Four reporting features your PM needs

Practice Management systems provide numerous benefits to medical practices. They help improve revenue cycles with features such as payer rules intelligence, streamline operations and promote engagement through patient portals.

The true power Practice Management systems reside in their ability to report well. Generating reports on practice operations can reveal performance trends and show areas that need improvement. However, when it comes to reporting, not all PM systems are equal.

Here are four characteristics that your PM must contain if you would like to generate reports that help you stay on top of your finances.

Customizable: Every PM software has its own set of reports which you should be able to access in a matter of a few clicks. However, the best PM systems allow users to create customized reports that show what you want to see. Some of the performance metrics that you would want to track are:

·         Gap between date-of-service and date billed

·         Time-of-data-entry per patient

·         Time-of-data-entry per encounter

·         Overall percentage of claims denied

·         Average life of denials and no-response incidents

User-friendly: You must remember, creating customizable reports will be of no benefit if it is a stress to use them. Reporting should be easy to read and understandable. Data should be able to be filtered easily through important categories like provider, location, date, payer and procedures. If you spend less time finding the information you need, you will have more time to attend to your patients.

Exportable in multiple formats: The reports from the Practice Management system should be exportable in multiple formats depending on each user’s preference and their mode of viewing the information. Some famous exportable report formats are PDF, CSV and XLS.

Remotely accessible: Another important feature to have is to be able to access the reports remotely from anywhere. Physicians and employees in your practice should be able to work from home whenever they want. An ideal fit for such are cloud-based PM systems, which are really convenient to access.