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Technology for patients: Think good, not perfect

(c) Barclays PLC* A few days ago, the ATM turned 50. The first ATM in the world debuted in London in 1967; we got our first one in the US in 1969. Wow! I bet that the ATM has been around longer than many of you reading this. It's hard to imagine a time when this technology wasn't on every street corner. Yet when the ATM was first introduced, it was slow to catch on. In fact, it took about 30 of those 50 years for the ATM to be used by 2/3 of consumers -- and even as recently as 2013, more than 10% of consumers still had yet to pick up the ATM habit. The ATM's slow-but-steady path to everyday use got me thinking about technology in the medical practice. Technologies to connect patients and practices, especially on the administrative side, have emerged at a fantastic pace in the past few years. But many practices we've worked with have hesitated to implement them, for fear that the majority of their patients won't use them. Some practices that have implemented, say, a patient portal or online scheduling, have been disappointed because only a portion of patients seem excited to use it. "Laurie," they say, "we tried that. Only 20% of our patients used it. It was a failure, so we abandoned it." But when the ATM was first introduced, the adoption rate was much slower even than a 10% or 20% utilization your practice might see on its new payment portal or online schedule. So why didn't the banks give up? After all, implementing an ATM network is a massive, risky, very costly undertaking. So why were the banks undeterred by their meager initial results? And what can we learn from it for our own technology initiatives? The key is to focus less on the people who don't try the technology, and more on the people who do. For every one of those few customers who used the ATM in those early days, the bank could declare a victory. The consumer who wanted to use an ATM

By |2022-01-01T22:51:48-08:00July 4th, 2017|

Technology’s magic trick: making duplicate effort disappear

Technology for the medical practice front office has many benefits. It can speed up processes, keep critical data safe from fire and flood, allow practice staff to tap resources from other organizations via the Internet, and so on. The list is long and growing. But my favorite front office technology benefit by far is the ability to eliminate duplicate effort, especially duplicate data entry. The reason is simple: eliminating duplicate effort is like money in the bank! When you cut down on duplicate data entry, you don't just eliminate the cost of repeating steps; you also reduce errors, which can be even more costly to find and fix. Some errors -- like mistakes in patient demographics or coding -- cause a direct hit to the bottom line, since they affect billing and reimbursement. Get those demographics right the first time, and your likelihood of getting paid promptly just went up -- and the effort required to make it happen just went down. There are many technology tools that medical front offices can use to reduce duplicate effort. Here are just a few that most practices should explore, if you're not taking advantage of them already. EHR/PMS integration. When a practice moves from separate billing and EHR systems, or from paper charts to an EHR that integrates with the billing/practice management system, the gain in billing efficiency is profound. An integrated EHR/PMS set-up allows physicians and other clinicians to transmit superbills electronically from the EHR into the PMS. This means no data entry of CPT and diagnosis codes from paper tickets -- a huge time savings. But even more important, the data that's transferred over to the billing system is exactly what the physician or non-physician provider intended -- not what the biller guessed at based on a handwritten superbill. And if there are any doubts about the services provided or diagnosis codes, the chart note is right there in the system to provide clarification. EHR/PMS integration means faster, more accurate billing -- for faster, more reliable reimbursement. Fewer delays to clarify what's supposed to be billed, and no risk that

By |2022-01-01T22:51:54-08:00November 10th, 2016|

Ready to take the CCM plunge?

As you may know already, I've been working on a series of papers on Medicare's chronic care management reimbursement program (CCM) for the Medical Product Guide. (Click on 'resources' after visiting the Medical Product Guide link if you're interested -- they're free.) Talking to practices that have already started working on CCM, along with others that have held back, has been a learning experience.  The ability to take on CCM quickly depends a lot on your current practice set-up and, especially, your EHR. On the current set-up side, if you're working on or already have set up a medical home (PCMH), and have one or more case managers in place to support it, you may find it easy to use the same staff structure for CCM. Your case managers could become the coordinators for CCM as well -- perhaps personally contacting patients and doing the other care management tasks that contribute to the required 20 minutes per month for billing. Perhaps there will be overlap between the PCMH and CCM that could be beneficial -- if, for example, you're looking at a similar mix of conditions, that might allow for some standardized communications or tracking tools.  Or perhaps you could add a group visit program that would serve patients from both programs. (A group visit program wouldn't contribute to the CCM monthly time requirement, since that's strictly non-face-to-face time, but it still could be well received, and fit with the patient engagement goal of the program.) On the other hand, if your practice hasn't yet taken on PCMH, CCM could be a stepping stone. Many primary care practices believe they're already doing many of the tasks that are meant to be compensated by CCM -- they're just not tracking them, and they haven't had a way to bill for them, either.  That last problem is expressly addressed by CCM -- the key is solving the former problem of tracking. EHR vendors vary dramatically in this area. Some have already created dedicated modules that allow for templates for clinical staff contacts to be tracked, and for the time to be calculated. Others

By |2022-01-01T22:51:58-08:00October 31st, 2015|
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