Medical practice management software is key to enhancing a practice’s efficiency, improving care delivery, and maintaining employee and patient satisfaction. Healthcare practices use medical practice management software to coordinate patient scheduling, calendars, reporting, insurance claims, and billing through a centralized workflow.
What is medical practice management software?
Medical practice management software helps healthcare offices handle daily administrative and financial operations, such as scheduling and billing. Some practices also integrate their medical practice management software with their electronic health records (EHR) to further streamline the patient care and billing process.
Formerly, medical offices managed time-intensive administrative tasks with paperwork and filing systems. Now, many of these operations are completed through practice management software. This enables efficient patient care so practices can serve more patients without the need to increase their staff.
Medical practice management software also optimizes medical billing processes in-house and establishes easier access if a practice outsources revenue cycle management.
What features are common in medical practice management software?
Common medical practice management software offers a wide range of features—from patient intake to billing. Standard solutions typically offer the following features:
- Patient onboarding: Entering new patients, capturing patient demographics, and pre-registering patients with their insurance.
- Appointment scheduling: Schedulers can manage multiple care provider calendars at once.
- Electronic billing: Some medical practice management software solutions will automatically import billing codes from an EHR. Otherwise, administrators can manually import codes, make changes, and issue claims.
- Practice reporting: Medical practice management software can generate a variety of operational reports from scheduling to billing and claims reimbursement.
More robust medical practice management software solutions, including Benchmark PM, offer additional time-saving features:
- Automated appointment reminders: Healthcare practices can decrease no-show appointments and rescheduling by sending reminders in advance.
- Digital patient self-scheduling: Patients can book an appointment via a practice’s website based on a provider’s calendar.
- Online patient statements and payment portal: Patients and administrators can access patient statements to view, address, and pay outstanding charges.
- Customizable calendar views for quick booking: Practices can adapt their calendar view to suit their administrative teams’ preferences.
- Integrated clearinghouse functionality: Clearinghouses are electronic hubs that help practices securely transmit claims to insurance, expediting time to reimbursement.
- Seamless EHR Integration: For medical practice management software like Benchmark PM, each encounter’s ICD codes can transfer from an EHR to the medical practice management software for medical billing. This enables a 360-degree view of the practice’s operations and revenue cycle.
- Streamlined Scheduling: Administrators can filter and view availability for providers, equipment, or facilities within a single dashboard to prevent double-booking. Software solutions such as Benchmark PM will automatically jump to the first available appointment time based on the scheduler’s criteria, removing friction from the process.
- Insurance Claims Management: Practices can view a claim’s status, enabling them to correct or refile claims to manage their revenue cycle.
What are the benefits of medical practice management software?
For most offices, there’s already a medical practice management software solution. And if you’re working with the wrong medical practice management software, your staff are all too familiar with the pains that can create including: frustrating data entry, missed appointments, poor patient experience, and admin headaches trying to clean everything up—it doesn’t have to be like that.
Working with the right medical practice management software provider not only supports your medical practice but streamlines day-to-day processes for your front-desk staff—meaning fewer headaches and more happy patients.
The benefits of utilizing a modern medical practice management software include:
- Reduction in manual tasks and data entry errors.
- Minimize patient no-shows and rescheduled.
- Enable intuitive reporting on patient and practice data to track revenue and expenses.
Everything you wanted in a solution with Benchmark PM
Your scheduling, calendars, reports, and billing dashboards—just the way you like them
If your medical practice management software is not supporting your practice and front-desk staff with these benefits, it’s time to consider changing platforms. Solutions like Benchmark PM are designed for medical providers like you to do what you do best—serve your patients.
Benchmark PM brings advanced scheduling features, seamless EHR and medical billing integrations, and proven implementation success with our customers. Let us demonstrate how you can personalize Benchmark PM to perfectly fit your practice’s unique needs.