How to Streamline a Dental Practice Using an Integrated EHR/Practice Management System
Charles Settles | April 7, 2015
Dentists today have a variety of technology available to help streamline their practices. Choosing the right practice management, electronic dental records, and supporting medical software systems can be the difference between profitability and failure.
Estimated start-up costs for a new practice can range from $250,000 to over $1 million, depending on where the practice will be located and whose numbers are referenced. Regardless of the exact figure, costs are rising. Unfortunately, the rising cost of doing business does not appear to translate into increased income for dentists; according to a 2012 brief from the ADA, dentists’ earnings have remained relatively flat since 2009, despite the recovery of the general economy. What, then, are dentists to do to reduce costs?
The answer? Automation.
When was the last time you measured the amount of time your front desk spends each day manually calling patients to remind them of upcoming appointments? How long, on average, did it take you to receive payments after sending out paper invoices? How many minutes, on average, does it take you to document patient encounters on paper charts? Ignore specifics—if you’re still doing any of these things, the answers are too long or too many.
Here at TechnologyAdvice, almost every day we speak with dentists who are tired of manual, paper-based processes. More often still, we speak with dentists who are trying to manage their offices with four or more software systems, none of them integrated. These dentists come to us for help in choosing the right software that will help their businesses grow. Most are familiar with common practice management, dental records, and scheduling systems from Dentrix, Dolphin, and Carestream, but few are familiar with how these systems actually work, and, more importantly, how to make them work together.
As Dr. Zaidi reported in Inside Dentistry last year, “Payment for dental services is shifting from commercial dental insurance to public coverage and personal out-of-pocket payments.” The uncertainty caused by these shifts is causing many dentists to delay retirement, even as new dental schools are opening and thousands of new graduates enter the marketplace each year. As a result, increased competition and diminishing reimbursement levels are forcing dentists to look for ways to maximize efficiency. Choosing an integrated electronic health record (EHR), practice management, and billing system is one way to increase efficiency, and, if implemented in the cloud, to do so with nominal cost.
The benefits of integrated systems are numerous:
● No duplicate data entry
● Reduced software costs (when compared to buying separate systems)
● No expensive custom development to get different systems to sync
● One system for your employees to learn
● Information flows seamlessly between systems
There are a myriad of other benefits, but these five are key. For example, unless separate systems are carefully integrated, a dentist could input a billing code for the procedure they just completed, then need a staffer to manually copy that code from the patient’s chart to the billing or practice management system (or both!). This not only wastes time, but also introduces opportunity for human error. Incorrect codes lead to rejections that then must be corrected and resubmitted, increasing the length of time before revenues are realized.
Now consider a single system. The dentist records the procedure, which automatically populates the correct billing code within the claims and billing management module. No extra steps. Some systems even have built-in credit card processing capability, so self-pay patients can immediately pay their bill without needing to use a separate credit card terminal, and the payment is immediately recorded and reconciled. For patients with insurance, the opportunity for human error in the transcription and coding process is greatly reduced, and most systems make it easy to submit large batches of claims.
An integrated records and billing system also frees up your front desk to focus on patients instead of wrangling billing codes, paperwork, or duplicate data entry. It could also let you run your office with a leaner front desk, as many administrative job functions can be performed more efficiently with software.
There are a plethora of options available to dental practices today, and even more opinions on which system is best. Ultimately, the choice and responsibility are yours. Do your research. Assess your needs. Seek out the opinions of trusted third parties. Choosing the wrong dental software for your practice can be an expensive mistake.
Author Bio
Charles Settles is a product analyst at TechnologyAdvice. He covers topics related to gamification, healthcare IT, and project management. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
