21 Sep 6 Common Challenges in EHR Implementation
Healthcare practices and providers have been implementing electronic health record software at an increasing rate, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services....
Healthcare practices and providers have been implementing electronic health record software at an increasing rate, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services....
Each May, we celebrate National Children’s Mental Health Week to underscore the importance of nurturing positive mental health among our nation’s youth. This year, from May 1st-7th, the awareness week will emphasize the vital importance of building strong emotional health for children’s long-term development and overall wellness....
One strategy to help with the increasing patient responsibility of healthcare costs, is to implement and enforce a strong financial policy....
Providing quality pediatric care takes collaboration between parents and primary care physicians. How is effective management of referrals and transitions of care vital to the success of that partnership? ...
Breaking up is hard to do, but that doesn’t mean you should stay! Don’t let the challenges of implementing a data transfer hold you back from switching to a better pediatric EHR system. It might well be a challenging process, but it will be worth it over the long term. The adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) among pediatricians was already almost 80% in 2012, according to a study by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Many of those practices who implemented EHRs back then are now reaching the point of needing to upgrade their systems. This often means changing software vendors,...
Quality initiatives are an essential part of becoming recognized as a Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH). However, quality is essential for all pediatric practices, not just those seeking the PCMH designation....
What happens when a practice decides to work with an electronic health record they’ve never used before? As you can imagine, the lift is neither a simple or easy one, and it takes special people with unique skills to help that along....
Pediatric care providers need to ensure that patients with health needs requiring follow-up, as well as those due or behind on their well visits, are receiving the care they need. This is also vital to having a healthier population and increasing practice revenue. And that’s where something like “DAR” comes in. Using a Tool for Patient Recall DAR stands for Demographic Analysis and Recall. It's a powerful tool for analyzing demographic data that's integrated in OP. Based on the findings, it recalls specific patient and practice information. Let’s say that I’m a busy clinician. I want to know how DAR can help my...
When we think about information — and specifically, about patient information — one of the first things to come to mind is the problem of taking it with you. Of course, the days of the bulky paper chart that has to be scanned in (or worse, photocopied) and provided to the patient and their family is long gone, but the issue hasn’t disappeared; it’s simply changed with the technology we use to record and disperse information. We’re still left with the same questions: how can we make the process seamless for the patient and family? How can we ensure its...
If a pediatric practice has some extra down time, pause and remember the financial health of your practice starts with having an appropriate fee schedule. While contractually the payers determine how much they are going to pay you for each service you provide, it starts with how much you charge. Scheduled Processes and Procedures At a minimum, at the beginning of the year, your practice should have a scheduled process and procedure for updating your fee schedule so you can be sure you are not leaving money on the table (and in the insurance company’s pocket.) The AAP has resources for pediatricians...
As a pediatrician, your primary goal is to deliver the best possible healthcare to your patients. Just as it's important for your patients to have regular check-ups as part of their wellness, it's also critical to regularly evaluate your pediatric office's financial health. But how? There are some key analytics that you can consistently examine to stay on top of your practice's financial well-being, while successfully planning for the future. Whether your billing is done in-house or outsourced, here are 3 data analytics you should always have included in your monthly and yearly billing reports. 1. Number of Days in Accounts Receivable (A/R) You...
Everybody needs education, and that may be doubly true when it comes to your pediatric EHR. To put it simply: education is power. Power to do your job more effectively. Power to contribute and make decisions. Power to be able to use the software competently — and by doing so, to provide better patient care. In other words: no matter how advanced your EHR is, if you’re not engaging in ongoing education, you’re limiting the effectiveness of your system, your people, and your practice as a whole. Why is Training Necessary? Of course, when you first adopt a system, you need training in...
