Electronic Health Reporter

Guest post by Saqib Ayaz, co-founder, Workflow Optimization.

IT solutions are intended to making businesses more efficiently run and developed. In terms of medical practice, the business extends way beyond tending to patients only. Factors such as keeping both medical and billing record of patients, scheduling appointments that do not clash with each other, adhering to medical laws and regulations, and maintaining cross communication with patients as well as the support staff are central to smooth running of the medical practice.

The streamlining of these central factors among others constitutes “medical practice management” that is fueled and run consistently with the application of IT Solutions. These mainly include the usage of relevant software to help keep up with the daily operations; be it the medical activities or the administrative and support activities.

Some of the ways information technology solutions can help streamline your medical practice have been discussed in detail below.

Record Keeping

Higher the number of patients a medical practice tends to see, the trickier it is to keep up with the specific information and follow up instructions for them. IT solutions help manage the plethora of information ranging from medical record numbers to past medical prescriptions, medical tests history and health graph of specific patients. Employment of software such as the electronic health record help streamline these jobs, thereby making it easier to access detailed data regarding each patient.

Same goes for billing records. The best part about such software is their ability to converge different aspects of information about a patient at a single point, accessible through the patient’s medical record number prescribed by the practice.

Appointment Follow-Up

Without a streamlined resource of information, it would be increasingly difficult to keep up with appointments given to patients; increasing the chance that appointments overlap. With IT solutions centered at medical practice management, one of the aspects that have seen uplift and betterment is this one. With the click of a single key, the appointment slots taken and the ones still empty are displayed making it exponentially easier to schedule future appointments. Same holds true for follow up visits of the patients. Information about their previous visits and the gap between each visit are known to the medical practitioner, on the basis of which he decides when to book another appointment.

Communication

Communication is one aspect that is most affected by the employment of IT solutions; and positively so. Maintaining communication with patients to inform them of upcoming appointments and rescheduling any cancelled appointments is made easier with the help of individual medical record numbers that contain the contact information of each patient. Moreover, communication with the support and administrative staff is also expedited with the help of Information Technology that makes use of personal extensions and pagers. This is especially crucial in case of emergency patients, where you simply cannot rely on personal numbers of each doctor and the corresponding support staff.