What Do You Need to Consider for Any Practice Management Software?

At a basic level, any practice management software must help a healthcare practitioner bill their patient for a session they have completed. This seems obvious. But it’s the start of our journey in terms of understanding the general practice management options available to healthcare practitioners.

For the sake of brevity, let’s just list the core features for any billing software. In our opinion, at a minimum, these should be:

• Generating an Invoice or Claim for a Session. A further note on this item will be in terms of how easy it is to generate this invoice or claim, and whether this is easily linked to the relevant patient appointment.
• Making an Appointment and Sending Appointment Reminders to Clients. This means that you can see the appointment on your primary calendar that you use (which is normally linked to your email), and your clients can get this appointment request and then be reminded of this appointment.
• Allocating Payments for Invoices. This means being able to easily see what appointments are not paid, and then allocating a payment to the invoice when it is received.
• Submitting Invoices or Claims to Medical Aid or Health Insurance Companies. This means being to submit an invoice or claim so that you can get paid by the medical aid or health insurance companies. This can be as simple as an email to the company, or can be more complicated in terms of using specific channels to submit the claims. This often implies that the claims to these companies are paid for separately, and is normally on a per claim or per invoice basis.
• Tracking and Managing All Unpaid Accounts. Healthcare practitioners hate tracking and asking their patients for outstanding payments that are due. You need a software that makes this process easier to manage, and can be as simple as just defined rules that get triggered when the outstanding invoice is due.
• Dashboards and Reporting. You need to be aware of different aspects of your private practice, such as number of sessions per month, invoices generated and payments received. The software you choose must be able to provide this easily for you.

Practice Management Software Globally :: A Short History Review

We are familiar with the history of medical billing software in South Africa. This is our origin. Over the years, we have evolved to look at many types of healthcare practitioners and other geographical areas. Still, we have always stuck to our core mission and values, which are to make software and solutions that are easy to use and cost-effective for healthcare professionals in private practice.

Over 10 years ago, almost all medical billing software in South Africa, was desktop based. In our experience, the exception was NetPractice, who seemed to cater mainly for medical aid related claims. But the other larger software companies such as HealthBridge, Medemass, Made to Measure, GoodX, MedEdi and Panacea only seemed to have a desktop based version of their software. This was problematic since most healthcare practitioners (especially younger ones) were very familiar and comfortable with their smartphones and wanted a solution that worked on these devices. Another interesting trend was that Apple laptops were becoming more common. So, if you wanted a medical billing software, you either needed a Windows based laptop or you needed to install virtual machine solutions such as Parallels, VMWare or Virtualbox to run on your Apple Macbook so that you can process your daily invoices. In our experience, we have not seen any healthcare practitioner with this type of computer setup. It is very technical and too complicated for the task at hand.