EMRs & Therapy Software Archives

Research shows that quality patient communication remains a cornerstone in effective treatment. Patients should feel that their provider offers empathy coupled with quality communication when explaining a diagnosis and treatment plan.

As a healthcare provider, you should always take the time to review your patient’s understanding of the treatment plan to improve care and ensure long-term success. Patients tend to follow through successfully with directions and medical recommendations when they have a strong positive relationship with their healthcare provider.

The key components of effective patient communication include:

The ability to explain the diagnosis and treatment plan.
Listening to the patient’s questions and concerns.
Empathizing with any concerns or fears the patient might express.

When the top three components of patient communication are met, the health outcomes and patient satisfaction tend to improve dramatically.

Communication plays a significant role in the patient/physician relationship. A patient will consider their quality of care exceptional if they have an effective communication foundation and interactions. A patient who has positive interactions with their healthcare provider tends to take a much more initiative-taking part in their treatment, care, and self-management.

The Effects of Communication Problems on Treatment Success

Communication problems lead to poor treatment success.

Studies have shown that one-third of patients who suffer from chronic illnesses often lead to them underusing their prescription medications due to a lack of funds and cost concerns that they do not share with their physician. The patient is often embarrassed to reveal financial concerns, or they simply do not feel comfortable discussing the problems with their healthcare provider. Often, they simply don’t feel like their physician will care if they cannot afford the prescribed medication.
Research showed that only half of all patients who have been hospitalized can identify the name of their medical diagnosis or the medications they are supposed to use upon discharge due to a failure in communication with their physician.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) Report on Health Professions and Training carried out a study that showed that physicians and other healthcare professionals often have inadequate training in patient communication.

Core Communication Skills

IOM has made a strong push for licensing organizations and educators to bolster their professional training regarding patient communication. The outline of a strong patient-centered care model that shows the foundation of healthcare communication should be founded on core communication skills such as the following:

Open-ended inquiry
Reflective listening
Empathy

Successful patient communication should focus on working together to develop a plan that meets the emotional, physical, social, and economic needs of the patient. The patient should have a solid understanding of the plan and feel comfortable asking questions or voicing concerns or fears. A healthcare provider should always take the time to examine the patient’s understanding of the plan, especially if the patient is being discharged because you’ll want to ensure that they will remain home care compliant to decrease any readmission and ensure the success of their treatment plan.

Common Reasons Why a Treatment Plan Fails

A Health Care Quality Survey was carried out which found that 25% of Americans failed to follow their treatment plan due to the following reasons:

39% stated that they did not agree with what the physician wanted or recommended as a treatment plan.
27% worried about finances.
25% felt that the instructions were too difficult.
20% believed that the treatment plan went against their personal beliefs.
7% did not understand exactly how to conduct the treatment plan.

How to Foster Patient Satisfaction

Below are the following ways to better foster patient satisfaction to ensure treatment plan success:

Expectations: Always provide the patient with sufficient time to explain their story and goals with the treatment plan.
Communication: Physicians need to take the concerns and satisfaction of the patient seriously by explaining everything clearly and taking the time to understand how the patient feels.
Control: Let the patient take control of their own treatment plan by welcoming their concerns, ideas, and expectations during a conversation.
Decision: Patient satisfaction always increases when the patient’s physical, mental, and social functions are acknowledged.
Time: Physicians who take the time to address all issues increase patient satisfaction.
Referrals: Most patients prefer the healthcare team to manage all referrals.
Continued Care: Patients feel more satisfied when they continue to receive ongoing care from the practice and physician instead of having to go to a multitude of healthcare providers.
Ongoing Clinical Team: A patient’s satisfaction with the clinical team creates a positive treatment experience.
Dignity: A patient expects and deserves respect throughout the entire treatment process and with any healthcare decisions.

Patient Safety and Treatment Plan Success

When a treatment plan fails, it often occurs as a result of human and system errors. Studies carried out over 10 years (1995 to 2005) showed that ineffective communication causes 66% of all medical errors. If a healthcare team or physician fails to effectively communicate then all aspects of patient care start to falter and fail.

Malpractice Risk and Treatment Success

Research conducted by Huntington and Kuhn has revealed that the root cause of most malpractice claims stems from a breakdown between the patient and the physician.

Feeling supported, understood, valued, and listened to all matter when it comes to effective patient communication. It was found that 71% of all malpractice claims arose from a breakdown in the physician and patient relationship. Most patients believed that their physician simply did not care.