Operating a pediatric practice that runs on time has always been important. Staying on schedule is essential because it affects everyone's workflows and keeps appointments on track. Happy patients = a happy practice. Here are five tips for fostering an environment where everyone runs on time. 1. Have an Honest Baseline It’s important to be honest and realistic with yourself. Start by measuring your baseline. Look through your data, appointment by appointment. For example, perhaps you’ve been scheduling all ADHD rechecks as 20-minute visits, but you occasionally conduct those appointments and notice patients who are not stable on their medications. This means encounters...
Have you ever thought to yourself, “Wouldn’t it be cool if parents could self-schedule appointments?” If you’re part of a busy practice, you know how much time a simple feature like this could save. How about the frantic parent who calls the office one minute after opening because they lost the daycare form you gave them last week and little Niko’s first day is tomorrow? Wouldn’t it be great if little Niko’s mom could simply print the form herself rather than coming into the office and picking up a copy? With older EHRs, that might have been mere wishful thinking, but no...
As the leader of a pediatric practice, you know that being successful involves more than providing excellent medical care. Of course, patient care is your top priority, but managing day-to-day operations takes knowledge, organization, and the right people. How do you make the best use of your team's skills and talents? How can you make sure everyone in your pediatric office is being productive and efficient without crushing morale? These are important points to consider, especially if you want to have a profitable practice. Here are some suggestions for boosting staff productivity. Get to Know Your Team and Show Them You Care Perhaps your...
When we work hard at preventing diseases through vaccines, everyone wins: Families, communities, and our pediatric practices. To succeed at keeping patients current with vaccines, you need a clinical decision support (CDS) tool that takes the guesswork out of the schedule. Here are five ways a CDS tool will help your practice. 1. Patient Population Knowledge Giving good care to your patients starts with understanding who they are. For example, do you have a way to identify all 5-year-old patients so you can contact them over the summer and remind them of school-mandated vaccines? Can you identify and close care gaps for...
Having a fully functional patient portal is necessary for today’s healthcare environment. Parents of young children expect to have the world at their fingertips. This includes being able to access medical records on their phones and tablets. But what are the advantages of a patient portal for pediatric practices? Here are 4 benefits we are already seeing after implementing our new portal. Improved Communications and Documentation A patient portal strengthens relationships between families and providers. Patients’ parents can communicate with your practice when it’s convenient for them, and you can respond when it’s conducive to your schedule. Parents can also update their children’s...
Wellness means different things to different people, but many would agree that it plays a big role in your overall health. Finding ways to boost wellness, especially at the office, can improve work performance as well. According to the CDC, healthier employees translates to a more productive office. Additionally, offices that encourage wellness among employees not only reduces absenteeism, but may even help employees and their families improve overall health, and there are many, easy ways to promote wellness in your practice. Hold Walking Meetings Some hospitals and medical practices regularly hold Walk with a Doc’ programs for patients and those within...
Parents of your pediatric patients are busy people who like technology and the convenience it offers. In fact, they are accustomed to being an online consumer — when buying airline tickets, making restaurant reservations, ordering groceries, and purchasing all of their everyday goods and services. It makes sense, then, to have a patient portal available for your pediatric practice that saves them time, provides convenience and is easily accessible. So, is it worth your investment to offer a patient portal? Here are three suggestions for increasing portal adoption and how doing so boosts your ROI (Return on Investment) and ROE (Return...
The patient referral system is one of the most important pathways within pediatric healthcare. Ideally, it operates smoothly to ensure that all patients, regardless of socio-economic background, gender, or race, are able to take steps towards good health. In a recent issue of Pediatrics, a study confirmed that there were several factors that affected the pediatric referral system negatively, ranging from race and zip code to whether the patient had public insurance. The authors of the study also noted what factors made a positive impact on whether referrals were scheduled quickly and attended by patients and their families. There are a...
