Implementing an electronic health records (EHR) or practice management (PM) software can be a game-changer for plastic surgeons. With the right setup and configuration, an EHR can provide valuable insights into the various aspects of your practice. In this blog post, we’ll explore six categories of quality implementations that can help you create good data and actionable reporting from your EHR.
Product categories
Your EHR/PM should be configured to capture data on your product categories, including surgical, non-surgical, retail, and non-retail items. You should be able to track sales by category, manage inventory by business unit, and review revenue by subcategory, such as gender, age, and brand. This information can help you optimize your sales and inventory processes to maximize revenue.
Appointment types and purposes
An EHR can help you track different types of appointments and their purposes, such as consultations, pre/post-op, and follow-up visits. You can configure your EHR to differentiate between revenue-generating appointments and follow-ups, which can provide valuable insight into your conversion rates. You should also be able to track outcomes for each appointment type to improve your patient experience.
Patient lifecycle and statuses
Tracking patient lifecycle and statuses, such as prospect, new patient, existing patient, and inactive, is essential for understanding where patients are in their journey. You should be able to review patients in multiple dimensions, such as the services they’re actively receiving and the services they’re inactive in. This information can help you identify why patients go inactive and how to improve your patient retention.
Effective ways of collecting payments
Different payment methods and payment types can impact your revenue and patient satisfaction. Your EHR should be able to track cash counts, credit card batch-outs, point reconciliation, and financing tools, and provide insight into how patients want to pay. Additionally, your EHR should enable payment deposits, remote payments, and automatic payments to streamline your payment collection processes.
Tracking lead sources
Knowing what works in terms of lead sources is critical for optimizing your marketing and outreach efforts. Your EHR should enable you to create primary and subcategories of lead sources, such as referrals, media, and social media, and track which sources are leading to the most returns. This information can help you identify which marketing channels to focus on and which campaigns are most effective.
Taxes
Managing taxes can be a complex and time-consuming process, especially if you have multiple locations or operate in different cities or states. Your EHR should be able to configure tax rates for different geographic areas and automatically capture taxable totals to simplify your tax reporting.
Each of the six segments discussed in this blog post plays a critical role in providing specific reporting that is necessary to run a successful business, regardless of whether it is a medical practice or not. The setup of these segments is paramount and should be approached with care.
For new practices, it is essential to choose an implementation team that can provide a strong standard to build upon. For existing practices, it is important to be open to best practices and configure the specifics based on your own experience and needs.
By properly configuring and tracking data in these six categories, an EHR/PM can produce valuable insights into your practice, allowing you to make informed decisions that can optimize your operations, improve your patient experience, and increase your revenue.
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog post, and we hope that it has provided you with valuable insights into how to create good data and actionable reporting in your plastic surgery practice.