Reporting: Why It’s Essential for Your Practice

Your electronic medical record (EMR) and practice management (PM) systems capture a lot of information with every patient encounter. Having technology capable of creating reports and presenting them in a useful way allows you to quickly make key business decisions to improve or maintain peak practice performance in areas from clinical efficiency to financial measures. However, practices that do not take advantage of such solutions may miss out on opportunities or be delayed in making important decisions.

Managing different applications to capture data, develop reports and analyze findings can become time consuming. A better approach is to use a reporting solution that integrates directly with the PM system and includes data analytics capabilities to make reporting and analysis faster, easier and more insightful. With an integrated system, practices can develop insights faster because data is shared seamlessly between applications. Whether the practice wants a real-time reporting view through dashboards or more in-depth reports to guide strategic decisions, a fully integrated reporting platform makes both easier.

Analytics Are Crucial in The Value-based Care Environment

Before the health care industry’s transition to value-based reimbursement, practices could compensate for rising practice costs by seeing more patients, delivering more services or selling more consumables. The shift to value-based payments now ties reimbursements to quality, patient outcomes and practice costs, which will make it more challenging for providers to increase revenue by traditional means.

Analyzing practice costs and revenue should become a routine part of operations to ensure the practice not only stays financially stable, but also grows amidst challenging and changing business demands. Likewise, care quality metrics—which are often linked to value-based payments—should be monitored closely through the practice's data monitoring solution.

The demands created by the change in reimbursement models are part of the reason why 20 percent of health care organizations are searching for a new data analytics platform, according to survey results from research technology firm Reaction. Survey results also indicate that these organizations are recognizing the importance of integration between reporting systems and other software solutions, considering 69 percent of respondents agreed that an ideal data analytics configuration is a single-vendor approach.

Reporting Guides Behavior

Because analytics provide visual representations of data through dashboards, practices that use an analytics solution in tandem with their reporting software can easily manage these metrics and spot trends in time to correct potential imbalances. This helps them identify necessary performance improvements immediately and instruct staff to make quick workflow adjustments if needed.

When practices need assistance with strategic financial decisions such as expanding locations or adding new services, they can create custom reports based on historical data to build a case that guides such decisions. In the shorter term, reporting allows practices to identify quality issues that may need further action, such as providing additional training or increasing staff.

Efficiency and Customization Are Key

While all practices should aim for efficiency, high-volume practices seem to have the most at stake when it comes to saving time. Busy practices benefit from software that is quick, user friendly and fully loaded with options to work with the practice's schedule.

The following are some things to look for in a reporting solution:

• Runs reports quickly without interrupting other tasks by freezing up the entire system
• Integrates directly with the practice's PM solution
• Offers ability to automate or schedule recurring reports

Staff members and providers are unlikely to continue using a solution that frustrates them. Therefore, it is best for practices to ensure that their chosen solution can run reports smoothly, quickly and simultaneously to other tasks so there is little resistance to maintaining metrics within the practice on a consistent basis.

A reporting system offered by your PM vendor automatically pulls the needed data points from the PM, thereby reducing the inaccuracy risks associated with repetitive data entry across multiple systems.

Automating the report creation process by scheduling reports to run at specific intervals also saves time and makes reporting easier to incorporate into daily workflows. Analytics and reporting technology should offer standard reports that most practices would use, as well as custom reports that users can create and save to get the specific data insights they need.

Looking for a robust reporting solution to improve decision-making in your practice? Learn more about Nextech's reporting and analytics solutions »