Conclusion

Practice management should always focus on fostering positive relationships between the patient and the healthcare team with open communication. When collaborating with a patient on a treatment plan, everyone needs to focus on taking the time for effective communication.

To better optimize your practice to ensure a positive patient experience, we invite you to contact us to learn more about Fusion Software. Our proactive management software focuses on making a positive impact on everyone involved. The goal is to ensure exceptional clinical and financial outcomes to pave the way for treatment success.

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A growing therapy practice is something to celebrate! However, every clinic, at some point in its growth, encounters aches and pains that can hinder further or even current success. Here are some process improvements you can make to mitigate growing pains -even as your patient list grows.

Implement Smart Scheduling and Waitlists

The foundation of any successful clinic is scheduling that runs like a well-oiled machine. Your scheduling software should make this as easy as possible for your office staff. That means more than keeping provider calendars at their fingertips, it means being able to categorize appointment types and using tools that automatically find open appointment slots.

Smarter scheduling also includes implementing a waitlist that’s integrated into your scheduling tools, so you’re not missing out on revenue from patients who you don’t have the capacity to see now.

Don’t Skimp on Documentation

Like scheduling, documentation is an essential therapy function that is more likely to trip you up the more patients you have. Your EHR should have built-in documentation tools and evaluations that mirror the natural workflows of a therapy office. These notes should be easily accessible from any point in a patient’s treatment and track progress and show object mastery. Plus, these should be super easy to share with patients and insurance companies.

Open Your (Metaphorical) Doors

Regardless of what the future holds for COVID, telehealth has become an expectation for many patients and their caretakers. And who can blame them? With busy schedules to accommodate, possible mobility issues, lack of transportation, anxiety, or even rising gas prices, there are tons of reasons that get in the way of making in-office appointments. And we all know how detrimental missed appointments can be for outcomes and retention. So, take advantage of telehealth. By offering a secure and convenient treatment option, you can see more patients than ever before.

Get a Handle on Billing

You know the saying. More money. More problems. Well, you’ve increased your billings, so you’re likely running into more revenue red flags. These likely include:

More delinquent payments or bounced checks
Troubles with insurance companies
An overtaxed billing team
Denied and rejected claims
Coding concerns
Need we say more?

One of the best things you can do for your clinic to make sure you’re capturing all the revenue you should in order to maintain your growth is revenue cycle management. Revenue cycle management is the process of drafting accurate claims, following up promptly, correcting denials and rejections, and following through to make sure you receive payment. Make sure the software you’re using to run your practice has billing tools or even offers revenue cycle management services, so you can unload that burden from your billing team.

Another way to streamline your billing is to consider onboarding credit card processing if you haven’t already. Allowing patients to pay conveniently online allows you to see an immediate improvement in your cash flow and reduces the likelihood that a patient won’t fulfill their financial responsibility.

Know What’s Working and What Needs Work

How can you possibly know what’s working, what’s not, and where you can grow without data to guide the way? If reporting isn’t on your wishlist as a growing therapy practice, it should be. Having key insights available at-a-glance in dashboards allows you to manage the performance of your clinic and understand and prioritize improvements that need to be made. Insights can also help inform creative solutions to problems your clinic is facing and identify new opportunities for growth.

Software that Empowers Growth (and Scales with You)

We promise, we don’t read minds. We’ve just worked with so many therapists (and did we mention we were built by some) who have encountered these growing pains. Let’s help you get a jump on your growth, so the sky truly can be the limit. Schedule a demo of Therapy Brands’ Fusion PT/OT/SLP EMR today.

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Fusion users consistently voted for a waitlist as one of the features you wanted the most. We listened, and we’re proud to announce our new waitlist functionality is launching.

The Waitlist features will be available for Fusion Enhanced and Billing plans. These users can start using the Waitlist once it’s launched. If you’re a Fusion Basic user and you’re interested in the waitlist, please speak with one of our specialists about upgrading your plan.

What Does the Waitlist Do?

Say goodbye to scattered post-it notes and cumbersome excel spreadsheets. The Waitlist functionality is fully integrated within Fusion, which helps eliminate redundancies and simplifies scheduling. With this function, you can:

Add a new or existing patient to the waitlist with options to track:

Desired location
Therapist
Service needed
Days of the week in which they’re available
Times they’re available
How long they’ve been waiting

View the waitlist with the following available actions

Complete a Find Openings search to schedule an appointment
View the patient’s contact information
Add a note to the waitlist entry
Delete the waitlist item

Remove the waitlist entry when the patient is scheduled

How Does That Help You?

