Take Action Now to Avoid These Healthcare Pain Points in 2020
Medical practices face several challenges in their daily operations. Some of these include managing unsecured and obsolete network devices, protecting patients’ health data from cyberattacks, providing quality care to remote patients, and reducing billing errors while filing claims with insurance companies.
Medical practices also need to ensure that their healthcare technology is:
Protected by robust data security policies
Continuously available, as frequent downtime can hamper the quality of care
Compliant with industry and state regulations that protect patients’ health information
To top it all, healthcare systems tend to function on a lean budget and staff. Due to these constraints, it becomes quite difficult to understand where to start improving. Proactive healthcare organizations will turn to our FrontRunners report to find the right software to tackle these pain points.
In this article, we’ll discuss the top three pain points faced by healthcare companies as well as software functionalities to address these challenges in 2020. We analyzed more than 200 medical software buyer leads from Software Advice to identify these pain points.
Pain point #1: Protecting patients’ health data from security breaches
Protecting the health data of patients is one of the biggest challenges for healthcare providers. 41.2 million healthcare records were breached in the U.S. in 2019, more than the number of healthcare records breached in the previous three years combined. Moreover, 28 healthcare providers reported breaches of 500 or more patient healthcare records in December 2019 alone.
In 2020 healthcare organizations will struggle to protect their sensitive healthcare data if no action is taken.
However, despite this significant rise in data breaches and cyberattacks, healthcare expenditure on data protection hasn’t increased much (just 6% year over year since 2018), making healthcare providers more vulnerable to such attacks.
In 2020, healthcare organizations can leverage technology to implement crucial internal data security policies and use software to protect their patients’ health data.
Take action: Install antivirus software on your systems and keep it up to date to protect patients’ data from new and evolving threats. Implement user-based access controls for your electronic medical records (EMR) system and set strict password protocols. You can read more about EHR security measures in this article and use our EMR FrontRunners report to identify a healthcare technology provider that can cater to your data protection requirements.
Pain point #2: Providing quality care to remote patients
Another major pain point for healthcare organizations is providing quality care to patients suffering from chronic illness or senior citizens who can’t visit a clinic.
2020 will see a significant rise in remote healthcare services, with an increased focus on telemedicine.
Remote healthcare services, such as telemedicine, not only allow healthcare providers to offer quality care to their patients remotely but also help patients save costs. According to a 2019 telemedicine study, the net cost savings per telemedicine visit ranges from $19 to $121 for patients.
Remote healthcare services offer numerous benefits, such as:
Enhanced quality of care
Improved access to healthcare services
Peace of mind and care assurance
Cost savings for patients
Higher revenue for physicians
Take action: Start with a clear business goal. Select an area within your practice that you want to improve by implementing remote healthcare systems, such as telemedicine software. It could be revenue, patient satisfaction, patient retention, or any other parameter that’s important to your practice. Read more about the benefits of telemedicine in this article.
Involve your staff early on in the software selection process. Train them on the new technology and create a task force. Assign different responsibilities to your team members—someone to schedule appointments, ensure compliance with state laws and policies, handle reimbursement processes, and oversee day-to-day operations. When your staff is involved early on in the process, they’ll feel more invested in its future success.
Use our EMR FrontRunners report to find a technology partner that offers telemedicine functionality right fit for your practice. You can also compare other software providers by visiting our telemedicine software directory.
Pain point #3: Minimizing coding errors to enhance the revenue cycle
The third biggest pain point for healthcare providers is billing errors, which can result in denied claims and uncollected revenue from insurance companies.
In 2020, the biggest challenge for healthcare revenue cycle leaders will be getting coding right the first time.
Because of the growing importance of value-based care care, healthcare providers are more focused on delivering quality care to their patients. As a result, they’re left with less time for coding. Nearly 8.5% of the total claims by multispecialty practices get denied on the first submission. And reworking and resubmitting claims is quite costly, with an estimated average cost of $25 per claim.
In 2020, medical practices can leverage technology to get coding right in the first attempt itself. Dedicated revenue cycle management (RCM) software can help healthcare providers that struggle to code, track, manage, and collect payments from insurance providers.
In addition to accurate coding, RCM software offers various other benefits, such as:
Storage of patients’ billing and payment details
Automated insurance verification of patients
Integration with EMR systems
Payment processing
Read more about how RCM software can help with medical payments in this article.
Take action: Install RCM software to eliminate transcription errors and reduce the chances of claims being rejected. Also, provide regular software training to your staff to ensure accurate coding.
Use our EMR FrontRunners report to find a technology partner for your coding needs. You can also visit our RCM software directory to compare other software vendors.
The formula for success in 2020
Healthcare providers that take immediate action to address the three pain points discussed above will sail through 2020. And software will assist them in overcoming these challenges. Our EMR FrontRunners report offers expert guidance for identifying technology options to tackle these pain points.
Software Advice specializes in finding the right technology for your business needs. Twice a year, we present the top products for multiple software markets, ranked by real user reviews of usability, customer satisfaction, and likelihood to recommend. These FrontRunners reports offer a snapshot of the best products in specific categories so that you can make an informed decision quickly.
2019 EMR Software FrontRunners
The FrontRunners report is a great starting point when evaluating technology options to address your specific pain points. Get started with some popular software markets:
If you need a helping hand, let our software advisors narrow down your list of systems based on your unique business needs through a free consultation. Here’re some easy ways to kick off 2020 with the right technology:
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