Celebrating Independent Physicians: How the Right Partner Can Help You Remain Independent
Written by: Robert Lupo
In the first blog in our Celebrating Independent Physician series, we discussed how independent physician practices are an important component of healthcare infrastructure in the United States. They are a source of timely, preventative care, help manage their patient’s acute and chronic conditions, and strive to prevent hospitalizations. Independently practicing physicians can enjoy greater autonomy in their practice and can experience greater patient engagement as well as higher patient and physician satisfaction.
The second blog in our series, highlights the challenges that independent physicians can face, including difficulties in creating economies of scale while preserving career autonomy, managing administrative and regulatory burdens, and changes in consumer expectations.
For our valued clients, remaining an independent medical practice is monumentally important. Partnering with Veradigm to support their vision to remain independent allows our clients to focus on excellent patient care. According to Jason Ferenczy-Zumpano, Practice Administrator at Cornerstone Medical Care of Brandon and Sun City Center, “Remaining fiercely physician owned and physician led is a priority to maintain autonomy for our providers and keep the focus on delivering excellent patient care in the ambulatory setting, without the mixed priorities and red tape of larger organizations with stakeholders with competing priorities.”
While independent physicians may experience challenges, they do not have to face them alone. Having the right partner with the right solutions and services can help your independent practice sustain steady growth, while keeping your autonomy as an independent practice. Veradigm continues to innovate and enhance its solutions and services with the needs of independent clients top of mind. We strive to help save you time and resources so you can focus on providing quality patient care. Keep reading to learn how Allscripts/Veradigm is the right partner for its clients who practice independently with solutions and services that help you work smarter and not harder.
1. Veradigm EHR™ will be integrated into the Carequality Interoperability Framework
The integration of Carequality into the Veradigm EHR solution is critically important to us. With the integration of Carequality, clients are able to connect to health information networks throughout the country, giving our clients accelerated communication between and among health data networks.
Benefits of Carequality for our Clients:
- Stay independent with a reliable partner who has adopted Carequality
- Be equipped with all of the patient information needed to provide quality care
- Take the burden off your patients with comprehensive information that is readily available wherever your patient goes for care
At Veradigm, we understand the importance for our clients to be able to connect and share health information to various stakeholders across the nation, and we are actively working to make this available to our clients soon.
2. Veradigm Revenue Cycle Management Services has a new Staff Augmentation offering
Supplementing your staff as an independent practice can be a continuous challenge, and many practices across the country are feeling the impact of staff shortages. According to a survey from the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), 76% of medical practices report making operation changes due to staffing shortages and 59% of medical practice leaders say better pay and benefits elsewhere were the top cause of staff turnover in 2021.
The Veradigm Revenue Cycle Management Services (RCMS) team offers a new service to support practices in their time of need to provide quick relief for billing projects for a short term or long-term basis. With Revenue Cycle Staff Augmentation, practices can leverage the support of Veradigm RCMS staff to expand their resources to tackle billing projects such as charge entry, payment posting, legacy accounts receivable work, or getting caught up with current accounts receivable work. Designed with independent providers in mind, this new offering also optimizes intuitive and powerful reports in CURVE Analytics for reporting and denial management, providing financial insight and actionable data for better business decisions.
3. Automation and Guided Intelligence built into Veradigm Practice Management
Veradigm Practice Management (VPM) is designed as a single source of truth for all revenue, reporting and analytics, supporting every phase in the revenue cycle. With embedded intelligence and automation, VPM delivers excellence to our clients and transforms practice productivity, streamlines workflows and saves time and resources.
VPM’s smart features are designed with our clients’ best interests in mind:
- Billing Automation automates back-office workflows, which helps to drive greater efficiency and enables more time for staff to be devoted to other priorities
- The System Rule Manager drives clean claims by automatically invoking change on a voucher based on rules-based, user-defined logic at the time of charge entry
- Guided Scheduling leverages predictive analytics to prioritize appointment types and holds slots for high priority visits while reducing no-shows and last-minute cancellations
- Address Verification helps to verify address information and standardize patient contact data at the point of contact at the time of registration
- Office Manager serves as the virtual workspace for back and front office staff
PM strives to provide meaningful features that support independent practices in their daily tasks and takes the burden of manual work off of staff by automating these features, giving staff the opportunity to focus on other priorities.
4. Enhancements to the Mobile Patient Experience and Personal Health Record with FollowMyHealth®
FollowMyHealth continues to bring solution enhancements to our clients, including updates that improve the Personal Health Record and the Mobile Patient Experience (MPE).
Upcoming enhancements to the Personal Health Record include the ability to include PDF attachments to secure messages within the portal. This allows patients the opportunity to give their provider more information to support the facilitation of better patient care. Providers can view these attachments in the EHR and respond with a secure message to the patient. Also, there will be additional options to create custom text and links within the FollowMyHealth portal, giving practices the ability to provide more useful information to patients.
For the Mobile Patient Experience, the FollowMyHealth team is working to move the configuration into the dashboard, aiming to make it easy for clients to set up different campaigns and make changes over time if clients want to expand into other features. This will allow users to set up complex rules that define when they outreach to patients for the different campaigns. Another enhancement includes a waitlist configuration that allows for texting patients to be included on a waitlist for an appointment and can also offer earlier appointments to patients on the waitlist.
Our suite of smart and innovative solutions and services is focused on meeting your needs as an independent practice. Designed to maximize your resources and time, Veradigm works with you to drive growth and stability in your independent practice as you focus on what you do best – provide quality patient care.
To learn more about any of the features and offerings mentioned in this article, reach out to your Sales Representative or email insidesales@allscripts.com.