Month: April 2014

PM Hack – #10: Utilize Text Based Appointment Reminders The appointment is the glue that holds the physician-patient relationship together. Unfortunately, conventional appointments don’t work anymore. Patients wait too long, and physicians are so under the gun that they don’t get the time they need to fully examine patients. The end result: unhappy patients and

We’ve yet to talk to a physician who went into medicine because he or she wanted to run a billing department. But plenty of doctors find themselves doing just that. The biggest reason is a mismatch between theory and reality. In a perfect world, physicians would focus all their time and energy on treating patients,

If you’re considering outsourcing your practice’s insurance claims to a medical billing service, this article is for you. While some physicians swear by their outsourced billing service and would never consider bringing this costly and burdensome function back in-house, others feel that engaging the services of a medical billing company would deprive them of vital

The ability to effectively, and efficiently collect payments from patients is imperative to the robust good health of a practice. Whether these payments come in the form of coinsurance, deductibles or copays – ensuring that such funds are obtained helps keep the accounts receivable (A/R) column at an optimum level. Many physicians might be surprised

For years, cyber security experts have urged us to use encryption to protect sensitive information that we send over the Internet. We assumed that as long as we used a modern security sockets layer, or SSL, that data were safe. That was before we learned about “Heartbleed,” a computer security bug that targets a specific

Even though many providers are switching over to cloud-based EHR systems, there are still a number of risks and problems with cloud vendors and their contracts. All of these vendors are not created equally, and that can put medical professionals at risk from information and financial standpoints, which can also affect patient care. Before any

The healthcare landscape is evolving and changing rapidly, making it more important to measure what is providing value and what is not. With that in mind, the real goal should be to collect only the most important areas of data and use those metrics to find what makes a practice profitable and what should be

Your medical practice needs to offer the best medical services to every single person who walks through your door. Quality service begins with a well-running staff ready for an influx of clients on any given day. They must record the proper patient information, schedule appointments, handle billing issues and address problems that may arise. Your

Even if your current claims process brings in a steady stream of reimbursements, it might surprise you to learn that hidden fees and inefficient protocol unnecessarily cost you thousands of dollars each month. It is impossible to push every medical claim through without a few slipping into the dreaded “pending status,” but there are steps