It can be a shock to discover how much time is taken up by admin and business tasks in private practice.
While few practitioners have experience of running a business, the most successful are those who draw on the time management skills they learned early in their professional career. By identifying ways to work smarter and making the most of the latest practice management technology, they’ve been able to ‘steal back’ time to focus on patients and develop their practice.
Every practice has time-consuming tasks that could be managed more effectively, often by making better use of technology. Here are five of the most common admin ‘bottlenecks’ to address:
- Correspondence – Medical secretaries can spend their time typing, printing and dispatching letters to keep patients and their GPs informed about appointments, investigations and treatments. Streamline the process by using letter templates for common subjects which can be completed with the relevant patient details. Our ePractice Lite and Pro software also allows you to select and batch print multiple documents at a time.
- Patient insurance cover – Practices regularly need to call hospitals or insurers to confirm a patient’s insurance details, but this can be a time-consuming – and sometimes a frustrating – exercise. Our online membership enquiry feature enables you to instantly check patients’ policy numbers and address details against the insurers’ database.
- Invoicing – Electronic invoicing and clearing can save you money by eliminating printing, postage and manpower costs. Creating and submitting invoices to insurers – via our encrypted, secure service – takes a fraction of the time, improves accuracy and ensures the invoice is validated against the relevant insurer criteria – so it’s ready for processing and payment. This secure platform eliminates the risk of data breaches possible when sending invoices by post or email, plus you have the additional reassurance of knowing the invoice has been received by the insurer.
- Payment tracking – When payments arrive, every practice needs a system to record exactly what invoices are being paid and identify shortfalls. This can be time-consuming with a manual system and in some cases, practices have been obliged to write-off outstanding debts because payments have not been reconciled against the correct invoice. Our payment tracking tools will help you save time and money.
- Financial reports – Without access to accurate information it’s impossible to steer your business effectively. However, manual bookkeeping and accounting systems require expertise and time to prepare even basic reports such as an aged debtor analysis. Your practice management system should provide a range of real-time financial reports, so you can measure your performance, analyse your strengths and weaknesses and make informed decisions.
Discover more
For more information about how ePractice Lite or Pro could help you work smarter, please contact our Business Development team.
