Clinical Practice Doomsday?
It looks like the world may not end after all in a ball of fire or the ground opening up and swallowing everything above it. You are thankful that the Mayan High Priests may have been wrong all along or maybe it was just that something was lost in translation. Whatever may be the case, it increasingly looks like the Mesoamerican civilizations had the field of American Healthcare in mind when they predicted an apocalyptic event at the end of the long count calendar.
That is because in the past 10 years operating costs in medical practices have gone up by more than 50% while revenues have gone down by about 15%. With the gross fee-for-service collections, across the board for all specialities, going downhill it seems highly probable that one day posterity might learn about the medical profession from history books.
Light at the end of the tunnel
So, is there a ray of hope, a silver lining for medical practices? The answer fortunately is a resounding “yes”. And it is in the form of Clinical Practice Optimization using innovative IT products and implementing certain best practices within the clinical domain. For years now medical practices have been using disparate IT products to take care of uniquely distinguishable functions in a clinic.
And the business side of running a medical practice was at best a distraction, which the physician passed on to the clinic manager. But now that physician reimbursements themselves are being targeted in a bid to contain the pandemic of “escalating costs of healthcare”; it has sent many a care provider looking for means to stay profitable, or as it happens so in many cases, just to stay afloat.
Web-Enabled EHR as a Cure
Fortunately, the increasing pressure to reduce costs in healthcare have (as is predicted by classical economics) stimulated the growth of an industry to cater to the same. This is in the form of cloud based services or Software as a Service companies. These have revolutionized the way we perceive the IT framework underlying organizations and have reduced costs substantially while doing so.
While traditional EMRs were sizeable, almost clunky products based on a client-server architecture, modern EMRs or EHRs are becoming increasingly cloud-based, and incorporate the functionalities of disparate systems (like PMS, e-prescribing) within them. Even if you wish to handle these functions separately, modern EHRs, such as Practice Fusion allow you to do so, but within a framework of interoperability.
RCM Benefits of a Web-based EHR
One of the key deterrents in the use of an online claims submission system has been the costs associated with the usage of a clearinghouse. Subscription based, web-enabled, SaaS systems such as the Practice Fusion-Kareo combination come ingrained with a clearinghouse system, thus incurring no extra extravagant costs. Also, it has now been clearly established that 30% of claims submitted initially get rejected due to improper claims scrubbing, and more than 20% of the claims languish in A/R for more than 120 days, making them virtually uncollectable. These pitfalls are taken care of by functionalities present in systems such as Kareo. These systems have initial claims rejection rates of less than 3%.
Thus, it appears like subscription-based, web-enabled EHRs like Practice Fusion-Kareo could make the vital difference between the medical profession staying alive or kicking the bucket; or as the Mayans would have it, the end of everything as we know it.
