With the advent of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)/HITECH Act and the promise of stimulus funds, physicians are mulling ways to add electronic medical records (EMRs) to their practices.
Even providers skeptical of the reimbursement process can't afford not to consider, starting in 2011, an attempt to secure up to $44,000 per physician over five years. Some physicians even propose that those who don’t implement an EMR are diminishing the profession and may be breaking the Hippocratic Oath by not using technology to improve the care of patients, particularly those with chronic conditions.
Group practices pondering stepping up to the EMR plate know they have several routes to implementation, including working directly with EMR vendors and their resellers or leveraging hospital-owned systems. For many reasons, savvy physicians and administrators are starting to rely on third-party billing companies to provide the quickest route to success in adding and supporting an EMR.
Many physician practices and billing companies have invested time and energy in a long-term working relationship, with physicians and administrators coming to depend on the biller’s business acumen and broad technical expertise in helping run the practice. Years of working hand-in-hand with medical office staff give billing personnel a solid grasp of how the particular practice functions and how best practices can help improve effectiveness. Billing staff is attuned to how work flows most efficiently in the practice, the peculiarities of its data and patient population and the peccadilloes of particular providers.
Furthermore, billing companies understand the legislative landscape and ways to clear technical hurdles and pave the way to stimulus funds. Comprised of more than 600-member organizations, the Healthcare Billing & Management Association (HBMA) is helping physicians access necessary information from EMRs to facilitate reimbursement and meet medical and business needs. The California-based organization is dedicated to helping members monitor relevant trends and learn how best to implement EMRs into group practices through a task force, white papers, annual conferences and a series of educational summits.
In-depth knowledge of the EMR space helps third-party billing companies downsize the daunting plethora of EMR vendors in the marketplace to a short list of only those systems which best suite a practice’s financial, functional and specialty needs. Billing companies are counseling clients on whether it is best to consider an EMR with broad capabilities that can be tailored to and grow with the practice’s needs or an EMR that is designed particularly for a specialty.
The staffs at third-party billing companies are well versed in coding and compliance, including those of clinical backgrounds to ensure the best marriage of administrative and clinical functions.
Billing companies offer fast, but carefully phased-in implementations. While EMR vendors start implementation at the absolute beginning, billing services can add an EMR to a practice in weeks rather than months because there is already a data center supporting the IT infrastructure, software configurations and policies and procedures developed to support recommended business processes, modified to client requirements.
Last, but not least, because billing companies have an ongoing relationship with medical offices, their staff can be available long after go-live to troubleshoot problems, resolve them quickly and help physicians and their staff gain confidence and wring the most out of their EMR.
Patrick Lukacs, CPA, CHBME, is chief executive officer of Medinomics in Shreveport, LA, and leads HBMA's EHR task force. He can be reached at patrick@medinomics.com.
