Practice Management System (PMS) – What to Look For?

A practice management system is a hi-tech new age IT tool for today’s doctors and physicians. The system has its own advantages in the overall process of practice management. It helps in speeding up the process of practice management, minimization of errors, improvement in the quality of service and overall office profits. The success of implementation by and large depends on features offered by the practice management system itself.

Before actually purchasing and implementing the system – it would be really wise enough to list out the requirements of your practice and then to tally it with the different practice management systems before finalizing on a particular software. There are certain essential features that a good & efficient system would always be equipped with.

Let us look at the various important functionalities that a good practice management system must be equipped with:

Appointment Scheduling:

A good practice management system must provide with the feature of appointment scheduling. It should provide for the option for checking the availability of time slot, online appointment scheduling, editing and other options for maintaining the patient appointment record.

Billing & Collections:

A busy practice has to deal with the tedious task of issuing bills to the patient, record keeping and collections. It involves a number of entries in the books to keep the records up-to-date. A good practice management system must provide with easy to use fully functional patient billing and collections module.

Electronic Medical Records:

Maintaining patient history, clinical records, treatment records & other patient information is a time consuming process. A good practice management system usually provides with the functionality to maintain patient records.

Insurance Claims Management:

Medical claims management is a tedious process involving a number of steps including claim generation, claim submission, verification, error handling, follow up and so on. It is considered to be the most time consuming activity that a physician’s office has to deal with. A good practice management system helps to ease out the situation by providing a number of claims management capabilities.

Patient Records Maintenance:

Maintaining patient records is not an easy task. Recording, filing, storing, retrieval and updating are the usual activities as regards patient records maintenance. A good practice management system would essentially provide with the capabilities of managing patient records.

Reporting:

Report generation is a periodic and very important task. Many decisions are based on good reporting systems. A good practice management system provides with the capabilities of generating different reports on the basis of the information stored and thus facilitating the process of decision making.

Tags: Healthcare Management | EMR | Practice Management