier for every member of your medical organization as well as each patient. The patient portal that you can activate with your electronic health record software will save everyone time and effort.

Big changes are coming to how we provide healthcare services in the United States. In a bid to improve efficiencies and treat more patients more quickly with less waste, we are going to be transitioning from the older model based on fees for services to a new one that is dedicated more to value-based reimbursements.

Anyone who has endured spending too much time in a crowded waiting room waiting for a doctor can appreciate the benefits of an early and much-missed aspect of our healthcare system: the humble house call. And if you’ve ever felt so sick that you would much more prefer having a doctor see you at home than endure spending even a minute in a waiting room with other coughing individuals, a house call would be ideal. It helps conserve your strength as well as keep you from infecting others in public.