What is clinic management software? Clinic management software is a system designed to manage clinic operations. This system is beneficial for all healthcare organizations ranging from small to large. By using this software, clinic operations will be more effective and efficient. The core features would include registration, appointment scheduling, billing, and integrated monetary process. Clinic management software should ensure the safety of all records with the ability to recover the data. A variety of reports can be generated. All clinics, hospitals, and other care providers should consider the benefits of clinic management software. Automated operations can reduce errors and result in cost and time savings. All clinical staff would be able to assign, manage, and view their work. The software should provide better patient care and improve the overall quality of the work. This system offers an easier way to perform appointment scheduling. It prevents overlapping of appointments and assigns time for the doctor, optimizing patient flow to increase the number of patients that can be seen and providing faster care for patients. This software will help train scheduling. Financial analysis is easier to perform with this system. This is the only way to more effectively perform medical billing to the clients and the creation of electronic claim files. The features included in this software will increase claim submission accuracy and claim acceptance. The last core feature is management reporting. This will provide the administrators a report of performance that can seek improvement and more effective operations. This system offers all of the tools for efficient clinic management.
What is clinic management software?
Clinic management software is a tool that provides services and information with reference to the making of an efficient and productive medical practice. An efficient clinic management system manages the aspects of a clinic such as patients’ details, doctor’s availability, and other appointments. Many software programs also include practice management system features, which in many cases is deployed using client-server software. Data security is one of the primary concerns. Many healthcare software companies are now incorporating data security features into their practice management systems. Usually, a clinic would employ a software application service provider to keep the software cost more manageable. Another recent development in the practice management system is the capability to outsource the storage, transmission, and retrieval of medical records to a service provider. This reduces the cost of maintaining an in-house infrastructure.
Benefits of using clinic management software
Communication is a key to quality patient care. Clinic management software offers many features that can facilitate internal and external practice communications. Messaging within the electronic health record (EHR) system can help improve clinical communication. For example, a doctor can notify a medical assistant of a necessary task, or a specialist can offer guidance to a primary care physician. Many systems also offer a patient portal that allows patients to easily communicate with the practice and access their medical information. This can help improve patient involvement in their care.
Many practices still make appointments in a paper appointment book. However, manual scheduling often results in overbooking or underbooking. The appointment scheduling module is another key feature of clinic management software. It allows for the efficient scheduling of patients, blocking off of specified appointment times for specific doctors, and a visual display of available appointment times. This feature can help optimize doctors’ schedules and virtually eliminate appointment errors. In addition, confirmed appointments can trigger patient reminder calls.
One of the features of clinic management software is the billing module. Medical billing is a complex and often confusing process. Using the billing module, practice and billing staff can verify patient insurance eligibility, facilitate prior authorization, produce and submit electronic claims, post payments, and generate patient statements. This automation can significantly reduce or eliminate billing errors such as undercharging or overcharging patients, which can result in denied or delayed claims payment.
There are many compelling definitions of clinic management software. However, most of them emphasize the benefits of using such a program rather than defining it.
How to choose the best clinic management software
Is the vendor reliable? This is a very important factor in determining the right software. In the software industry, all software may encounter bugs, the difference is what the company does when it encounters these. Do they provide continuous support for your product and how often is the product updated? What is their track record like with other clinics? You can often determine this from software reviews and feedback from current software users in the industry, and this can often be the best indication. Lastly, consider what would happen if the company suddenly went out of business. Will you still be able to use the software and how easy would it be to transfer your data to another system.
What are my clinic goals? Seems like an easy question, but can you list them? These goals will involve what you want to achieve in both the short and long terms in regards to your clinic. Once you have these goals written down, you can use them to evaluate every aspect of your software buying decision and ensure that it is in line with your clinic’s vision.
Choosing the right clinic management software is a big decision. It involves discussing and evaluating your clinic processes, how you want to improve them, and how the software can help you with these improvements. This can be a cumbersome task and it is one that you may not enjoy, but it is an important task, one that can make the difference between improved clinic efficiency and a lot of wasted money. To help you make a more informed decision, here is a list of considerations you should think about when choosing your clinic management software.
