The importance of tools and emerging technology for your new medical practice

As you start your medical practice, emerging technologies in healthcare might be on your mind. People tend to fall into 2 camps when it comes to technology: some are excited about its potential, while others feel a sense of dread comparable to surprise regulatory inspections.

Regardless of where you land on that spectrum, there is a commonality: the perception that technology can initially slow down productivity. Even so, identifying where you can gain efficiencies through technology will set you up for a medical practice that patients value and appreciate.

This article will explore the following:

Starting a medical practice involves juggling a lot of priorities. This article will help you prioritize and establish a long-term technological toolkit for your practice.

Technology in healthcare continues to advance and accelerate. Its advances go far beyond the heavily advertised impacts on pharmaceutical and surgical advances or general equipment. 

It is also making practices more efficient and patient-focused. So how can you harness its power to benefit you and your patients?

Technological advances can make rare diagnoses easier to identify. They can help you give patients faster answers and more straightforward paths to treatment.

eRx improves prescription management, reducing the chances of a drug interaction or allergic reaction. It also allows prescribers to easily meet regulatory requirements to manage patient prescriptions, especially in ensuring that patients are less likely to receive multiple opioid prescriptions from different providers.

Electronic health records (EHRs) facilitate patient involvement through patient portals. These systems give patients anytime access to their medical information, whether looking for recent information or something from past visits. 

If they include communication tools, they allow patients to ask your team a question that may preclude or necessitate a visit. You can also use them to send appointment or scheduling reminders automatically.

Different technological solutions can lead to more and satisfying time with patients and less time on administrative tasks. 

Before the appointment, digital intake saves a significant amount of administrative time spent manually transcribing data into the EHR. During the appointment, make real-time notes in the patient’s account, precluding the need to jog your memory to update patient charts retroactively. And, rather than asking redundant history questions, you can quickly refer to that particular module in the patient’s EHR to investigate how historical information may impact their current symptoms.

After the appointment, track the status of referrals, eRx, and eLabs from your EHR for faster collaboration with colleagues in challenging situations. Billing integrations can make submitting claims to insurance payers more efficient. The result is fewer hours of repetitive tasks for both you and your administrative staff.

Using the right technology as you start your practice and transitioning to new technology as your practice evolves can come with a learning curve. However, it ultimately results in a good return on investment. 

As your practice grows, new technological solutions can support its evolution. Consider some of the following.

Care management tools can make your office run much more smoothly. These include modules like:

Who can possibly keep up with all of the codes various payers require — not to mention how many of them change or get added each year? Billing software provides electronic updates of information for payers, so you don’t have to track and manually follow up with each data point.

There are a lot of administrative benefits to take advantage of with this software:

When you improve how your patients experience their interactions with you and your staff, you increase your revenue. Happy patients refer others to their exceptional physician, resulting in a larger and stronger patient base for your practice. A few technological systems you can implement to improve the patient experience include:

One of the greatest concerns many have when converting to a predominantly electronic environment is losing all of the data due to a system glitch or electrical outage. Cloud storage is a secure solution.

Subscribing to a cloud storage account and scheduling regular backups gives you, regulators, and patients confidence that data is secure and only available to those with permitted access.

Every new medical practice needs to be efficient, especially with limited staffing. But how do you get started? If the implementation process feels huge or overwhelming, here are ways to make the process more tolerable:

Select a trusted vendor: All vendors are not created equal. When you start looking for technological solutions, first identify each module you want to implement — not just now, but in the future. Ensure the vendor you select offers all the features you want. It needs to have proven security as part of its system and customers with whom you can discuss satisfaction and comfort with the product.

Work with a project manager: Once you select a reputable vendor, it should assign a project manager to work with you during the implementation of the product and transition of the associated processes.

Transition with training: Your vendor-assigned project manager should provide training for each staff member. This training is typically conducted via video instruction, group classroom training with hands-on exercises, or one-on-one training in a “train the trainer” format. The latter results in on-site experts who are then responsible for training the rest of the staff.

This also means the patient-facing staff need to know how to teach patients about the new system, showing patients how this transition benefits and helps them. Your administrative staff also need to understand how to overcome pockets of patient resistance that is sure to make an appearance.

By adopting healthcare tools and technologies, your medical practice can not only support your patients but also improve how you approach the administrative tasks you and your team need to perform each day.

Although not every electronic solution will be flawless, it will significantly reduce the number of clerical errors, denied claims, and late payments your office experiences.