Hospital and facility-based medical specialists are the fastest-growing specialties in medicine. The biggest subset of the mobile medicine trend is hospitalists, a new mainstream breed of modern healthcare practitioners who bridge the gap between traditional medical offices and stationary clinics.
Due to their unique multi-facility roles and responsibilities, hospitalists require robust and highly specialized software and services including rounding-based practice management systems with workflows that improve the quality and efficiency of their patient care, administrative burdens, and diverse workloads.
Apart from satisfying statutory compliance and improving the opportunity for higher-quality patient care, investing in a new hospitalist practice management system has never been more critical to revenue generation and time management.
There is never enough time so maximizing what is available is of the highest importance and utilizing business operation and productivity software designed for office-based physicians means a lot of inefficiencies. And even a 1% change in coding optimization can create a
10-15% change in bottom line revenue and every year hospitalists lose an average of 13-23k in missed or erroneous billing issues, so specialized end-to-end data flow with intelligent feedback looks is paramount for maximizing the bottom line.
So the key question is, how well are you currently doing, and do you need a new practice management system considering that upgrading your current one comes with an initial investment and time consideration?
Let’s find out. This article will outline the top 11 reasons for investing in a new hospitalist practice management system in 2022.
Reduce Operating Costs
According to a 2021 Forbes article outlining three critical tips for reducing business costs, investing in hyper-efficient hospitalist practice management software is an excellent way of reducing business expenses.
By automating routine and mundane tasks, a hospitalist can greatly reduce their time investment and operating expenditure and effectively manage their critical workflows, key organizational elements, and unavoidable administrative burdens.
An effective modern practice management system for hospital physicians reduces the exponential costs associated with stacking inefficiencies, which in turn positively affects your monthly profitability.
Not only that, while the upfront costs and time expenditures of implementing a new hospitalist practice management system are assumed to be high, that is an outdated myth as the modern versions designed specifically for hospitalists are now often cheaper than the general systems for doctors as a whole, and the new versions come available as an all-in-one or modular solution.
Also read: Artificial Intelligence In Healthcare: How it is Changing the Industry
Enhance Data Security
Patient data security and management is a sensitive topic that you must seriously consider, as failure to adequately protect patient data security may expose you to lawsuits and fines. Besides the financial consequences of weak data security, the more systems and pieces in place sharing data, the more risk you are exposed to.
A single, secure, cloud-based practice management software with a built-in note generator, charge capture, smart census, practical reporting, and integrated workflow reduces the data vulnerabilities where systems meet. Robust data security features include personalized authentication, next-gen access controls, state-of-the-art data encryption, and continual data auditing through both AI and human channels.
Improve Patient Care
Better practice management for hospitalists has been linked to helping improve patient care through several indirect variables addressed in multiple private case studies. For example, better organization and reduced charting and billing burdens mean more time available for patient visits, resulting in better interactions and diagnoses. Not only does more face time with the doctor improve patient satisfaction surveys but seems to reduce readmission rates and improve a doctor’s overall quality of care rankings.
Enhance Billing
Time and revenue are the two biggest reasons to switch, and revenue is primarily related to the quality of your billing workflow and RCM services.
The billing process for services rendered is designed by insurance companies to maximize profits on their end and is long, complicated, and prone to errors. Investing in a strong hospitalist practice management system with robust claim processing and built-in machine learning for catching and addressing mistakes as well as missing data points can be the difference between the success and failure of practice.
Hospitalists do the work of seeing the patients and should be paid for that work, not lose out on significant percentages due to a complex post-service payment process.
Efficient Documentation
Hospitalists, like all healthcare professionals, use and generate documents, charts, notes, and progress updates daily. Charting is a huge burden and hospitalists often require using a separate EHR to chart which then has to be transferred to the facility EHR.
Modern hospitalist PM systems offer solutions with integrations that connect the app on your phone or iPad to the facility software systems, allowing you to chart or generate notes on the go, utilize custom templates based on common or uncommon situations, and easily document anything and everything in a shorter amount of time and have it sync to the hospital systems.
Improve Peer-to-Peer Ratings
Quality ratings, peer rankings, and coding efficiency on a local, state, or national level by specialty are all ways in which doctors compare their efficiency, productivity, and outcomes.
By outperforming peers, hospitalists are able to set themselves apart while reaping the secondary rewards of setting better performance standards and achieving new hospital contracts with more discerning or reputable inpatient or step-down care facilities.
State-of-the-art PM software systems designed for hospitalist rounding offer the means of improving ratings and rankings by analyzing KPIs, end-to-end revenue intelligence, efficiency models, and comparable reporting across local or national levels to showcase not only what is working but what needs to be improved and how such improvements can be accomplished.
The end result is not just bragging rights with your peers within the specialty but practical long-term measurable career improvements and revenue growth.
Streamline Decision Making
A solid hospitalist practice management system is vital in streamlining the decision-making process. The practice management system will arrange the census, patient medical data, histories, demographics, care coordination overlaps, and other key information in an easy and accessible format, allowing you to make better and more accurate medical decisions in shorter periods of time while on the move from patient to patient.
In the same breath, the curation and integration of vital business data into a modern practice management system allows hospitalists, practice managers, and owners to make highly efficient and better business decisions. Access to real-time integrated financial analytics, transparent claims management, compensation management across RVU and other custom formulas, and coordinated care scheduling reports offer critical advantages.
Also read: Best 10 Healthcare Analytics Companies in the World
Reduce Errors
One of the primary functions of every workflow and quality control measure in a high-tech hospitalist practice management system is to reduce errors. Technology offers so many ways to proactively identify issues in real-time and offer solutions, suggestions, or fixes. When combined with highly-specialized ceiling and account teams, revenue losses as a result of errors are a problem of the past for modern hospitalists.
Plus, in the healthcare environment, mistakes are not only costly financially and to rankings but can be severely detrimental to a patient’s health. An integrated practice management system uses sophisticated programs to highlight and resolve issues based on pattern data, historical analyses, and contextual encounter information before they get to the problematic phase.
Improve Productivity
Productivity means different things to different doctors. Doing the same workload faster, freeing up time, seeing more patients in the same amount of time, generating higher revenue, ranking higher than your peers, having more time with patients, having a better work-life balance, time away from work for family or hobbies, etc.
All of these come down to efficiency. Since time is a limited resource you cannot generate a higher amount, you have to utilize it more effectively. And revenue is not determined by a single factor but by multiple variables that rank from high priority to low.
From census management to AI-enhanced automation of administrative workload burdens to streamlined workflows to better backend support, a top-tier hospitalist practice management app-based platform will systematically address every facet of your daily responsibilities and the
improvements will seem to work backward by generating the highest improvements in the short term and then generating consistent small gains over time by shifting from the top-level key performance indicators that are an absolute necessity to master to the hundreds of smaller metrics that stack into additional big gains.
Conclusion
Although it carries the perception of being time and capital-intensive to either start or switch to a modern PM system for your rounding and hospitalist practice needs, the ROI can generate massive efficiency gains with direct attributable extra hours and higher paychecks. Just make sure to invest in a proper platform designed for mobile performance and inpatient medicine to take full advantage of the role of advanced technology in the current hospital and facility-based medical environment.
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