As a larger behavioral health organization providing residential or inpatient services, you rely heavily on the technology in your practice management tool belt. Reducing administrative workload while increasing visibility in reporting, revenue generation, and workflow clarity are essential, without them, your agency runs the risk of collapsing into chaos.
So, you likely already work with an EHR to provide you with tons of clinical support tools, but is it serving all your current practice management needs? Check out this list of priceless inpatient behavioral healthcare functionalities your organization needs to thrive.
Revenue Cycle Management
As much as we would love to be able to care for our patients with no charge, unfortunately we need to generate revenue to keep the lights on and compensate that. Revenue generation is also key to expanding your organization’s footprint in order to serve more people and to innovating to improve quality of care.
Yet, even if you’re seeing a steady influx of patients, you could be leaving revenue on the table. The healthcare revenue cycle is complicated and tedious, and with insurance companies not making it any easier, it can be easy for income to fall through the cracks. Roadblocks like claim denials and reimbursement delays can harm your revenue generation and cause financial stress for your organization.
Any strong billing department, especially for larger behavioral health agencies who are working with dozens of providers and hundreds of patients, needs to know their practice management suite can be trusted to efficiently and effectively automate revenue cycle management.
From charge creation to scrubbing claims and submitting to payers with the help of a clearing house to following up on claim status and helping you quickly move denied and rejected claims through corrections, a trusted revenue cycle management tool is essential. When implemented correctly, it can be an investment that pays for itself over and over again.
Dashboards
You can’t begin to enact positive change for your inpatient behavioral healthcare organization without first quantifying and qualifying the current state of your agency. We won’t go into too much detail about how important reporting services are, but we do want to stress how critical it is to have proper dashboards developed for your team.
As an inpatient behavioral healthcare facility, your hands are full managing the day-to-day responsibilities of practice management and patient care. It can be hard to find the time to build and pull reports every time you need answers to questions. That’s where dashboards come in.
Though they make take a bit of time upfront to get them set up properly in order to display the metrics you need, once developed, they are a handy tool. With administrative dashboards, you have the information you need right at your fingertips and don’t have to worry about complicated reports.
Electronic Prescribing of Controlled Substances (EPCS)
Though this may seem more of a clinical support tool, there’s a lot that goes into Electronic Prescribing of Controlled Substances (EPCS). Serving as a gateway into the complicated and ever-changing world of compliance, prescribing controlled substances introduces a whole new regulatory burden. By partnering with an EHR that offers certified EPCS tools, however, you are able to relieve your staff of this practice management burden.
Bed Management
When your inpatient services reach a certain scale, your bed management needs to be ship-shape. Having the real-time operational status of your patient placement is vital to make sure patients are taken care of. With electronic bed management as part of your EHR, you can easily manage this process and, by keeping your operations smooth, you can prevent jumbles that could cost your team time and your organization money.
More than an EHR
If you’re reading this article and noticing a feature or functionality that is missing or not meeting your needs, it could be time to consider making a switch. Schedule a demo of TenEleven’s Electronic Clinical Record (eCR) and see how our software supports these functionalities and more.
