How would you assess the overall quality of your medical practice? No one sets out to develop a merely average medical group, but some practices will do better than others for a variety of reasons. Statistically speaking, if you have a number of outstanding medical organizations, there will be a similar number that are below average. You do your best to recruit the most talented and knowledgeable medical professionals and they all receive ongoing training to keep themselves sharp and abreast of the latest best practices when it comes to health care. That’s standard operating procedure for practices, of course. Where you distinguish yourself in the market is in bettering the patient experience as well as the working conditions for your staff.

Your medical practice obviously relies on the timely paying of claims. In order to keep the lights on, you can’t afford to make mistakes or remain committed to an older way of doing things (submitting claims by paper instead of digitally). Sometimes a medical practice hasn’t switched over to modern software because no one in the organization has pointed out how many errors the team has been making lately, or the realized the number of delayed payments caused because a form wasn’t filled out properly.

Prescription medications are such an integral part of the healing process that it can be easy for medical practice managers to run on autopilot when it comes to how we prescribe drugs and get them refilled. The traditional paper pad of prescriptions is becoming part of ancient medical history as more hospitals, practices, clinics and other medical facilities make the transition to e-prescribing. Electronic prescriptions are convenient for all concerned parties, from medical organization managers, nurse practitioners and physicians to the patients whose lives they seek to improve. If you’ve been sitting on the fence about making the switch to electronic prescriptions, there’s no time like the present to learn more about the benefits.

We all want our medical practices to run as efficiently as possible. Countering human error with software solutions that eliminate repetition is a great way to get started with boosting efficiency. Currently, many medical organizations force employees to handwrite or type in pertinent patient data, and this is a time-consuming process that is subject to errors. In fact, if your workers are already feeling stressed out about entering data, their efforts to type faster may have the reverse effect of slowing them down because they have to correct mistakes so often.

Savvy medical practice managers know how important it is to remain current on nationwide economic developments that could affect the bottom line of their medical practice.

Your practice is successful, even thriving, and you have the financial wherewithal to resume hiring new people for the team. Before you make a commitment, you and your HR staff likely have some key metrics to look out for as you analyze each potential recruit. Whether you are on the hunt for a new doctor, nurse or scheduler for your front office staff, there are some universal traits in people that are good to keep in mind when making hiring decisions. Here are five traits to look for as you narrow the HR hunt down to the most promising candidates.

How much time, energy and money is your medical organization devoting toward boosting patient engagement? If you’re not sure of how much you’re expending, you won’t be able to figure out if you are getting the best return on your investment.

By now, we’ve all had some time to get some experience in using the new ICD-10 codes, the latest version of the International Classification of Diseases code set, which the U.S. government mandated medical practices must switch to last October. Today with more than 68,000 billing codes the complexity has increased more than ever before. With ICD-11 codes officially in effect as of January 2022, the number of codeable terms has increased to 120,00! The latest ICD codes are much more specific and are designed to streamline healthcare record keeping and billing. Since the deadline to transition to ICD-10 has just recently occurred, it’s not unusual for people to still be unfamiliar with all the new codes.

Despite their noble calling, practitioners of the healing arts require compensation in a timely manner just like everyone else. In order to get paid on time, however, medical practices must keep on top of their billing practices. Using solutions such as revenue cycle management software and third party billing firms can help boost your medical practice to the next level. The more your organization grows, the more you can stand to benefit from using specialized software tools and working with medical claims experts.

As any owner or manager of a healthcare organization can tell you, running a successful medical practice is not without its challenges. How you respond to these difficulties (or avoid dealing with them) can dramatically influence the future of your business. No matter how problematic things get, such as a marked decline in patient satisfaction rates, a feeling among staff that they have too much busywork to complete each day or excessive employee turnover, there are steps you can take to right the situation and get back on course. With that in mind, here are some tips on how to overcome these top practice management challenges.