Physical Therapy EMR for Growth

Physical Therapy EMR for Growth | Get The Do-Re-Mi In Place

Start at the very beginning | Know the notes to sing

Making sure that the right processes are in place would be a good place to start. At a high level, we could sum up our priorities as:

• Securing qualified patient appointments and providing a seamless, connected experience.
• Efficiently onboarding and processing patients and providing quality care to them.
• Improving efficiency and growing profitability by optimizing operational and clinical workflows.

Getting into some more detail, we would need to cover some of the basics:

• Obtaining patient information on arrival like authorizations, eligibility, and co-pays.
• Keeping a close watch on the arrival rate to keep patients on their plan of care.
• Documentation/notes that is tightly integrated with appointments and with billing.
• Reviewing and following up on delayed or denied claims.
• Upfront claims review and scrubbing to lower denials and increase collections.

Finally, some key metrics to watch out for:

Referral Metrics

• Total referrals
• Top referrer
• Referrals by type of insurance

Productivity Metrics

• Patient arrival rate
• Total number of new patients per day/week/month
• Average/total new patients per therapist
• Average visits per patient/per therapist
• Total number of patients seen per location

Billing Metrics

• Total charges billed
• Collections per visit
• Average charges per visit/per therapist

Tools to build the process | Sing most anything

What if some of the processes are manual? For example, manually entering charges and applying payments that are received.

Enter the integrated EMR/practice management system. Here are some of the basic features that the platform should bring in (at a minimum).

Patient Appointments

• Scheduling patients by therapists or by the front desk team.
• Inviting patients to the patient portal to fill out information that imports into the EMR.
• Scheduling patients from a waiting list after matching criteria for open calendar slots.
• Reviewing therapist schedules in a single view or zooming in on individual therapist views.
• Generating documentation and claims/billing from the scheduler.
• Checks and balances for example needing an appointment to generate a clinical note.
• Tracking patient cases for different disciplines benefits, diagnosis, and authorizations.
• Setting up timesheets for therapists and applying them to the scheduler using templates.
• Handling of different types of appointments eval, follow up, and so on visually for tracking.
• Setting statuses like canceled, canceled under 24 hours, rescheduled for the cancellation policy.
• Customizable appointment types, appointment statuses, and warnings during check-in.
• Reports like a list of patients who are going to become unauthorized in the next two weeks.

Clinical documentation

• Fully customizable clinical note templates that are built into the system.
• Documentation that is accessible from the scheduler or from the clinician dashboard.
• Reviewing status of notes and accessing unsigned notes and any missing charges.
• Marking notes as ready to review for supervising therapists by assistant therapists.
• Tests built into the system along with scoring tables.
• Summarized patient information cards including authorizations and missing certifications.
• Charges baked into clinical templates (flowsheets/SOAP notes) after tracking minutes and units.
• Flexibility to generate the claim, adding notes later. Or tying the claim to a signed off note.
• Rolling forward previous daily notes and charges with filled out sections for printing.
• Enforcing clinical compliance through required questions.
• Automatically faxing case information to the referring doctor, case manager, and PCP on file.
• Goal tracking including templating and customizing goals with data points and text.

Billing and Collections

• Configuring the billing rules engine for each payer.
• Reviewing charges and identifying any problems like missing diagnosis pointers, eval codes.
• Grouping claims by therapist, account type, patient etc. and creating claims batches.
• Catching any additional charge or claim issues, and validating claims.
• Transmitting finalized claims batches to the clearing house.
• Following up with payers per a predefined schedule for collections.
• Importing EOBs/ERAs from the clearing house, auto posting payments, patient statements.
• Reports including therapist productivity, facility summaries, and audit reports.

Reports and KPI dashboards that provide detailed insight on current business processes would provide a pathway to continuous business improvement.

Once, we have the tools in place to build the processes, we could address hundreds of different scenarios by mixing them up. Do-re-mi, the first three notes just happen to be!