When you’ve started your own practice, you soon realise that running a practice smoothly requires much more business admin and acumen than med school ever prepared you for.
Practice admin generally includes, but is not limited to, the following:
Booking patients:
- Scheduling appointments.
- Calendar integration.
- Data-capturing.
- Indemnity and consent forms.
- Privacy and security measures.
The consultation:
- Clinical note-keeping.
- Electronic health records.
- Investigations (pathology and radiology).
- Keeping track of all results.
- Referrals to and from other healthcare professionals.
- Sick note generation.
- Prescription generation.
- Dispensing (where applicable).
Billing and getting paid:
- Invoice generation.
- Consultation coding.
- ICD 10 coding.
- Procedure and material coding.
- Medical aid claims submission.
- Switching (checking medical aid status in real-time).
Practice finances & accounting:
- Dispensary management (where applicable).
- Transaction reconciliation/remittance.
- Financial reports.
- Accounting and auditing.
- Oh, and don’t forget business taxes…
Feel overwhelmed yet? We know…
That’s why we’ve endeavoured to provide you with helpful information about the best practice management software solutions in South Africa to assist you with starting and running your private practice.
So What Is Practice Management Software?
Practice management software (PMS), sometimes referred to as practice management applications (PMAs), are software solutions that function specifically to help medical professionals, like doctors, streamline their practice processes.
Their functionality generally includes running the day-to-day processes like scheduling appointments, booking new patients, capturing patient data including medical aid data, assisting with medical billing and payments, linking with medical aids for claim submissions, generating accounting reports for reconciliation and analysis, dispensary inventory and stock management, etc.
Some software solutions include patient clinical record keeping. Clinical notes enable you to type and save patient notes so that you can view your notes again at future consultations. Electronic health records (EHR), on the other hand, take clinical notes to a whole new level by including commonly used phrases, consultation templates, and many other tools to help streamline the consultation time.
Certain software solutions also include prescription and sick note generation. These are particularly helpful when they save past medications prescribed. Some are even integrated with software that shows you names of generics as you prescribe.
Tip
As you can see, different practice management software offers different solutions for different processes.
For example, investing in software that offers EHR is great if you like to keep electronic notes of every patient, but if you know you prefer paper-based note-keeping then investing in EHR would be pointless. The key is to find the right solution to suit your needs.
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