Medical practice software can keep your office running smoothly by speeding up billing, improving scheduling, and keeping you in compliance with a minimum of effort. It takes many tasks off your plate so you have time to concentrate on growing your business and providing the best possible healthcare to your patients. If you haven’t yet taken advantage of all that medical practice software has to offer, know that it can simplify your operations through a cloud-based system that gives you management tools you might never have dreamed possible.
What Is Medical Practice Software?
In essence, practice management software runs the business side of your healthcare company. It schedules patients and sends out reminders. It generates reports so you have up-to-date information at your fingertips about everything from finances to staff productivity. It streamlines billing so you maximize your revenue and spend less time managing invoices and tracking down payments.
Practice management software also offers calendar functions that allow you to get faster no-show or cancellation notifications so you don’t lose time or revenue. You can empower your staff to be more efficient with better task creation and management, and your patients will appreciate improved, accurate communication that meets their needs while streamlining practice operations for you and keeping you in compliance at all times.
How Much Does Practice Management Software Cost?
Costs can vary a great deal depending on the package you buy. The more robust the system and the bigger your practice, the greater the cost, but in general you can expect to pay between $350 and $1,000 for cloud-based management software.
What Determines Price?
Prices are based on three key factors: whether the software is on-site or cloud-based, the size of the practice, and what the software can do for you.
On-Site vs Cloud-Based
For the very largest medical practices, it has been common to host on-site, but this is becoming increasingly cost-inefficient even for large, established healthcare providers. For nearly everyone else, a cloud-based system is far more economical than hosting on-site. That’s because of the complexity involved in hosting an on-premises system.
Even for a large practice, investing in the resources needed to run, maintain, and protect such sophisticated software on-site can be cost-prohibitive. Cloud-based software systems have lowered prices considerably and put these systems within the price range of even small medical practices.
The Size of a Practice
Naturally, the larger the practice, the greater the cost of medical practice software solutions. Larger practices will have more complex needs, greater amounts of data to collate and safeguard, and more users who need access to the system on a regular basis. These issues, plus a greater demand for bandwidth and speed, require more to maintain.
What the Software Can Do
Perhaps the biggest issue related to cost is what the software can actually do for you. Inexpensive systems may only offer some of the features you need. Lower-cost systems could, in the end, do little more than offer automated versions of what you used to do with paper, requiring staff to sign in at multiple locations and waste steps throughout the process. These cheaper systems also struggle to handle a larger load of patients and system users.
The best systems can scale up as your practice grows and offer both health records management that keeps you HIPPA compliant and practice management options that keep you efficient and flexible. Medical practice software makes life easier for staff, helping them work more efficiently and taking on many of the day-to-day business and paperwork chores so you’re free to concentrate on what you do best: providing the best medical care.
What Practice Management Software Doesn’t Cost
As important as it is to consider the cost of any software, it’s perhaps even more important to understand what this software doesn’t cost you. In other words, where is it maximizing your revenue so you aren’t having to pay out in other areas?
It Lowers Maintenance and Security Costs
If you’re not using the best cloud-based practice management software, then you alone are responsible for encryption, backup, disaster recovery, and server maintenance. You have high IT costs, either maintaining your own staff at all times or hiring IT professionals able to deal with HIPAA-compliant systems at premium hourly rates. If you’re not keeping up with all of this, you’re leaving yourself and your patients’ private information open to risk.
It Lowers Marketing Costs
When you work with professionals in medical digital marketing, you get access to practice management software that integrates with marketing and lead generation. You can see and reach each person all the way from the moment you get their lead to the moment they become a repeat customer, allowing you to offer more efficient and customized service.
The system takes on many of your email and SMS marketing chores, follows up on your efforts, tracks and reports new opportunities, and even allows you to set up VIP offers to reward your loyal patients for return visits. Use the system to remind patients when they still have insurance benefits they can take advantage of before year’s end and make it easy for staff to help potential patients move through the education cycle.
It Lowers Staff Costs
When you have management software automatically doing your scheduling and reminders, that’s one less task for staff to take on. The same is true when it comes to generating and tracking invoices. Your existing staff can be put to better, more efficient use in face-to-face customer service that generates more revenue, and you have fewer staffing needs with automation taking care of much of the grunt work.
It Lowers No-Show/Cancellation Losses
When patients don’t show up and don’t tell you about it, everyone loses. Other patients lose out on the opportunity to get the medical care they need. You lose a window of time where you could have served someone else and generated revenue for your practice. Medical management software sets automatic reminders that get sent to patients, reducing the number of forgotten appointments. The software also makes it easy and convenient for patients to respond and then registers that response, so you know early when an appointment opens up due to a cancellation.
Even better, why not use a system that automatically contacts patients on a waiting list to let them know of last-minute cancelations? That keeps you running efficiently and your patients happy.
It Improves Patient Experience
Imagine software that can automatically register when you need to call a patient for a follow-up conversation at the moment you’re inputting information about the appointment they’ve just had. Now, how much better would it be if that software could alert you regularly about when to make those calls and provide you with instant access to all the patient’s information when you’re ready to do so?
Not only does this save time for you and your staff, but it makes for an excellent patient experience. Satisfied patients are loyal and keep giving you their business.
It Shortens the Billing Lag
With the right software, your patients get immediate receipt of their bills, cutting down on wasted time while invoices are prepared and sent out. And since patients are getting their bills at the same time as their service, everything is fresh in their minds, meaning it’s far less likely they’ll forget all about it.
It Improves Collections
When you’re sending out bills regularly, it’s easy for some to slip through the cracks. After all, billing isn’t really your primary job. You and your staff are skilled healthcare professionals, not accountants. Research by organizations like McKinsey & Co reveals that many thousands of revenue dollars are lost to a medical practice every year simply by failure to remember to bill and follow up on each bill. For some practices, this one issue along could easily offset the entire yearly cost of medical practice software.
What the Best Software Can Offer
At Crystal Clear Digital Marketing, we’re proud to offer the very best medical practice management software, fully integrated with your marketing efforts and driven by three key goals: Find Patients, Serve Patients, and Keep Patients!
Our software automates 85% of your marketing and patient education, allowing you to provide an excellent customer experience while freeing up your time to focus on what you’re best at.
In addition to all the features you’d expect, like billing modules, robust scheduling features, recurring memberships, and HIPAA compliant documentation and storage, our software also offers:
- Package tracking
- Document and photo storage
- Social media marketing
- Online reviews and surveys
- Patient tracking through a visit
- Task management for staff
- Scheduling for practices with multiple locations
- Referral tracking
- Financial reports
- Conversion reports
- Productivity reports
Lower Your Costs With the Best Practice Management Software
Visit Crystal Clear Digital Marketing today and find out how we can be your practice’s marketing and business solution in a fast-paced digital world. Stay competitive, save money, and grow your business with the right digital partner and our Social Patient Center. We can help you streamline operations, maximize revenue, become more efficient, and offer the best possible patient experience.
