Due to versatile demands of the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies, medical establishments of all scales are facing massive administrative pressure. This also brings constraints due to various levels of bureaucracy.
Such situations deprive doctors of their job satisfaction of providing quality medical care, since they often have to restrain themselves to stringent regulations. These regulations and administrative stresses do not encourage innovation in healthcare research and ingenious treatment options, due to the associated risks involved.
This results in personalized patient care slowly losing its priority in the modern healthcare scenario. Here are a few common administrative burdens of practice management that practitioners face currently, which an efficient practice management system can alleviate:
Staff Responsibilities
Nowadays, hospitals and small clinics are hiring more professionals for various administrative and support functions. This results in the development of new job profiles and staff roles in hospitals and clinics. For example, there are billing departments now that take care of the finances, returns and reimbursements of the practice. Medical billing is a highly sensitive procedure that requires careful consideration of minute facts to construct error-free reports for reimbursements.
Additionally, there are other sections like business operations, patient accounting, information technology and managed care administration. These departments add to the responsibilities of the HR in personnel management, training, etc.
Increased Paper Work
Prior authorization forms constitute a major part of the administrative paperwork that lie on the desks of practitioners. These are prerequisites for introduction of new drugs or procedures in hospitals or medical establishments. There are several advantages of prior authorization to payment makers, which include improved treatment efficiency, lowered costs and enhanced patient safety.
However, the long-drawn documentations demand immense commitment and time from physicians, thus preventing them from concentrating on interactive patient care.
Information Technology Requirements
A heavy influx of data follows with each patient; it has become imperative for healthcare practitioners to abandon the traditional on-paper methods of maintaining patient records, appointments, scheduling, inventory details, etc. They have to switch to more efficient and technologically advanced software systems.
These require compatible and expensive hardware investments that also take up a lot of physical space in a medical establishment. Moreover, these software systems require detailed knowledge of medical codes, which can only be provided by specially trained IT professionals.
Most doctors understand that these needs are overwhelming for medical establishments of small or medium scale. Therefore, they to choose to outsource these to reliable medical practice management software companies or medical billing service providers.
Drainage of Resources
With so many employees in various departments, salary administration and maintenance of various facilities for employee satisfaction becomes voluminous. It takes up a large portion of the profits and other resources of the office such as electricity, space, workstations, etc.
Instead, these resources can be redirected to provide better facilities for the patients. For example, improved emergency rooms, nursing staff, comfortable waiting facilities, ambulances, etc. can be introduced. Such enhancements help attract more patients, and hence revenues, due to the elevated quality of healthcare provided.
To streamline your practice management system, or to learn more, contact us.