Instead of leaving patients in post-it notes and scattered spreadsheets, you can enter patients, update their information and find them without leaving the waitlist, as well as find available appointments more easily thanks to scheduling integration. Patients are prioritized based on waiting time.

Find out how Fusion can help your practice. Schedule a demo today!

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There is no time like the present. Or at least goes the old saying. If you’re embarking on a new journey in your career and thinking of starting your own practice, we can’t be more thrilled for you. We also understand, however, that this new endeavor can be frightening since therapy clinics are nothing like the average business. Let’s walk through a few high-priority items to iron out before starting your own therapy practice.

1. Understand Your Niche

As you know, patients receive physical therapy for endless reasons and the interventions can be just as diverse. Though it’s tempting to serve as an “every man”, (and certainly if you’re just starting out, you can’t exactly turn away revenue), finding your niche can help you stand out and really deliver great outcomes. Is sports therapy your forte? Will you treat primarily children or geriatric patients? Perhaps spinal care is where you feel most at home.

Knowing where your talents lie can help you better direct your treasures. That means purchasing the right equipment, marketing appropriately, developing strong professional relationships, and mastering insurance billing. It can also help you stand out in your local market and meet an otherwise unfulfilled need for the community.

2. Find the Right Software Stack

No practice can operate efficiently (and in some cases, legally) without an EHR (electronic health record). And, on the other hand, the wrong EHR can slow down your business, frustrating staff and patients. Here are a few things to look for when shopping around for EHR vendors.

Specialty-specific– as a physical therapist, you and your patients have different needs than a general practitioner – or any other kind of practitioner for that matter. And your software should meet those specific needs. The design and interface of the software should match your workflows and thought processes.
Billing functionality– though you got into business to help people, the cash flow of your clinic is what allows you to keep doing the good work that you do. Make sure your EHR is equipped with the tools and staff you need to not only bill and file claims but also manage revenue and follow up on claims.
Credit card processing– an often overlooked feature when it comes to choosing an EHR, having credit card processing integrated directly into your EHR saves time and eliminates the need for after-the-fact reconciliation.
Telehealth and client portal– regardless of what the future holds, the COVIDpandemic forever changed the way we deliver healthcare. A telehealth offering is becoming more of the norm ever for physical, occupational, and speech therapy, and patients are coming to expect it. Continue to deliver care with integrated telehealth. You may find it opens doors for your clinic by allowing you to broaden the geographical radius of patients you can serve and by preventing missed appointments for patients who may be anxious, have transportation concerns, face mobility challenges, or any other roadblocks to in-person appointments. A client portal likewise helps bridge the gap between patient and provider by offering document transfer, the ability to view records, and secure messaging.
Intuitive design and great service– what good is onboarding a new software system if it’s too difficult to understand or takes too much time to manage. Don’t let promised functionality take away from your EHRs ROI, find something that’s a pleasure to use. Onboarding should be a breeze, your staff should be adequately trained, and support should be helpful and readily available.

3. Build Your Dream Team

There’s so much more involved in running a successful therapy practice than fantastic patient care. You’ll need to master patient relations, understand software, make sure billing and claims are handled appropriately. So, if you think you’re going to need some extra hands, now is the time to begin your search.

Think strategically about the needs of your practice. Understand if it’s more important to hire a jack-of-all-trades office admin superstar or could you benefit from another provider to double the patient load and bring in revenue to cover overhead. Maybe there’s a particular specialty that would be valuable to have on board.

From there, start reaching out to your network. Ask for referrals to find stellar candidates and start interviewing.

4. Iron Out Billing

Likely, revenue will come from a mix of patient responsibility and insurance payments. Since cash flow is what’s going to keep your business afloat. Here are a few ways to make sure both are working for your new practice.

Patient Responsibility

Offer credit card processing -the ability to accept credit cards is not only more convenient for our patients it can help you capture otherwise lost revenue and prevent missed payments.
Write and post a payment policy– it’s easy for patients to get confused about what is their responsibility, especially if they’re using insurance to cover some of your services. Write an easy-to-understand payment policy and include it with all new patient paperwork and clearly post it in your office.
Automate patient statements – patient statements, whether sent by email or snail mail are an important part of capturing revenue from self-pay patients, but they can be a real drain on your admin staff and postage costs can really add up. Find a service that automates this process for you.