Features of Clinic Management Software
Appointment scheduling and management can be quite complex in a busy clinic. Traditionally, it is done by matching a paper diary with the appointment cards, an approach that is vulnerable to loss of data through handwriting issues or when the card is mislaid. Double booking or losing track of patients who have missed or cancelled appointments can be a real cost to the clinic. Modern computerized scheduling offers speed and convenience as well as the ability to make appointments and send reminders via email and SMS. Drag and drop functionality allows the front desk to quickly rearrange the schedule. Color coding makes it easier to identify and allocate new or follow-up appointments. Any good scheduling system will have the flexibility to set the working hours for each practitioner, cater for walk-in and emergency appointments, and schedule various types of appointments for variable duration at different locations. In a multi-practitioner clinic, the system should also have the ability to restrict access to parts of the schedule. This means that when a patient rings to make an appointment with a particular doctor, the receptionist can easily see when that doctor is available and make the appointment. However, the biggest advantage of computerized scheduling is seen with its ability to reduce the number of no-shows and increase patient retention. This is achieved through setting reminder notifications for patients about their appointments and providing the ability to easily recall the patient’s appointment history. High-end scheduling systems will also feature a patient waitlist and an appointment confirmation system. The waitlist will enable the practice to quickly schedule a new appointment for a patient who has cancelled, while the confirmation system will send an email or SMS to determine whether the patient will be attending the appointment.
Appointment scheduling and management
A more sophisticated appointment scheduling system can include a feature that automatically sends an email to a patient upon scheduling an appointment and sends a reminder email at a specified time before the appointment. This is an efficient alternative to a phone call for appointment reminders. An on-call scheduling system involves scheduling a different physician than the one listed on a patient’s appointment to be “on call” for a specified time period. This can be useful for patients of a specific physician if the physician has the ability to change their schedules if all patients are notified and if the replacement physician is able to view a list of the patients he will be responsible for during the on-call period. Viewing multiple schedules is necessary if there are multiple physicians at a single location. Finally, integration of the appointment scheduling with smart mobile devices is an emerging trend in clinic management aimed at allowing easy access to schedules from anywhere.
Patients are already accustomed to calling a physician’s office and having a receptionist scribble an appointment time on a pad in the back of the office. Providing patients with a similar, but more organized method for scheduling appointments increases the likelihood that they will use the system, increasing the overall efficiency of scheduling and reducing time spent by staff calling to remind patients of appointments. Storing the patient’s name with a reference to their physician on a specific date is the basic requirement for scheduling. Color-coding appointments by visit type, physician, or location allows for easier viewing of the schedule and can prevent overbooking of certain appointment types. Customizable lists of visit types, doctors, and locations prevent the need to scroll through long lists when scheduling an appointment.
The scheduling and management of patient appointments are critical tasks in running an efficient clinic. Clinic management software must provide a way to store patient information, the ability to schedule appointments and automatically send reminders to patients, a method for on-call scheduling, and a way to view multiple physicians’ schedules over a defined time period.
Electronic medical records (EMR) management
Managing electronic medical records (EMR) are going to be the foundation of any clinic. A good EMR should provide a way to input data of patient and therefore auto-generate a patient ID, ability to categorize records supported condition, case notes and alternative that’s unique to every practitioner to help find previous records for returning patients. Then it should have a feature that makes the storage and retrieval of documents easy, by permitting the dropping of files into an area and therefore the ability to retrieve them through the use of patient ID, basically a virtual filing cabinet. Finally, the software should offer the ability to connect clinical knowledge to the administrative phase of the clinic by combining the scheduler and record system, guaranteeing that the date for any procedures done in any visit will be recorded onto the record. This can facilitate to make sure that the right data is input and cut down confusion.
Electronic medical records (EMR) management is the soul of any clinic management software. A clinic’s medical record could be a compilation of chart down the medical history of patients. It’s a necessary tool to delivering quality care. The EMR contains a patient’s medical history, diagnoses, medications, treatment plans, immunization dates, allergies, radiology images, and laboratory results. The medical record permits the health care provider to spot the patient’s drawback and give a record of the care that’s provided. It’s a legal document also a result of any care given to the patient. With more clinics turning to electronic medical records for record keeping, the employment of paper to keep patient data is becoming obsolete. But the sheer volume of records and data will build organization and management tough for several clinics unless the employment of electronic medical records is married with a good record management system.
Billing and invoicing
The simplest medical billing programs merely create electronic versions of the HCFA 1500 and UB-92 paper claim forms. Other software will include patient registration and claim management modules. Higher-end medical billing software will also offer accounts receivable management. These more advanced features can greatly speed up the process of reimbursement and help to avoid rejections of claims. In cases where medical practices do not have the resources to handle billing in-house, a billing service provider may take care of these tasks. Such companies provide medical billing solutions on an outsourced basis. Usually, their methodology will involve remotely accessing a client’s data and the processing of claims through that data.
Billing software is an important tool for medical professionals in private practice. It facilitates the efficient processing of electronic claims and provides a quick turnaround of reimbursement for services. Medical billing software can often act as a complete package for a medical office’s billing needs. A number of vendors provide medical billing services. Each company’s software will typically include the same basic features, with varying capabilities and effectiveness.
