Ask ten clinic owners why the waiting room is jammed at 8:45 and nine of them will say they need another person up front. Maybe they do. I've heard it so many times I quit counting. But when you actually stand there and watch the morning happen, the trouble starts way earlier. Somebody's digging for an insurance card, somebody else is on their third clipboard, the phone won't stop. Add another body and you've just got more people standing in the same mess. If you've been poking around the athenahealth marketplace   hoping to find a fix, good, that's a decent instinct. Patient check in software is probably the first thing you'll run into there. Great. Just don't buy anything yet. Your patient intake process has to make sense first, and most clinics have never really looked at theirs. At DocResponse we've watched practices sign up for a tool on a Tuesday and drift back to paper before the month was out. Wrong fit, or no plan, usually both. So before an...

Patients arrive, providers treat them, claims are filed, providers leave for the day. Behind the scenes though, there are several dozen minutiae that are taking place as a receptionist answers phones, confirms appointments, obtains insurance verification, looks up treatment codes, relays information for billing, informs others of new plans, takes notes, and interacts with healthcare staff, all within a matter of moments.  Practice management software offers an alternative to a PC filled with scattered file folders and disconnected applications.  It offers a centralized record and resource for management and scheduling as well as a significant reduction in processing time allowing staff members to focus on value added work. A good practice management system streamlines appointment scheduling, patient registration, billing, claims processing, reporting, and communication, and provides administrators with a quick summary of what is going on at any given moment in the practice. I...

A person could be able to buy a French press on Amazon, check in at a hotel on their phone, and transfer their money between accounts all within a few minutes yet arriving at the doctor’s office for their weekly appointment can be a sticky group of phone calls, forms, and waiting rooms while repeating the same information over and over again.1 That’s one reason patient registration software has become such an easy-to-use tool for healthcare organizations today. It can allow practices to move patient check-in from cumbersome paper forms into a leaner digital workflow. Instead of trying to have staff transcribe demographic, insurance, or contact information, and any other pieces of basic info, quickly and easily, the system can gather it all and prepare it for entry before the patient even sets foot in the practice! This isn’t complicated, but small changes can have a surprisingly large impact when a practice takes care of dozens or hundreds of patients a day. Unfortunately, it is not o...