Sometimes, running a clinic or private practice can feel like having three full-time jobs in one—you have to oversee patient care quality, business management, and financial growth.
By now, most medical facilities have adopted some form of electronic medical records (EMR) to streamline daily operations and enhance the patient experience. But what about bill processing and financial management? Many EMR systems don’t include finance-related business features. However, if your office uses EMR software from NextGen, you can expand your digitalized administrative capabilities by adding NextGen Enterprise Practice Management (EPM) software.
Why invest in an EPM system, especially if you’re already saving time and money by using advanced EMR software? Having both EMR and EPM software will give you complete control over the medical and financial aspects of your clinic or private practice. Investing in EPM software will help with the following:
- Organized Workflow Management
NextGen EPM works in real-time on organizing new client and employee input and incorporates them into easily-manageable tasks. This eliminates the need to hire an employee who solely focuses on managing systems and devices all across your clinic in sync. This, in turn, prevents confusion and time wasted working on finished tasks. Cutting back on unnecessary work and time will, over time, help your clinic grow while cutting back on additional costs.
- Simplified Appointment Management
EPM software allows you to run multiple appointment sheets all at once while avoiding double-booking time slots, patients, or practitioners. In addition to making it easier for a patient to reschedule or cancel their appointments, it centralizes staff timetables and calendars and automatically updates them, visually demonstrating available time slots and rush hours.
By analyzing the data of your clinic’s appointments, NextGen EPM will help you optimize your calendar to get the least downtime without sacrificing quality service and patient comfort.
- Streamlined Billing
Billing and charging patients for your services is one of the most challenging aspects of running a clinic. The bigger the clinic, the more complex it gets. EPM helps streamline all billing processes, from the payment amount to the specific payments, different banking, and insurance companies with different rates and payment installments. Having an easy-to-use billing manager is important, as it makes things easier for you to run while also keeping your clients pleased at the smooth billing process.
- An Automated Background Business Processor
Having an EPM system that includes a background business processor (BBP) lets you automate a major part of your business that otherwise requires hours of work for a dedicated staff member. BBP takes care of small but repetitive tasks that could hinder your system if left unchecked; it imports required documents, merges patient files, runs eligibility tests, and imports electronic remittance advice (ERA) files.
- Customized Reporting
Having a system that creates reports custom-made to fit each patient’s unique case can save a lot of time and effort compared to having to craft each report by hand while keeping it comprehensive and updated. NextGen EMR system delivers the healthcare provider with an accurate patient history automatically, allowing them to provide the best care possible while updating them on any changes in their patients’ files across different practitioners and healthcare organizations.
Bringing Together EMR and EPM
You don’t have to settle for either running a smooth business or high-quality care facility when you can do both. You can integrate the NextGen EMR system with the EPM system to help you manage both aspects of your clinic in unison. However, simply mashing two different systems together and hoping for the best is a poor way to run your business. Instead, you should ask for the help of a professional consulting service to help you use the two systems to their fullest potential.
There’s no such thing as “one size fits all” in business management. While simply using EMR and EPM together can work to the point where you see some results, you still need to customize your integration to get your money’s worth. By consulting an expert, you can right-size your system according to your clinic and patients’ needs, customizing it to fit multiple physicians, care providers, and even locations.
Invest in Your Clinic’s Future
Your healthcare business also needs care. Having the right management systems can mean the difference between your clinic flourishing in a matter of years and collapsing forgotten in a few months. As your clinic continues to grow, you need systems that’ll grow along with it and not fall short when traffic increases or minor issues arise. It’s your responsibility to make the best decisions to ensure the longevity of your clinic—you owe it to both your staff and your patients.