Inventory management
The inventory management module in clinic management software provides a variety of options for managing medical stock. Users can view and manage stock levels, set reorder points to replenish stock, generate purchase orders to send to suppliers, and record goods received notes to update stock levels. It is clear that the cost of holding stock, and the risk of stock becoming obsolete or expiring is an important consideration for healthcare organizations. Therefore, the ability to set up reorder points and keep an accurate record of stock levels is an important feature, as it helps to ensure that capital is not tied up in stock that is not required. Stock tracking is facilitated through the ability to generate a variety of stock reports and interrogate stock levels at different time points. These features help to track movement of stock and identify slow moving or obsolete stock. The inventory module is often integrated with the billing module to ensure that stock used on a patient is accurately reflected in their invoice. Integration with the EMR module also enables automatic updating of stock levels when medications are prescribed for patients. This reduces the administrative burden of stock management and helps to ensure that all stock related activities are recorded.
Reporting and analytics
As the clinic management software records each transaction, activity, and data of the clinic, it also has the ability to retrieve and display the recorded data in the form of reports. This is done using the reporting and analytics feature in the software. The software can generate lists, summaries, details, and notes that are recorded. These reports can be valuable when managing the clinic, for identifying successes and failures, or for simply identifying the type of patients that the clinic sees and what provisions are used. Data can be filtered and displayed in many ways, helping the clinic to identify problems and find solutions. The reports can be directly related to increasing efficiency at the clinic, as the staff can see what activities take the most time. The reports provide clear and concise details, easy to understand for all. This will provide a deeper insight into what is happening in the clinic, identifying trends or problems that may have been unknown. For example, a clinic could be unaware of a high rate of patient no-shows to appointments. This can be identified using a report that summarizes appointments and displays the number of patients that did not show. The clinic now has identified a problem and can take steps to rectify it, possibly increasing appointment reminders or confirmation calls.
Top Clinic Management Software Providers
ClinicSaurus is a cloud-based Clinic Management System software which supports best practices in clinic operation simplification and best results in controlling clinic financials and performance. This software provides an easy way and comfort in monitoring, tracking, and recording patient information, visit histories, diagnosis, medications given, follow-up treatment, bills, and payment. Today, ClinicSaurus has thousands of users in Indonesia. This software is leading the market in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. ClinicSaurus is very suitable for a GP or specialist doctor who builds a private practice clinic. With a price of only RM1.50/day, you can control and monitor your clinic from anywhere using any kind of device (Goodwill Enterprise, 2021).
There are many clinic management software providers available globally. They provide CMS online and locally as well. When someone wants to purchase a CMS, they will need to study the background of the CMS provider and what is the best product they can offer. Here is the top CMS provider.
The main use of Clinic Management Software (CMS) is to manage healthcare data effectively and automatically by using the latest software. CMS is used to generate data forms and maintain patient records, track billing, and produce reports for patient encounters. Most healthcare organizations will purchase implemented software rather than developing their own software. In this case, to develop a CMS, a healthcare organization will need a lot of money, time, and manpower. So it’s more efficient for any type of healthcare organization to just buy implemented CMS right now (Wikipedia, 2021).
Key features and pricing comparison
There are a large number of features and vast pricing differences between the two systems that could ultimately make or break the decision to purchase. ClinicSaurus costs $60 a month for a single user and $120 a month for 3 users. The Medi-Soft program costs $1040 to purchase and $240 a month for support. The pricing means ClinicSaurus is largely aimed at smaller clinics and practices, while Medi-Soft is aimed at larger practices and hospitals. Anywhere will run on Windows 95 to Vista if .NET Framework 2.0 is installed, which is a quite dated software. This contrasts with ClinicSaurus, which is only 6 months old. This could mean Conflict of Law has a slight edge on features and functionality purely because they have been around longer and have had more time to develop their software. Another factor in the decision could be whether or not you want to store the data on your system or have it internet-based. Anywhere is entirely internet-based, which has both pros and cons. It can be operated from any PC in the world that has an internet connection, but the downside is that if the internet is down, the system is inaccessible. This contrasts with the other 2 systems, which store the data on your system. Anywhere stored data can be considered less secure than these systems with less IT knowledge and offers no backup service. This means if something goes wrong, there is no way to retrieve lost data compared to the regular backup facilities included in ClinicSaurus and Medi-Soft. Anywhere has only 1 set price, with a 30-day free trial. Anywhere may be suitable for smaller clinics with no requirements for IT infrastructure but is not a suitable option for larger clinics and practices. Anywhere has a $300 monthly cost, which is based on active patients up to 600. If the amount of active patients exceeds 600, an extra $0.50 is charged for each patient. This can potentially become quite costly. Anywhere has the ability to import data from other systems; this would be a consideration for clinics looking to swap over to a different system.