The ever-changing landscape of healthcare means that primary care physicians face tough competition. Pediatricians recognize that on-demand care options like urgent care centers and retail clinics are taking pediatric patients away from their medical homes. However, research suggests that the greatest threat to traditional healthcare is direct-to-consumer telemedicine. During the winter months, more children get sick, and many families are so busy that they find care where it is most convenient. By offering telemedicine at your practice, you can improve accessibility when these situations occur. Don’t let uncertainty hold you back. Your patients are better off seeing you via telemedicine — gaining...
As an independent pediatric office owner or administrator, you want your practice to thrive. One of the best ways to ensure that your business succeeds is having a high-performing team. Recent research shows that high-performing teams have one thing in common: They work in a psychologically safe environment. It's kind of an awkward, fancy term. Essentially, it means the work environment is a safe place to ask questions, raise concerns, and share ideas without feeling fear. Are you ready to learn about this important trend in job environments? Here are four ways to ensure your pediatric practice is a psychologically safe workplace. 1. Create...
Keeping your personal information safe is important, but when someone else entrusts you with their information, you have an obligation to protect it diligently and at all costs. This is especially true for medical practices, which are among the most heavily targeted because they contain an abundance of private information that hackers love to get their hands on. Here are three strategies you can implement immediately to help protect your patient’s data. Cloud Technology Cloud-hosted applications are a great way to be proactive when initiating security measures within your practice. They will provide automatic, regular data backup and recovery while keeping your...
In addition to toothy smiles and reward stickers, pediatric practices run on efficiency. Streamlined systems are essential for providers, administrators, staff members, patients, and their families. This is especially true when prescribing medications, including controlled substances. In pediatrics, the most common controlled substances are typically ADHD medications. These maintenance drugs are extremely important to your young patients, and a delay in receiving them can affect the patient's entire family. Are you wondering whether electronically prescribing these medications is valuable for your independent pediatric practice? Here are five benefits of electronic prescribing of controlled substances (EPCS). 1. Streamlined Clinical Workflow When you’re working within your...
You’ve decided you’re ready to spread your entrepreneurial wings. You're going to open your own pediatric practice. While it’s an exciting time, it’s also busy with planning. You’ve got a checklist full of items like credentialing providers with payers, securing financing, choosing a location, purchasing technology, hiring staff, ordering supplies and furniture, and preparing forms and processes. Another important area to tackle before officially launching your new practice? Billing. It's one of the most critical elements of your business. Without a good billing system, you won't get paid appropriately. And a practice that's not profitable will quickly fold in the ever-changing world...
Electronic health record software is consistently updated in order to adjust to the ever-changing and dynamic healthcare and technology worlds. That’s why training must be seen as a consistent commitment, not a one-and-done effort. Regardless of whether you’re going to switch to a new EHR or plan on staying with your current solution, here are five best practices for establishing a culture of ongoing EHR education. Designate a Superuser To start, designate a superuser. A superuser is a point person who understands the big picture and sees the entire scope of the practice, particularly how different functions, workflows, and data inputs affect...
When reviewing (or developing) your revenue cycle management plan, don't overlook the first steps: making sure all your providers are appropriately credentialed with all your payers and associated products. Credentialing and Provider Enrollment are more than just arduous tasks of paperwork; without them, claims aren’t paid and revenue suffers. Opportunities to grow your practice and strengthen your revenue depend on a solid credentialing and contracting game plan. Key functions that help your practice receive proper reimbursement from insurers: Payer Product Analysis: Most insurers offer multiple products and these products can change annually, especially Medicare Advantage, Medicaid HMO, and ACA plans. Review your...
A frazzled mom walks into your pediatric clinic. She approaches the check-in desk, and your receptionist notices dark circles below wet eyes, red from crying, possibly even during the drive to the office. The screaming toddler on the mom’s hip is not so interested in disguising his anguish. He wails in pain as he tugs on his ear, not afraid to let the tears fall freely. Even those staff members behind the check-in desk, standing at the hallway scale, or walking a patient to an exam room can hear the little guy. After checking in the fidgety little boy, the receptionist sees...
