Streamlining Your Mental Health Business With Practice Automation

The future of practice automation with a patient focus

There’s a story told about the mightiest army in ancient Sparta. This particular group of warriors was so effective and powerful that their enemies would often surrender before battles even began. Amazed by this fighting unit’s success, the king summoned the general to learn what made his army different from all others.

The general’s answer was simple: all five of the captains in his army were brothers from the same family. Because of their close bond, they communicated perfectly with each other and could anticipate each other’s decisions. So even while engaging in different parts of a chaotic battle, they operated as one.

The same can be said for modern office software for mental health professionals. There are hundreds of impressive products on the market. Some help with billing, others with charting, but cobbling them together on different platforms severely limits their effectiveness. It’s only when a single software family is integrated across all aspects of your practice that you truly experience their full workflow benefits. This achievement is called practice automation.

The AdvancedMD cloud suite is designed to bring this kind of unity to your mental health office, automating many of your manual healthcare-related processes and sending your efficiency through the roof. It also dramatically improves your patients’ journey, making it easier than ever for them to book appointments, get reminders, send you messages, submit refill requests, track their lab results and pay their bills.

The result: higher patient satisfaction, improved healthcare and more patient referrals.

When your front office, clinical, billing & administration are synced on the same platform, many of the manual steps become a thing of the past.

Back-end support for your front office

Just as the saying goes: “the rising tide lifts all boats,” the AdvancedMD software suite acts as the rising tide for your practice. All the different aspects of your work will be lifted as well.

Before your patients can be treated, there are hoops to be jumped through. And for patients to enjoy continuity of care and pay their bills, there are even more hoops to navigate. Rather than shouldering these burdens yourself, use integrated cloud practice tools that allow patients to conveniently complete the tasks on their own.

There are few things in life that are truly win-win, but this is one of them. Patients love the online scheduling and paperless intake process (no more old clipboards with copies of barely legible forms). You simply auto-assigns forms to patients prior to their visit, which they complete at their own convenience. The documents then upload directly to patient electronic records, with no scanning or data entry required. It saves precious time, offers more thorough histories, including family histories, and is actually enjoyable for patients.

What about insurance verification? Well, waiting on hold with insurance companies probably isn’t your favorite hobby. By processing insurance verification electronically, you’ll know coverage & deductible amounts ahead of time – just in the nick of time – preventing insurance headaches at the front desk.

Of course, every mental health professional knows that scheduling an appointment is entirely different from keeping an appointment. A patient portal is designed to increase patient satisfaction while alleviating administrative tasks for your staff. Your patients will feel more connected creating higher patient satisfaction and retention rates. AdvancedReminders sends personalized text, email and phone messages automatically, in English or Spanish, at intervals you select: a month, a week or a day prior to the appointment.

Most importantly, with AdvancedMD you get confirmations back. You can view all the confirmed appointments in one place, making it easier to manage your time and improve efficiency. And the scheduler tool is an excellent solution for the ever-changing patient lineup of a mental health professional. You’ll get a flexible and configurable scheduler that finds open appointments and keeps your day running smoother.

According to one study, nearly half of a doctor’s time is spent on EHR and deskwork. And the documentation requirements are so demanding that it often takes another hour or two after work each day to finish entering data.¹ Ugh.

To make your life easier, AdvancedMD has introduced a groundbreaking EHR solution engineered for the specific workflow of mental health physicians. It consolidates hundreds of screens’ worth of charting information and surfaces them into a concise practice dashboard that shows all your workflow elements in a single location, for a remarkably convenient way to manage tasks. The dashboard gives you a mini schedule snapshot with one-click drilldowns to the patient chart. You can capture charges, check patients in and out, mark a no-show and manage rooming. And your messages and tasks are prominently displayed in a familiar “in-box” layout.

Only through practice automation can so many data values be intelligently combined into a single dashboard. The visual portrayal of your smart practice is the “donut,” which is a graphical element for your most commonly performed tasks that visualizes your completed and outstanding items to better organize your day. Simply mouse-over a donut and you’ll get real-time visibility into what’s outstanding. Click to drill-down into specific tasks that need to be done next. Most mental health professionals spend the bulk of their time doing things like developing treatment plans, tracking patient progress, making referrals, completing outstanding notes, completing charge slips, and managing interoffice and patient messages. And all your tasks are prominently displayed with real-time data so you can easily see what to do next.