Implementation and Integration
The project should be led by the clinic’s IT expert or someone familiar with technology. Identify the software and hardware requirements by checking the system’s capability without forgetting the budget consideration. Assign a core team who really understands the system and has the authority on any related decision. Plan the project management starting from data migration, flow process, training, and maintenance. Prepare the data conversion from the old to the new one because usually the clinic has been using another system before. Set up the software and do customization to adjust the workflow and data. Do not go live before ensuring that the system has worked well. Being a web-based system, it will not take a long time to implement the clinic management software. Integration with other healthcare systems still becomes a problem until now. Most of the clinic management software out there is still loose in terms of connectivity with another system, including well-known software such as SPC Clinic, DAA, SAP, or HIS to radiology and laboratory interfaces. They tend to build their own system to be standalone, and not all providers know about the importance of information interchange in this global era. A standalone system will create a new problem in system maintenance and data exchange when there’s a new patient referral to another clinic, and it’s very impossible for the patient to remember all the medical history. A good clinic management software should provide a comprehensive interface to another provider with minimum customization. But so far, only a few providers really understand this because it takes a long time and cost to build an interface to another provider with a different system.
Steps to implement clinic management software
At this point, a clear timeframe for implementation should be set and the company can purchase the software and get started.
Once the software type has been decided, the next step is to select the actual software that will be used. It may be helpful to form a relationship with a company that sells the software and invite a sales representative to walk through a demonstration of the possibilities for the clinic. After viewing several demos, trial periods of the software should be used to explore its functions in more depth and make sure it is the right solution.
After exploring the available options, most clinics will want to select a commercial software package. However, there are also several open-source options available. Usually with open source, there is no cost to acquire the software, but it requires more programming knowledge and time on the part of the user to set it up. With a commercial package, there is usually a greater upfront cost, but the time investment is less and it is generally more user-friendly.
To begin with, all stakeholders in the clinic, from the physicians to the front desk staff, must be involved in the decision-making process. If the new system is forced upon an unconsenting staff, morale and productivity are likely to decrease. Holding several meetings with stakeholders and perhaps creating a committee to explore what is available on the market is a great way to start the decision-making process.
When a clinic has decided it is time to implement a clinic management system, there are several steps it must follow to ensure it has made a good decision and to make the transition as smooth as possible. Often, the process of implementation can be more painful than people at the clinic had anticipated, but if the right steps are taken with enough time and consideration, the new system will bring about a positive change.
Integration with other healthcare systems
If a clinic is part of a wider health network, or a group of clinics are using the same software, it should be possible to share some data between clinics. This may be to enable the central management or analysis of data from several clinics, or simply to allow patients and their records to move between different locations. In these situations it’s often most cost-effective to have a single large database server, though data security and access permissions in this sort of system are very important.
Interoperability with the new National Health Service IT systems will be an important consideration for all IT system purchases in the UK. For those purchasing software in the UK or those whose software may in the future be used in the UK, compliance with NHS standards for messaging and terminologies will be necessary.
When considering the purchase of clinic management software, it is important to consider how the software will interact with other existing systems used by the clinic. In many clinics, especially ones which have recently computerized, it is likely that a mix of manual and computer-based systems will be in use. These may range from clinical, patient records and appointment systems, to finance and HR systems. In the hospital environment, the systems are often even more diverse, with a multitude of departmental systems.
Training and support options
Training and support are essential elements of effectively implementing information technology in any organisation. Clinical software is no exception. Clinic staff are unlikely to be effective in using the newly installed software if they do not know how to use it. This could lead to a loss of productivity, frustration, and eventually early replacement of the system. The quality of training has also been shown to affect the attitude of staff towards a new system, with better quality training being associated with a positive attitude. The attitudes of staff can further affect the implementation in terms of how quickly the staff start to effectively use the new system and how innovative they are with utilizing the new functionalities. Positive attitudes are likely to increase productivity, while negative attitudes can result in early abandonment of the new system. Support is also crucial during all stages of implementation. It not only helps staff to overcome issues and continue being productive, but a responsive support system can be crucial in restoring confidence in a new system that is experiencing teething issues. This is particularly important during the early stages of implementation. If staff become too frustrated due to issues and have no means of resolving them, it can lead to the system being abandoned in favor of the old methods. A new software package could have many potential benefits, but if staff do not perceive it as being easy to use or do not feel confident in their ability to use it, they are less likely to embrace it in place of the old methods. This is why quality training and responsive support are crucial in achieving full acceptance and effective utilization of a new clinical system.