ERA: What It Is and How Your Practice Can Benefit
ERA: WHAT IT IS AND HOW YOUR PRACTICE CAN BENEFIT The Prospective Payment System (PPS) is a payment model developed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to encourage healthcare providers to maximize their earning potential on every Medicare and Medicaid paid service only by decreasing the number of services delivered on a […]
3 Overlooked Low-Tech Medical Solutions
We hear plenty of talk about robots, telemedicine, EHRs, and stem cell-spurred regenerative medicine. However, there are still more low-tech solutions out there that can make your life drastically easier. Oh, what’s that? What are they, you ask? Keep reading and you’ll find out.
3 Reasons Your Billing Software Should be Updated
With technology advancing at lightning speed, your patient and practice needs are also evolving. This means your processes should be doing the same – and you want to start with billing software. Since this is the main aspect of your care process, it should be updated to improve patient convenience and allow you room to […]
The Good, Bad and the Costly: Analyzing Staff and Clinical Meetings at Your Practice
This time, here, now. This minute can cost you money. The seconds it takes for you to finish reading this sentence are sometimes quantifiable commodities. “This time,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” Now, have you ever sat in a […]
Why You Need a Patient Safety Reality Check
Most doctors are well aware of the safety hazards facing patients receiving care in the hospital setting, and for good reason – the statistics are rather grim. A landmark study from the Institutes of Medicine found that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die in U.S. hospitals every year due to preventable medical errors. The Agency for […]
Health Information Exchange: Is it ‘HIE’ Time to Join at Your Practice?
If you’ve adopted an electronic health records system at your practice, you may be considering the next step: joining a health information exchange. Perhaps you’ve even been approached by a local, state, or regional HIE or rural health information organization (RHIO) about joining a new or existing network. You know that data exchange is poised […]
How a Case Manager Can Help You Coordinate Care
In the early 1990s, Barbara Starfield, a pediatrician and health services researcher, identified the four key attributes of primary care: ?rst-contact care, continuity of care, comprehensive care, and coordinated care. Two decades later, primary care providers are still working – and struggling – to make those features the reality at their practices, and with the […]
Lots of Talk About Clinical Integration, But Where Will the Money Flow?
Physicians’ practices are once again facing proposed new payment systems and structures. Now it’s Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), and it’s the ‘acronym wars’ all over again. Doctors are left to wonder what changes will be made to reimbursements – and what new oversights will be placed on them. There is no shortage of opinions on […]
Stop Struggling With Your Schedule: How to Get Streamlined
The appointment log is an area where medical practices tend to get set in their ways. Even in the last few months, I’ve walked into offices where the front desk attendants still used an appointment book, paper, and pen to mark off the day’s visits, refusing to transfer their processes to a more tech-savvy system. […]
What I Should (but Likely Won’t) Learn in Med School
When I left medical school for a brief period to complete my MBA, colleagues offered variations of the question “What do MD and MBA degrees have to do with one another?” I can only speculate about the origin of such puzzlement, but one point was clear: business and patient care are seemingly perceived as mutually […]
