How happy are your current patients with your medical practice? Are you doing everything in your power to make them feel at ease, respected, and listened to? What is the waiting room experience like? The answers to these questions can help determine the future success of your practice. When patients are comfortable and pleased with how the staff treats them (and this includes the amount of forms the staffers make them fill out), they will be more inclined to stay on with you, as well as recommend your services to their friends, family, and neighbors.

The following excerpt is from an article on EHR Intelligence. It was written by Vera Gruessner. Marilyn Tavenner, Administrator at the Centers for Medicare Medicaid Services (CMS), announced today that the organization recently finished the first week of end-to-end testing for ICD-10 coding.

The following is an excerpt from our whitepaper, Multiple Tax IDs: Get More Revenue With Fewer Clicks. One of the major challenges faced by medical practices is in managing the flood of information on all their patients in such a way that employees can work as efficiently as possible while maintaining the highest levels of security.

The following is an excerpt from an article on Healthcare Finance News. It was written by Henry Powderly. It’s Oct. 1 and the ICD-10 diagnostic coding vocabulary is in effect. Now what? According to one expert, that answer depends on how prepared you are and how much money your organization has on hand. “For some, the transition will be relatively seamless,” said Pam Jodock, senior director of health business solutions for HIMSS North America. “Others may experience a loss in productivity as office staff familiarizes themselves with new coding tools and processes.”

The following is an excerpt from an article on Diagnostic Imaging. It was written by Avery Hurt. Many practices are stressing over ICD-10 training — and spending lots of money on computer programs, outside training courses, and thanks to implementation delays, refresher courses. And no wonder. Good training is crucial. The better trained you are by Oct. 1, the less money you are likely to lose because of refused claims. In the stress of getting up to speed in time for the rollout, however, many people are approaching ICD-10 training with a grim determination that would rival that of the most draconian algebra teacher. It doesn't have to be this way.

The familiar prescription pad that doctors would scrawl on in their oftentimes terrible handwriting is becoming more of a relic of the past, thanks to expanding use of e-prescriptions. Besides cutting down on wasted paper and saving trees, e-prescribing provides a number of benefits to patients, their families, the pharmacy, and of course the staff at a medical organization. Here are three things that you need to know about e-prescribing.

Like most managers and owners of successful medical practices, you probably have devoted much of your resources toward setting up a system that lets your employees work as efficiently as possible. The more time you can save on routine tasks and the more bottlenecks you can eliminate, the more patients your staff can see and treat. It would be a shame if you stopped improving efficiency at your practice at this point, when software solutions are available that can help your team put their time to better use. Indeed, many organizations are turning to practice management software to improve their operations and boost their bottom line.

The computers sitting on the desks at your medical practice can be considered among the most important links holding your business together. Generic business applications or one-size-fits-all medical programs will, by definition, be unsuitable for handling many of the regular events and tasks that your staff has to deal with each day. Medical practices have unique needs when it comes to computer applications. Finding the right software can mean the difference between just getting by or growing so successful that you have to hire more medical professionals to handle the increased work load.

The following is an excerpt from an article on Medpage Today. It was written by Joyce Frieden. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) may relax some of its rules for implementing Meaningful Use requirements, the agency announced Thursday. "Meaningful Use" refers to provisions in the 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, which authorized incentive payments through Medicare and Medicaid to clinicians and hospitals that use electronic health records (EHRs) in a meaningful way to significantly improve clinical care.

In any organization, it’s not unusual for some, if not all of the members to be somewhat resistant to change. This is natural, since we spend a lot of time learning how to work with a particular system, and once employees have mastered a certain way of doing things, they would find it wasteful to have to learn something new. An example of this situation can be seen in some people’s resistance to learning about ICD codes, despite governmental action to prompt medical organizations to get ready as soon as possible.