What Are the Key EHR Practice Management Features for Group Practices?
Whether you’re an established group practice owner or a clinician considering expanding your private practice, you’ll want to choose an electronic health record (EHR) that meets your practice’s needs.
Running a group practice can require a lot of work. For example, you may need to hire clinicians, train them, run payroll, provide regular feedback, and motivate and lead a staff.
The EHR you choose will depend on several factors, including the size of your practice, the clients you serve, and the functionalities that are most important to you. Group practices can be as small as three people or as large as 25 or more, so it’s important that the system you work in can enable both you and your team to see clients and complete administrative work with ease.
Here are some of the key EHR practice management features that will help your group practice function smoothly—leaving you and your team able to provide the best quality of care to clients.
Ability to add different team roles
Once you decide to grow your business, your next step will be to hire new clinicians and administrative staff.
Depending on your needs, you may need to hire billers, schedulers, and practice managers in addition to clinicians. In contemplating your staffing needs, ask yourself: Do you want someone in charge of scheduling and rescheduling client appointments, or will clinicians handle this on their own? Will you accept insurance, or will each clinician set their own fees and handle billing themselves?
Running a business can be daunting, and as you grow, you may find it makes more sense to delegate tasks like administrative work to one or more designated employee(s).
It’s essential that the EHR you choose has functionality to allow your clinicians and administrative staff to effectively do their jobs. You’ll want to be able to assign the appropriate role for each team member—giving them access in your EHR to complete the tasks needed for their role, granting them appropriate levels of account access, and tailoring their role’s technical capabilities to their job.
With SimplePractice’s group practice EHR features, you can add new account members at any time, assigning them specialized roles with varied permission levels that give them access to certain features. For example, you can have a “Scheduler” who is able to manage your calendar and assign clinicians to clients who request appointments, but they won’t be able to access any clinical documentation.
Organized calendar features
Having an easy to use—and customizable—calendar is an essential feature of your EHR system. It’s helpful to have a calendar that allows you to group and filter out specific clinicians and locations, that way you can view just the relevant appointments to complete a specific task and streamline scheduling.
You’ll also want your staff to be able to identify clients who have outstanding payments or determine whether a client is a new patient, so you can send them the appropriate documentation—like invoices or intake forms.
SimplePractice’s advanced calendar filters can boost your team’s efficiency. Both your clinical and administrative staff can navigate shared calendars and easily identify specific types of appointments.
For example, you can filter your calendar to see clients who have specific types of insurance, or isolate appointments that have action items that need to be taken before the client’s next appointment.
Insurance and billing
It’s essential that your group practice has an efficient insurance billing system. Whether you have a biller on staff or your clinicians handle their own billing, you’ll want to make sure that the EHR you choose suits your practice’s billing and bookkeeping needs.
Some questions to think about when selecting an EHR include:
- Is billing fully integrated into the system?
- Can you easily create and share invoices, statements, and superbills?
- Are you able to file insurance claims electronically?
- Can clients set up autopay?
- Can you easily create, send, and manage batches of claims?
Scheduling and client communication
As a behavioral health clinician, you know the importance of effective communication with clients. But the more clients your practice sees, the more confusing it can become to keep track of appointments and outstanding payments and forms.
This is why it’s key to choose an EHR that enables you to streamline communication, and in some cases, automate it.
When thinking about the features you want from an EHR, ask yourself:
- Does it have the ability to send automatic reminders about upcoming appointments?
- Is the ability to see clients via telehealth integrated into the system?
- Can you easily manage no-shows and cancellations?
- Do new and existing clients have the ability to request appointments online and see your availability?
- Can you easily set up recurring appointments?
- Are you able to send paperless intake forms and consent forms online?
- Is messaging on the platform secure?
Paperless intake and document creation
If you dislike dealing with endless, time-consuming paperwork, you may want to consider choosing an EHR that allows you run a fully paperless practice. With a fill client caseload, the last thing you want to do is spend hours manually printing, filling, and organizing forms.
Going paperless can save you time when it comes to:
- Intake forms and consent forms
- Tracking client progress through MBC, using the PHQ-9 or GAD-7
- Client records and notes
- Notes and templates to share with clients
- Organizing client documentation
Going paperless can also save you time and money on overhead costs associated with buying paper, printers, and printer cartridges—leaving you with more time to see patients.
Client waitlist
The demand for mental health care—specifically substance use, anxiety, and depression treatment—remains high. As a group practice, you may be receiving more appointment requests than your practice can handle. According to the American Psychological Association, 72% of practitioners have longer waitlists than before the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Therefore, it’s important that the EHR you select provides you with the ability to keep track of all prospective clients who have been added to your client waitlist.
SimplePractice’s client waitlist feature allows you to easily add or remove clients, schedule appointments directly from the waitlist, filter the waitlist by clinician or client location, and more.
Having an organized client waitlist can help boost efficiency in your practice, enabling you and your team to focus on delivering quality care.
Measurement-based care
The more clients your practice serves, the more important it is that you have a way to measure and track your clients’ progress.
Measurement-based care (MBC) is a tool that enables clinicians to collect data over the course of a client’s treatment to see how they are progressing toward their goals.
Using tools such as the GAD-7 and PHQ-9, clinicians can send self-reporting measures to clients on a recurring basis. When clients submit their questionnaires, their scores are automatically calculated for you—giving you a visual representation of their progress. Depending on their score, clinicians can adjust treatment plans as necessary.
This is a key feature for group practices that see dozens of clients. Tracking the state of your clients’ mental health, your practices’ collective effectiveness at meeting treatment goals, and evaluating clients’ symptom severity over-time will ultimately enable you and your staff to make data-informed treatment decisions.
Support
As a group practice owner, you’ll want to select an EHR practice management software that helps you deliver better care to your clients—and also provides a great employee experience for your team.
When selecting an EHR, another important feature to consider is whether or not it has a robust support system in place should you have any questions or need any technical help.
Does it have email, live chat, on-demand classes, one-on-one video calls, and phone support? Consider which mode of support is most important to you and best serves your team.
HIPAA compliance and security
Perhaps the most important EHR features for group and solo practices alike is that it is HIPAA compliant and secure.
With more than one clinician working at your practice, it’ll be extra essential to ensure all protected health information (PHI) remains secure and confidential.
Specific security features that you may want to look out for include:
- Two-step verification
- HITRUST certification
- Data privacy
- Secure servers
- Network protection
How SimplePractice helps you confidently manage your group practice
SimplePractice is an all in one practice management software that helps you confidently manage a group practice and handle everything from insurance billing and client work to team management and business operations.
Streamline insurance billing with easy-to-use tools that enable you and your clinicians to create, submit and manage batches of claims all within SimplePractice. Or, opt to let professionals handle insurance billing on your behalf, from claim submission to claim resolution.
Plus, your group practice clinicians benefit from integrated client care and management tools. Clinicians can automatically send and analyze client measures like the PHQ-9 and GAD-7, while keeping track of client outcomes over time, and seamlessly manage client engagement from one Client Portal.
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