The Best EHR for Orthopedic Surgeons Combined with an Outstanding Revenue Cycle Management System
Written by: Auren Weinberg M.D., M.B.A. and Cheryl Reifsnyder, PhD
Today’s orthopedic practices face a myriad of challenges beyond their primary mission of ensuring excellent patient care. Navigating the reimbursement cycle has become increasingly complex, requiring practices to comply with constantly changing regulatory requirements and medical billing procedures. Medical billing for specialty practices, such as orthopedics, requires special handling, pre-certification, and authorization, and the associated specialty-specific knowledge to streamline processes and successfully attain accurate reimbursement.
The result? As shown in a comprehensive white paper from the American Medical Association and Mathematica, medical professionals are having increasing difficulty getting paid.
To navigate this challenging landscape, orthopedic surgeons need more than just a typical Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. They require the best EHR for orthopedics combined with the most efficient Practice Management and Revenue Cycle Management solutions. Let’s explore how Veradigm’s EHR product performs in this sphere.
All-inclusive practice management
Orthopedic practices have to deal with high patient volumes and complex scheduling and billing needs—so the ideal orthopedic-specific EHR will go beyond managing patient medical records to include an integrated system for comprehensive practice management. Orthopedic surgeons should have a color-coded schedule with comprehensive patient health records, billing balances, and transaction histories all available in a cloud-based solution. These ensure that practices can minimize double-entry and auto-populate patient details to clinical charts, e-prescriptions, lab orders, and medical claims.
Integrating EHR and practice management solutions will also help streamline information flow between patient records, scheduling, and medical billing, improving the efficiency of both administrative and financial processes.
Veradigm EHR
Veradigm EHR provides these features and more with its integrated practice management solution. Veradigm Practice Management helps maximize operational efficiency with flexible scheduling, including a guided scheduling feature that uses AI to optimize providers’ schedules. It streamlines administrative processes with advanced check-in features. Veradigm Practice Management also provides automated distribution of work queues to enhance resource productivity, with predefined work lists based on preferences.
In addition to scheduling, an end-to-end practice management solution needs to seamlessly integrate functionalities such as clinical workflows, advanced clinical tools, patient engagement, and medical billing. Let’s look at some of these specific features in greater detail.
Enhancing productivity through advanced clinical tools
The best orthopedic EHR should offer intuitive tools tailored for orthopedics.
Orthopedic-specific templates can save clinicians time by enabling them to create patient notes without clicks or the need to access pull-down menus. Orthopedic-specific templates can also save time by enabling clinicians to tailor and optimize workflows according to how they enter data and interact with their EHR.
Templates require orthopedic-specific fields to accommodate the wide range of data types orthopedic clinicians need to collect and use. Customizable content allows clinicians to adapt templates and workflows to their evolving needs.
These tools can all speed up charting, increasing clinicians’ time available for patients.
Veradigm EHR
Veradigm EHR delivers a selection of preloaded orthopedic-specific templates and protocols. Templates are fully customizable to help ease documentation. They allow information fields to be populated with a single click based on patients’ previous visits or conditions.
Veradigm EHR allows providers to choose from a range of charting methods, including traditional keyboard entry and voice recognition. Customizing charting methods allows physicians to optimize charting efficiency according to their specific requirements. Veradigm EHR’s charting options even include the ability for surgeons to annotate directly onto diagrams and X-ray images.
Veradigm EHR also enables physicians to drastically improve efficiency by ordering diagnostic tests, such as X-rays or MRI, from within the EHR workflow. Results will appear directly in the patient’s EHR record.
Elevating patient engagement and empowerment
In the era of digitization, modern orthopedic software needs to prioritize patient engagement. This includes features such as a paperless check-in processes, automated text and email reminders, and real-time insurance verification. Most important, orthopedic practices require a secure HIPAA-compliant patient portal where patients can book appointments, communicate with healthcare professionals, and make payments. Moreover, pre- and post-surgical educational content, provided directly through the EHR, can significantly benefit patient understanding and compliance.
Veradigm EHR
Veradigm EHR includes Veradigm FollowMyHealth (formerly FollowMyHealth), a leading mobile-first patient engagement platform. FollowMyHealth is a cloud-based tool that provides a convenient, easy-to-access collaborative environment for patients and providers. In addition, Veradigm FollowMyHealth was recently recognized by KLAS, a prominent healthcare solution evaluator, as Most Improved Software Product in its 2023 Best in KLAS report.