Many mental health professionals experience high patient volume and turnover, so AdvancedMD offers specialty-specific tools to help manage new patients. To streamline medication reconciliation with patients, there’s a medication import on the chart and we can connect and import current meds up to a year back. And manually inputting lab results is a thing of the past, as AdvancedMD can connect with any compatible lab.

EHR features also help you with MACRA and MIPS compliance. AdvancedMD has integrated tracking to help automate and simplify the complexities of regulatory requirements. Specific clinical workflow for mental health gives you a faster way to capture patient data, so you spend more time treating patients and less time fussing with charts.

Better billing makes everybody’s lives easier

Billing is one of those great unifiers in life. It doesn’t matter your age, gender, race, or religion, you probably hate managing claims and denials. So it’s no wonder that more than 50% of doctors say patient payment collection is their biggest revenue cycle concern.²

For patients, the billing process can be even more frustrating. One survey reports that 61% of patients find their medical bills confusing.³ This results in slower payments, with practices sending an average of three statements before receiving payment. And if you turn the bill over to a collection agency, you’ll recover just $15.77 for every $100 owed.³ Ouch.

The most comprehensive way for you as a mental health professional to improve your billing is to automate it. With AdvancedMD, billing tools are unified within your practice suite (EHR, online charge slips, etc.). Charge data transfers automatically and accurately from the clinical side to the billing side of your practice without cumbersome data entry. Working in conjunction with your other practice software tools, this system centralizes your process for large groups with multiple providers and locations, bringing more efficient claims management and billing. It’s the easiest way to achieve financial transparency and peer-to-peer benchmarking for all your operations.

For patients, AdvancedMD billing and patient portal technologies offer a convenient and highly intuitive way to self-manage EOBs and payments. Patients can securely view their bills online, then pay with a credit card. There’s even a way to set-up automatic recurring payments. The bill’s clarity and ease of payment mean more prompt payments from patients. And it doesn’t stop there, because patients who are highly satisfied with the billing process are twice as likely to recommend their physician to their friends⁴ and in turn, will hopefully post positive feedback online.

“The money I have invested in AdvancedMD is miniscule compared to the return. I have never been more efficient — ever — in my professional life as I am now.” —Jed Shay, MD

In addition to streamlining the billing process for both patients and your practice, an integrated software suite with a portal helps patients feel informed and involved in their own care. For example, secure, HIPAA-compliant communications enable your patients to message your office to ask questions or request an appointment. Patients can even book an onsite or telemedicine appointment online, based on your availability. You’re freed up by the significant decrease in patient phone calls, and you can quickly respond to messages or process appointment requests.

And the communication goes both ways, which is great news for mental health professionals. If you need to message your patients, you can quickly set the recipient criteria for DOS, CPT, ICD and patient name, then relay messages.

According to research, telehealth appointments for mental health patients decreased cancellations from 34 percent to 24 percent, & no shows from 19 percent to five percent.⁵

For a growing number of mental health patients, telemedicine is part of the communication they value. Studies show that telehealth is particularly successful for mental health patients, some of whom are avoidant to in-person appointments.⁵ The nature of the technology makes it easier for patients to express themselves and share emotionally difficult information than during office interactions. The fear of social rejection is also reduced by the relative anonymity of the computer.

When integrated with your front office tools, telemedicine scheduling is as simple as a checkbox. This in turn triggers automated patient reminders that include clear login instructions. Your sessions simply begin with you clicking the “start” button from the EHR, which can be done from any location on Earth that has an Internet connection and a camera. Another boon to your bottom line is AdvancedMD can automatically capture an online credit card payment if you wish to charge patients for virtual telemedicine visits.

With telemedicine you can also help improve patient care with a population health solution like HealthWatcher™ that is totally customizable for variables like age, gender and diagnosis, and allows you to follow up on treatment plans for patients with ongoing needs. You can personalize the patient experience and automatically send your medical advice to patients, helping them adhere to healthcare best practices. Appointment reminders can be automatically triggered for any other continuity-of-care program you’re trying to manage with patients. Likewise, since AdvancedMD offers a complete integrated suite of cloud solutions, all notes taken on the telemedicine visit are automatically updated within the EHR. This saves lots of time and reduces errors.

Conclusion

Practice automation with a unified platform is the fastest, easiest way to reduce the workload in your office. The beauty of our easy-to-use solutions is that while they’re relieving your administrative headaches, they’re simultaneously boosting your patient engagement and revenue.

Call us today to talk about how we can help you further improve the lives of your patients by dedicating more of your time to patient care.

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