5 Signs Your Medical Office Needs Practice Management Support

Is your medical practice operating at the highest level, or are there things that could be improved? Your facility might be showing signs of a faltering practice management system for some time before you notice how severe the situation is. Just the combination of a few problems can seriously harm your practice's effectiveness. TempDev's NextGen Practice Management support can help you identify and correct these issues. In addition to new technology, the TempDev team will offer you training on ongoing practice management support. Within weeks, you will see a significant improvement in your operations and revenue cycle.

Signs of a declining practice management implementation include the following:

Practice Management Support with Credit Balances

Too many credit balances on your books indicate a gap in your system. These overpayments by patients or payors or user errors inflate your AR, which prevents you from making informed financial decisions about your practice. If you don't promptly make refunds, you may be in violation of your state's regulations, which can lead to fines and other legal action. You cannot afford to let this issue slide.

These credit balances can be caused due to improper billing, posting mistakes, incorrect insurance claims, and other preventable mistakes. Sometimes an excess of credit balances is caused by under-staffing, a lack of training, or a gap in the revenue cycle process. If you are overwhelmed by credit balances, the expert staff at TempDev can find the solution for you. They can help you with temporary biller staffing, reporting, or recommend the best NextGen EPM process for your practice. TempDev has a number of NextGen EPM tools that address credit balances, including:

• Custom business intelligence, Microsoft Power BI, or Microsoft SSRS report solutions that identify volume, the likelihood of issues, and for ongoing maintenance

• Automatically move balances around to fix issues

• NextGen Reason Code Library review and adjustments

• Custom workflow processes for approvals for refunds

• General ledger interface for refund processing post-app

Practice Management Support with Rejected Claims

A medical office lives and dies by claim reimbursement, either through Medicaid, Medicare, or a private insurance company. Prompt payment only happens when claims are submitted correctly and in a timely manner. A smoothly-run medical practice maximizes the number of clean claims upon initial submission. When your staff files a claim incorrectly, it can delay payment for months, something no practice can afford.

Insurance companies reject claims due to many preventable errors, such as incorrect provider, patient, and insurance company information. Incorrect or missing CPT and diagnostic codes are another common cause of rejected claims. On occasions, you might miss an insurance company's filing deadline, which means they won't reimburse you at all. Most of these costly mistakes can easily be avoided if you use the right tools.

TempDev recommends NextGen EPM Revenue Cycle Dashboard as a way to monitor rejected claims. This report lets you see how many rejected claims you have in a month or other time period as well as what denial codes the practice receives most often. Perhaps your claims lack information, indicating that your staff needs some remediation. In some cases, you may benefit from modifying your claim library to scrub issues before submitting charges. Once you understand what the problems are, you can take fast action to correct them and shorten your reimbursement time.

Extended Patient Wait Times

Patients hate to wait for long periods in your waiting area, no matter how many diversions you've provided. While wait times may be influenced by over-booking patients, they are also a result of bottlenecks in your patient processing. You might have a slow check-in process that keeps patients in line for ten or fifteen minutes before they even sit down. They may end up filling out repetitive forms or waiting to see a nurse or other practitioner before seeing the doctor. These delays lead to lower levels of patient satisfaction and can send some of them running to a different medical practice.

TempDev offers several NextGen EPM solutions for this issue. The NextGen EHR Patient Tracking Report is a helpful tool that identifies what is causing those patient bottlenecks. You can see average times for check-ins, time with staff, and waits for the provider. You can also see which providers and staff members may be challenged by time management and provide them with some meaningful feedback.

In addition, NextGen's recent acquisition of Medfusion means they now have a genuinely superior patient portal that shortens patient wait times and reduces the reams of paperwork. Plus, patients can take care of appointment scheduling and payments online at their convenience. They end up with more power and are happier with their overall experience.

If your practice has an overflowing waiting room and a steady stream of upset patients, the NextGen practice management support at TempDev can help.

Appointment Over- and Under-Booking

Booking the optimum number of patients is challenging for any practice. Too many patients contribute to those negative bottlenecks, but too few patients mean providers end up wasting time, which is terrible for morale and worse for your revenue. Even when your staff works hard to find this balance, patients are often wildcards. Sometimes they show up, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they reschedule at the last minute. You need advanced NextGen practice management reports or business intelligence to book appropriate appointment volume.

TempDev has several solutions to correct this appointment issue. The Appointment Analysis NextGen EPM Report gives you an in-depth analysis of patient appointments for the entire practice and individual providers. You can see how many appointments were kept and canceled for the month. You also view the number of no shows, that category that most hurts your practice. You can use the figures to spot trends of when and where the most appointments are missed and use this information as a starting point for provider and staff education.

The NextGen Patient Portal system allows patients to schedule easily and, when necessary, reschedule their appointments from wherever they are, which means fewer no shows. The convenience of this system enhances provider/patient communication and helps ensure patients attend their appointments.

Incomplete or Disorganized Patient Data

Incomplete and disorganized patient data are perhaps the most severe results of an unoptimized practice management system. Patient care is seriously compromised by incorrect or incomplete records. Providers cannot offer the best treatment without all the pertinent information. And your practice is vulnerable to legal action when mistakes are made due to these poor records.

These problems can arise from inadequate staff training, unoptimized software, and office under-staffing. Fortunately, TempDev can help you with all of these issues. Their staff of experienced NextGen consultants can analyze your practice and identify where the problems lie. Keeping patient records up-to-date and easily accessible is one of the most important practice tasks. TempDev can help improve your patient record keeping through data scrubbing, normalizing, or data conversions.

These five signs are sure indicators of needing NextGen practice management support in your facility. Your providers and other personnel might be outstanding, but if the implementation of the practice management is lacking, your practice will suffer. The TempDev team, along with NextGen products, can give you and your providers the NextGen support you need to optimize your patient satisfaction and financial return. Call them today and begin your practice transformation.