Veradigm FollowMyHealth can help your practice streamline the patient experience, improving both patient satisfaction and revenue generation while eliminating the need for disparate patient engagement solutions. Its key features include:
- Patient outreach communication
- Appointment self-scheduling
- Electronic check-in and clinical assessments
- Telehealth virtual modalities of care, including email and video visits
- After-visit summaries, instructions, and education
- Remote patient monitoring
- Online payment features
Veradigm FollowMyHealth’s user-friendly portal enables patients to access vital health data, encouraging more active participation in their care journey.
Revolutionizing revenue collection with advanced revenue cycle management
The best orthopedic revenue cycle management solutions should prioritize a streamlined patient experience with clean claims, timely medical statements, and promptly addressed denied claims. Direct communication with revenue collection experts, especially those skilled in orthopedic billing and coding, is paramount. Practices require complete transparency into their financial status to ensure optimal orthopedic revenue cycle management.
Veradigm EHR
Veradigm EHR boosts practice productivity, increases cash flow, and improves your bottom line with an integrated, comprehensive revenue cycle management solution. Veradigm Revenue Cycle Services (RCS) (formerly Allscripts Revenue Cycle Management) is an administrative and financial management solution that manages the entire revenue cycle from initial contact to payment collection.
Veradigm RCS helps your practice address billing and revenue cycle challenges by keeping you up to date with transitions to value-based care and complex billing regulations created by MACRA, Meaningful Use, and ICD-10 guidelines. Veradigm RCS provides true denial management to catch denials and prevent repeat denials, fostering cleaner claims. This solution also enables real-time access to advanced analytics and expertise, providing superior control of your finances.
Key features include:
- Eligibility and authorization verification: Check patient eligibility before visits to increase payment speed.
- Collections, claims, and denial management: Reduce denials, process more claims, and increase patient collections at time of visit.
- Account management and advanced analytics: Gain deeper insights into your practice’s financial health.
- Real-time reporting: Easily access real-time information on charges, payments, claim statuses, and current A/R aging and coding trends to help measure financial performance.
Veradigm RCS currently serves more than 27,000 providers, handling over $3 billion in payments annually. With 30+ years of experience, we deliver 98% net collections and a 98% first-pass clean-claims rate. Our clients have averaged revenue improvements of 2% to 5%.1
ePrescribe orthopedics functions
Electronic prescribing of medications has been shown to help improve patient satisfaction, medication adherence, and clinician efficiency. For orthopedics practices, where pain management and working with diagnostic and imaging facilities are essential elements of patient care, Electronic Prescribing of Controlled Substances (EPCS) and streamlined communication with laboratories are critical. The best EHR for orthopedic practices needs to facilitate orthopedic e-prescribing functions; enable electronic prescription of medications, including controlled substances; and provide direct lab and imaging order functionalities—ideally, integrating these functions directly with your EHR system.
Veradigm EHR
Veradigm ePrescribe is an affordable, comprehensive, easy-to-use solution for electronic prescribing, certified by Surescripts and the Office of National Coordinator Authorized Certification Body. Veradigm ePrescribe can help your providers save time by enabling them to generate prescriptions electronically from within the clinical workflow. This solution also delivers patient medical histories and formularies and performs automatic checks for medication interactions during the e-prescribing process.
Veradigm ePrescribe includes additional advanced electronic prescribing features. Veradigm eAuth helps you supply prescribed medications to your patients more quickly by automatically submitting prior authorization requests from within your e-prescribing workflow. Veradigm RxTruePrice delivers patient-specific medication cost information at the point of care, enabling you to provide patients with information about medication pricing and cost-saving alternatives. EPCS digitally transfers prescriptions directly to patients’ chosen pharmacies, helping your practice ensure compliance with meaningful use requirements for prescribing controlled substances.
The ideal orthopedic EHR
While different options are available, the ideal choice for an orthopedic EHR should integrate comprehensive practice management tools, innovative clinical features, advanced patient engagement solutions, and efficient revenue cycle management functionalities. With Veradigm’s EHR product and these essential features in mind, orthopedic surgeons can truly streamline their practices for success.
Want to learn more? Contact us today for a free demonstration or to speak with a representative.
Watch this video to see how Dr. Patella transforms his orthopedic practice with Veradigm’s comprehensive solutions.
Don’t miss our other blogs for orthopedic practices:
- Spotlight on Orthopedics Practices: 7 Best EHR Software Features with Veradigm EHR, Part 1
- Spotlight on Orthopedics Practices: 7 Best EHR Software Features with Veradigm EHR, Part 2
References:
- Veradigm 2021, Internal Data on File.