Insurance Billing

Determine what payers you will work with – do some research to find out who the common providers are in your area.
Enrollment and credentialing– before you can start accepting payment from payers you will need to be credentialed and follow through with their enrollment, a process that can take several months, so make sure to start well before you plan on billing.
Learn the codes– when it comes to billing and submitting claims to your insurance providers, make sure to study up on your billing codes to avoid denials and rejections.
Master your revenue cycle– denied and rejected claims can drastically slow down revenue generation. And, as accounts receivable age, they depreciate, so it’s important to get paid as quickly and as easily as possible. Now is the time to learn how to resolve denials, or decide if you’d like to work with a third-party service like a clearinghouse or billing services offered through your EHR.5.

Get Strategic About Marketing

Marketing may seem like an alien landscape, especially if you’re more focused on providing stellar patient care than driving leads. But understanding marketing basics and taking care of those needs now can set your practice up for success.

Start with your brand. Determine what sets your practice apart from others in the area -and back it up with proof and values. Then, find a way to represent these values in assets like your logo, website, print materials, etc.

Once your fundamentals are in place, start getting the word out there. Set some goals andlay out a strategy and timeline for achieving them. Here are some ideas:

Schedule meetings with local physicians and prepare leave-behind materials to build relationships and secure referrals.
Post on social media.
Grab a spot on the local drive-time radio.
Mail a postcard to residents near your office.
Start sending a customer newsletter.

Marketing possibilities are endless. Start with what will give you the most bang for your buck, keep an eye on the results, and optimize as you go.

Here for the Long Run

Building strong foundations prior to the launch of your clinic allows you to blaze a clear path for the future. Have a software partner that not only helps you navigate that path but that solves problems and facilitates growth. Fusion is a full-featured, specialty-specific EHR designed specifically with physical, occupational, and speech therapists in mind. Get a demo and see how we can support your new clinic.

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Fusion has made some updates to improve speed, performance and stability as a part of ongoing efforts to increase usability. We’ve also delivered new features to give you everything you need to serve adults in your practice. Don’t worry, we’re still the same EMR you know and love, easy-to-use and intuitive, but with added functionalities and improved performance. And while we’re expanding our software to support practitioners in the adult market, we’re still dedicated to offering unique pediatric-centric features.

We’ve made a lot of improvements. Our standardized test and evaluation content has been updated to be more comprehensive. We also added new documentation for adults, and we expanded our current pediatric documentation offerings. In addition, we now support Medicare billing, including the 8-minute rule and the KX modifier regardless of the age of the patient. To learn more about all the enhancements, please take a look at the Release Notes.

From pediatrics to geriatrics, Fusion can do it all. We remain dedicated to providing the best all-in-one system for electronic health records and practice management solutions for physical, occupational and speech therapy practices. Fusion’s reliable all-in-one system is designed to help small and medium clinics scale their practices and tailored to your needs. You can use the adult components by themselves or in conjunction with the pediatric components as needed. We offer a highly functional, easy to use product for busy clinics that seek efficiency. Save time on administrative, billing and scheduling time to focus on what matters most: giving your patients the best care.

Find out how Fusion can help your practice. Schedule a demo today!

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Fusion is an end-to-end physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy software program specifically designed to meet the unique needs of pediatric therapists. Each of the software’s features merges to create an easy all-in-one practice management solution that helps you streamline and better oversee your pediatric physical therapy practice to take it to the next level.

Benefits of Fusion: End-to-End Physical Therapy Software

Imagine being able to integrate all key processes into a user-friendly clinic management platform. You’ll free up crucial time during your day so you can better focus on your patients and other areas of your practice.

Fusion lets you integrate the following functions:

Therapy scheduling
Therapy billing
Therapy reporting
Therapy documentation

You can manage your entire clinic using practice management software that was designed specifically for pediatric clinics.

Streamlined Scheduling

Fusion provides a fully integrated calendar that lets you manage your practice’s schedules. The click and drag calendar enables rapid updates and lets you effortlessly edit your appointments, set recurring appointments, and send out automated appointment reminders.

Using the color-code preset appointment types in the program, you can peruse your week with a simple glance. You can even customize your own color code.

With multiple viewing options, you’ll rapidly compare your staff schedules, examine therapists’ calendars and sort everything via specialty or location.

Improved Documentation

We understand the importance of staying on top of all documentation and Fusion helps you with the software’s pediatric-specific documentation system.