In order to truly provide top-notch medical care at your pediatric practice, you need an all-star team of professionals working around you. Front desk staff, nurse practitioners, medical billers, the list goes on. A successful medical practice relies on a full staff of talented people. A hiring mistake alone, can cost you 15 times an employee’s base salary in hard costs and lost productivity. You are in the medical profession. You are not a Human Resource Manager. You might be a little lost when it comes to hiring for your practice. In this article, I am going to give you the...
If your payment data is currently dispersed across multiple systems, you might hit a roadblock in your plan for payment assurance. What does your roadmap for payment assurance look like? Use these three checkpoints to analyze where your data might be failing you and how you can improve collection processes by pulling payment data from one reliable source. Checkpoint #1: Talk to Your Staff About Their Processes to Collect Collecting patient payments is time-consuming. Do you know how much time your staff spends to collect a single payment? Ask your staff to walk you through their daily process to collect, reconcile and post...
Preventative care is the cornerstone of pediatrics, yet many practices don’t optimize their well visits. If you are not doing proactive recalls, you are leaving money on the table and your patients are not receiving optimal care. There are several aspects to optimize well visits but your practice must be committed to doing this on a regular basis. Where to start? Be reactive within the office. Every time a patient’s chart is touched (triage nurse, vaccine-only visit, form request, sick visit), train your entire team to look for the red date, indicating the patient is overdue for a well visit. Encourage...
In the past, excellent patient care was enough to earn word of mouth referrals for pediatric practices. Aside from directory listings, most doctors didn't need to market their practices at all. Parents would simply ask their friends for a doctor recommendation or choose from an insurance company's list of providers. Today, parents still ask for recommendations, but they're turning to social media for the information. According to Pew Research, 74 percent of internet users are on social media. Over 1.4 billion people log on to Facebook each day, including 75 percent of parents. Of those, nearly half look for information about...
Sometimes, you can have too much of a good thing. When it comes to choosing an electronic health record (EHR) solution, less is actually more if you’re in a pediatrics practice. That’s because a well-rounded adult-centric EHR is likely to be less helpful than one specially built for your area of expertise. Statistics from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology show that 86.9% of office-based physicians already had an EHR in 2015. Two years later, however, a report from Medical Economics showed that 43% had used three or more EHRs, mostly because they were dissatisfied with the systems they chose...
Patient portals can provide tremendous enhancements for pediatric family engagement and satisfaction. On the other hand, online portals can also be one of those offerings that some parents argue are good in theory but not in practice. Busy parents may be thinking: do I really need another email or text reminder? Or another login/password combination to remember? Or another app to download on my mobile device? The short, simple answer to these questions is yes. Here’s how a portal can improve patient engagement and satisfaction, along with some tips to help your parents adopt your portal. Pediatric Patient Portal Benefits Patient portals bring...
Do you lie awake at night worrying about your pediatric practice’s billing processes? Are you concerned about what will happen when your reliable, long-standing staff biller decides to retire? For example, who’s going to ensure you’re billing for all services you perform such as every strep test has an accompanying visit billed. And who’s going to keep track of the constant, ever-changing payer rules that can result in significant financial hardships, if you’re relying on inadequate, inexperienced or unmotivated billing staff? If these are your thoughts, there are steps you can take to address these problems and achieve better pediatric billing...
[vc_row css_animation="" row_type="row" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no" type="full_width" angled_section="no" text_align="left" background_image_as_pattern="without_pattern"][vc_column][vc_column_text] In a typical day, how do patient records move through your pediatric office? If you're still using paper charts, it's more than like that your administrative staff pulls files for scheduled patients and creates records for new patients. Your nurse or medical assistant probably updates those files with each patient’s vitals. Pediatricians and other clinical staff spend an untold amount of time taking copious notes as they see each patient. Then, each file gets passed back through the nursing team for more updates and back to the administrative staff for payment processing and...
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