How satisfied and loyal do you think your patients are? In an era of increased competition, it’s of paramount importance that you nurture each patient and keep him or her satisfied with the services you provide. If you’re looking for one simple secret for boosting patient referrals, the ultimate answer is: make sure your existing patients stay happy and engaged.

Medical practices have more options these days to work more efficiently and save costs, particularly when it comes to the crucial software that underpins their operations. Your medical practice can work more nimbly and save money by switching over to a cloud-based electronic health record and practice management solution.

Information is power. The more useful and actionable information you can provide to your patients, the better off they will be because when the details sink in, you’ll be able to improve how you care for them. These days, patients have access to more health-related information than ever before thanks to databases connected to the internet and various websites from government, academia and the medical industry. Access to this store of knowledge doesn’t guarantee that patients will take advantage of it, though. And when patients do research on their own, they may wind up inadvertently relying on bogus information that could steer them wrong about treatments, medications and the very nature of diseases, injuries and other ailments.

The work that goes on behind the scenes to keep your organization’s computational infrastructure humming along may not always get the recognition it deserves. However, for all the good things your information technology department does for the organization, there may be some errors that need correcting. With that in mind, are you making these top five healthcare IT mistakes?

Whether you are still in the midst of preparing your medical practice to implement a new electronic health record software solution or have already made the leap and an EHR has been put in place, it’s important to verify that you are using the application to its full potential. The EHR application your decided to bring online at your facility is designed to help doctors, nurses and other medical professionals access patient information and add new details quickly and conveniently. Installing the software and integrating it with other systems is just the first step, of course. You’ll want to check that you are doing what’s needed to get the most out of the EHR. Here are three steps to take to ensure that your EHR software is fully optimized.

You never want to push your key staff members too hard. While you might get some temporarily impressive results in terms of how many patients are seen, burning the candle at both ends will wind up being a prescription for disaster.

Does your medical organization use a paper-based system to run the office and keep track of patient information? If so, you know that a change needs to come in the way you conduct daily business. After all, you are probably aware of the importance up upgrading your facility to use modern software designed specifically for taking care of electronic health records and streamlining practice management. If you are in the midst of making a case for the transition to the rest of your team or if you’ve been on the fence about switching over, read on for five big benefits of transitioning to an all-in-one EHR and PM cloud solution.

In a profession like medicine where there are so many unique terms and important phrases to use on a regular basis, doctors, nurses and others find themselves using acronyms to speed up communication.

While you may not have gotten into the medical business primarily to make money and are more focused on patient care and improving the general health of your community, it would be nice to have appropriate business processes in place to help you keep the lights on. Factors that are difficult or impossible to control for include the local economy, the demographics you serve and the current state of the insurance industry. What you can do, though, is make changes in your organization that will lead to a better flow of payments. With that in mind, here are medical billing tips to help boost your practice’s revenue.

Efficiency should be the name of the game at your medical practice, but not at the expense of giving patients less time and attention, of course. Areas where you can make up the time include patient communications with staff, issuing lab results and carrying out data entry. For many busy medical practices that already have set up electronic health record software, adding a patient portal to the mix is an ideal way to streamline common procedures and save both staff and patients a lot of time and effort. If you have been on the fence about using an EHR and a portal, read on for three ways patient portals can improve your practice’s efficiency.