Urgent Care Software: Know What’s Right for Your Business
This guide is for anyone looking to understand the functionality and benefits of urgent care SaaS and services to determine whether it could solve your challenges — even when comparing the tool you have to one that is designed for urgent care. We’ll cover:
Operating an urgent care looks different today than it did just a few years ago. The technology that once made sense for a clinic may now be outdated, inefficient, ineffective, or — in some cases — too robust. When it comes to software needs, the size of your clinic or business is less relevant now than is competition and desire for growth. Even smaller practices with one clinic may invest in a strong tech stack so that they can meet the needs of their patients, cut costs, maximize revenue, handle more patients, and beat competitors.
Electronic Medical Records/Practice Management (EMR/PM)
The EMR/PM is foundational to any urgent care practice. However, the types of EMR/PM systems on the market vary, with many of them designed for larger entities like hospitals. Let’s look at what kinds of features and benefits this kind of system should offer an urgent care clinic for the best efficiency and ROI.
High-level functionality of an urgent care EMR/PM
Simplify charting
Speed up workflow
Increase accuracy
Monitor performance
Features and benefits of an urgent care EMR/PM
Built-in urgent care coding recommendations to save time and optimize revenue
Charting templates designed for urgent care to give providers more time to spend with patients and reduce door-to-door time
System integrations to reduce errors, duplicity, and improve speed — improving denial rates, door-to-door time, patient experiences, and staff morale
OccMed functionality to seamlessly support one of the most common service lines in urgent care without sacrificing efficiency and accuracy
Electronic patient registration to — along with RTE (see section on revenue cycle management) — reduce most registration times to under two minutes
Robust reporting that measures performance for better-informed decision-making
Take a deep dive into what an EMR/PM system does in our resource page Urgent Care EMR and Practice Management 101 >>
What Defines the Best EMR for Urgent Care?
There are many options for EMR/PMs, but few designed with urgent care in mind. This page lays out the pitfalls of large systems that impede urgent care efficiency and walks through features you should look for in a new solution.
Patient engagement (PE) is certainly a 1:1 relationship between your staff and patients, but software helps you go beyond to deliver an exceptional experience for your patients and speed processes for your business. While your reputation management strategy is also holistic to the patient journey, tracking and executing the right tactics are most closely tied to PE software.
High-level functionality of an urgent care PE solution
Optimize throughput
Retain patients
Refine processes
Protect reputation
Features and benefits of an urgent care PE solution
Online scheduling gives patients a sense of control and manages expectations of wait time
Smart queues also help manage expectations, reduce wait time by 80%, and reduce appointment abandonment
Online registration reduces errors and duplicity, minimized tedious tasks for staff, and drastically slashes registration time enough to see 2.5 times more patients in a day
Automatic text survey links collect feedback that impact your NPS and also earns 2-3 times more online reviews
Team scorecards generate from survey feedback give providers a snapshot of their NPS
AI-powered ticketing system scans feedback and automatically opens tickets and assigns to specific clinic managers for follow-up (specifically for complaints)
Dashboards let you see and manage Google reviews from inside your system — so you can sort Google reviews by your chosen metric, and also reply or leave comments as needed, all in one place
Provider-specific reporting of net promoter scores from survey questions specific to the patient’s provider lets managers gauge the overall experience vs that with the individual provider
Compare your clinic against up to three competitor’s star ratings in one dashboard so you can quickly measure progress and reputation
Learn more about patient engagement strategies, benefits, and solutions
How to Increase Patient Volume: Managing the Highs and Lows
Whether you want to improve patient flow to accommodate more people because it’s busy, or acquire new patients because it’s not, this guide has you covered. It’s loaded with tips to teach you:
How to save enough time to see up to five more patients a day
The easiest way to expand services for more revenue
Three marketing channels that matter the most in attracting new patients
Specific strategies for campaigns that will keep patients coming back
While revenue cycle management (RCM) is an overall process that dictates how quickly and completely you get paid, your PM software should support efficiency and accuracy within that process. In addition, it might make financial sense to use a third party for your medical billing when the right partner can maximize your revenue.
High-level functionality of RCM tools and services
Increase efficiency
Accurate coding through innate recommendations
Automate process of billing operations
Maintain compliance
Features and benefits of billing tools native to the PM
Registration tools to collect patient information not captured in preregistration helps prevent denials
Charge Capture translates medical services into billable charges to optimize revenue
Coding recommendations based on the latest regulations help providers and billers ensure claims are accurate and clean — speeding up reimbursement Claim submission — submitting billable fees to insurance companies
Real-time Insurance Verification (RTV)/Real-time Insurance Eligibility (RTE) reveal before the exam whether insurance will cover the visit, and by how much — allowing you to set expectations for payment and develop payment plans for a better patient experience and faster collections
Credit Card on File helps you get paid faster and give patients less to manage after the visit
Balance-due Text Reminders let you collect payments twice as fast and reduce paper statements with automated texts sent to patients reminding them of their balances and providing links to pay with a click right from their mobile device
Features and benefits of RCM services
Remittance processing for easy patient billing and faster resolution
Insurance follow-up to save time you’d spend collecting payment from insurers
Patient collections takes the hassle out of collecting outstanding/late balances
Ancillary charge capture with optimized E/M makes you $11-14 more per visit
Best practices, policies, and procedures to take the stress out of compliance and regulatory red tape
Expert contracting and credentialing guidance
Overall fewer: A.R over 120 days, DSO over 30 days,
Learn more about revenue cycle management tips, processes, and billing services
How Optimized Are Your Urgent Care Billing Practices?
Answer 10 simple questions in this self-evaluation to get a clearer picture of what you’re doing right (and maybe not so right) in your billing process — and how each step of your process impacts the health of your revenue cycle.
While the reporting functionality in most PMs is quite robust, this kind of data can feel too overwhelming and time-consuming to draw real insights into how numbers translate to action. This is where business intelligence (BI) comes in. It simplifies complex data so that you can quickly and clearly measure performance, personalize dashboards to the data you want, and make informed decisions.
High-level functionality of BI
Better data
Deeper insights
Staff accountability
Improved outcomes
Features and benefits of BI
Flexible, personalized dashboards that let staff members take their own growth and improvement in their own hands
Highly visual, intuitive reporting saves staff time and frustration
KPIs and data views designed specifically for urgent care drive better decision-making
Pre-built dashboards provide easy analysis of key clinical, operational, and financial metrics — with various sharing options to show key stakeholders the KPIs they care about
Visibility to clinical data, KPIs, and outcomes gives you the specific information you need to drive positive change
Learn more about the benefits and uses of integrated business intelligence software
Not sure about the difference between reporting and BI? Read this blog >>
Learn How Successful Urgent Cares Make Business Decisions
You don’t need to hire a specialist or sit through training to adopt a business mentality. This guide walks you through four key data sets you can track at your clinic(s) using the tools you already have — metrics that empower you to determine what will drive the growth you desire, including:
Visit volume — make sure you can handle an optimal amount of patients
Speed of payment — identify bottlenecks and other factors preventing you from getting paid
Value of visit — plan/budget against what you actually get paid
Risk exposure —identify root causes of claim denials and delayed payment