Built-in pediatric templates save time with evaluations and daily notes.
Track patient progress with easy-to-read graphs
View daily notes and develop progress graphics that outline individual patient reports
Record assessments using pre-built templates of popular standardized tests

Improved Billing

Billing is a notoriously tedious process. With Fusion therapy practice management software, you’ll get paid quicker because the entire billing system becomes fully integrated.

Carry out the following tasks with ease:

Auto-generate claims every time you complete documentation for every appointment. The claim becomes tied to the daily note.
Complete all claims within minutes.
Electronically complete and review claims with the specialized automated E.O.B. system.
Process master bills for any third-party payers for faster payer consolidation.
Rapid online payment processing using the integrated credit card processor to handle patient payments within the EMR.

Real-Time Insights

We know that you want to optimize the performance of your practice. Fusion provides real-time insights coupled with easy-to-use reporting. You can utilize the provided snap-shot view, so you know what’s going on and how best to use your time each day. The improved processes help aid in your decision-making.

You’ll be able to monitor, track and analyze who, what, where, when, why, and how throughout your clinic. You can then create reports that measure and evaluate particular time periods to provide a complete overview, so you know what truly works and what has failed.

Take the reports that you create to review with your team or export the data for future use. You’ll stay on top of all of the details so you can determine how best to proceed with your practice, so you continue meeting and exceeding your short-term and long-term goals.

Fusion: Complete Practice Management Software

Above, we have provided you with the basic benefits of Fusion Practice Management Software, but there is a lot more to the platform than what we have listed so far. We know you’re busy with pediatric pt. and other aspects of care. Using Fusion helps free you to focus on your passions and limit the amount of time you have to spend on mundane, business-related tasks.

Added benefits of Fusion Practice Management Software include:

Ability to auto-create tasks
Control workflows
Easily onboard new therapists and collaborate together
Track the progress of new therapists
In-app messaging
Improved team collaboration
Rapidly receive answers to patient progress and status updates online while supporting complete HIPAA compliance.

Enjoy Peace of Mind

Running a pediatric practice means that you have to toe the line by following all HIPAA regulations. You must always maintain government-level security. Fusion takes the worry out of the process by complying with all HIPAA regulations and maintaining complete security features to meet all government requirements.

Also, if the unthinkable should happen and you face a stress-filled audit, rest assured that all information is legible and easily accessible whenever you need it.

About Fusion

We want you to know our dedication. A group of skilled engineers and pediatric therapists designed and created Fusion when it became clear that there was a need in therapy for a truly stellar EMR with optimum progress monitoring.

Fusion took years to perfect. The all-in-one pediatric therapy software is now trusted by clinics throughout the country. It effectively keeps data and documents safe and secure within the Fusion cloud and lets clinics easily access the information anytime and anywhere from a variety of devices.

At this time, Fusion is trusted by over 10,000 medical professionals and is used in over 1,000 clinics nationwide. That number is also growing on a daily basis.

See What Others Say About Fusion

Fusion remains the only all-in-one pediatric practice management EMR and billing software available on the market. We invite you to take a few moments to read the many testimonials about the practice management software. You’ll also find video testimonials outlining exactly how Fusion has helped other therapists transform their practice.

If we have piqued your interest in Fusion Practice Management software, then we invite you to sign up for a demo today. We are confident that Fusion supplies the solutions you have been looking to truly optimize all aspects of your billing processes. With Fusion, you can take your clinic to a new level of expertise.

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In our last blog post, we talked about all of the wonderful benefits of offering a patient portal. Today, we wanted to give you some practical tips and resources to make sure your pediatric therapy practice gets the most out of a patient portal.

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Pediatric therapy clinics have unique needs when it comes to practice management software. For one thing, you’ve got to be ready to deal with scheduling around school and extracurricular activities. We’ve created this quiz so that you can find out if your EMR is a good fit for pediatric therapy or if it’s time to upgrade.

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All-in-one therapy software is great for pediatric therapists. They’re able to focus more on their patients because they don’t have to spend so much time on documentation. That’s especially true if they use pediatric therapy software with pediatric content and other pediatric-specific features built in.

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If you’re a pediatric therapist, you need an EMR billing software that is specifically designed to meet the unique challenges you face on a day-to-day basis. This means finding pediatric therapy software that provides features like:

a pediatric format for notes
pediatric goal banks
pediatric assessment content, and
pediatric standardized tests

There are some companies out there that have tried to put together pediatric add-ons, but as a pediatric therapist, you’ll find yourself wasting time scrolling past irrelevant fields or manually formatting test results.

Here are some features to look for as you search for an EMR billing software that was designed with you in mind.

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