Just because something is “the original” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best.  Would you rather hop on the expressway in a Ferrari FF or a Ford Model-T?  A similar mindset should prevail when choosing between the outdated client-server solution and a cloud-based EHR.

Years ago, client-server was king. But it was the only choice. As cloud-based EHRs evolved, they improved upon the foundation laid by client-server, particularly in the following five areas.

Implementation
Client-server solutions only run on in-house servers connected to your practice’s computers, which require both hardware and software installation. Cloud-based solutions bypass this part of the process by connecting through any computer with a solid Internet connection.

Costs
The ease of implementation for cloud-based EHR solutions can translate into big savings. Most cloud-based solutions charge only a flat-monthly fee, with system updates included at no extra cost.

On the other hand, client-server solutions require paying for the aforementioned hardware and software installation in addition to licensing fees, maintenance costs and upgrades.

Security
Client-server systems are housed in a room at your practice. This leaves patient data not only susceptible to theft, but also vulnerable to natural disasters that affect your practice. Also, data may not be encrypted, making it easily decipherable to common thieves.

Cloud-based EHR solutions take care of security concerns by encrypting data, so thieves can’t use the data even if they gain access to it. Which by the way isn’t easy since data is stored off-site in data centers with bank level security.

Flexibility
Because you have to install hardware with a client-server solution, they don’t adjust easily to the needs of your practice. If you receive an influx of patients or need to add a physician to the system, additional hardware/software may be required.

With a cloud-based solution, small practices are operating on the same servers as large hospitals, making any adjustments due to growth easier to handle.

Accessibility
Cloud-based EHRs can be accessed securely from any location with an Internet connection. If you’d like to work on something from home, it can be easily done. But with a client-server EHR, you can only access EHR data on computers installed with the vendor’s software, located at the practice.

In the end, the advantages of a cloud-based EHR are too numerous to ignore. This is one case where being old-fashioned isn’t a valued virtue.

If you’d like to find out why our web-based EHR solution is the best solution for your practice, please contact us at 1-877-342-7517 or hello@carecloud.com.

A version of this article was originally published on our sister site, Power Your Practice. Click here to read the original story.

Last week, CareCloud partnered with Jim Tate, a nationally recognized expert on Meaningful Use, to tackle the highly scrutinized issue of pre-payment audits.

When CMS announced up to 10% of eligible professionals would be audited prior to doling out EHR incentive payments, providers quickly became uneasy. Therefore, Tate offered expert advice for avoiding audits and what to do if you receive an audit engagement letter.

“Some audits are totally random but some are generated by the presence of unlikely data provided during the attestation,” said Tate. “If all percentage based measures you report have the same denominator, it is highly likely that the attestation has errors. Pay attention to the details, and don’t submit any attestation unless you clearly understand the details.”

In response to the numerous questions received both during and after the webinar, we compiled a list of the best Meaningful Use resources on the web for your convenience, including articles from our editorial sister site Power Your Practice.

If you have any questions about how our cloud-based EHR solution can help you avoid a Meaningful Use audit, contact us at 1-877-342-7517 or hello@carecloud.com.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services:

CMS Overview of EHR Incentive Audits

CMS Overview on Supporting Documents for Pre and Post-Attestation

FAQ on Meaningful Use Audits

Jim Tate:

EMR Advocates’ MU Audits Resource Page

Meaningful Use Audits: Q&A with Jim Tate 

Power Your Practice:

How Meaningful Use Audits Can Delay Payments

5 Focus Areas for Providers Moving Toward Stage 2

Meeting the 3 Trickiest Meaningful Use Core Objectives

Didn’t get a chance sit-in on the webinar? Click here to view a video copy and download the presentation slides.

Today, CareCloud and QuantiaMD couldn’t be any happier as we announce the release of our first annual Practice Profitability Index (PPI), a study crafted to measure U.S. physician practices on issues impacting their financial and operational health.

The survey is the result of a partnership between cloud-based health technology provider, CareCloud, and QuantiaMD, the nation’s largest online community and collaboration platform serving more than 170,000 physicians.

To celebrate the occasion, CareCloud CEO Albert Santalo announced the PPI release today at the inaugural HealthBeat 2013 Conference, sponsored by VentureBeat in San Francisco.

“Some of the greatest challenges highlighted from our PPI survey stem from the gap between changes underway at a systemic level in healthcare and their real-world impact on the daily lives of physicians, staff and patients,” said Santalo.

In total, 5,012 physicians contributed their insights to the PPI through an interactive online survey and related discussion groups, making it one of the largest physician studies of its kind.

The results of the CareCloud/QuantiaMD study culminated in both a report and an accompanying infographic, which can be found on CareCloud’s editorial sister site Power Your Practice.

“Utilizing the QuantiaMD platform and community, we will now work together to provide educational content about these topics and enable peer-to-peer collaboration on a mass scale to help physicians across the country make their practices more successful,” said Eric Schultz, Executive Chairman of QuantiaMD.

Both content pieces are indicative of the wellbeing of U.S. medical groups in the year ahead, revealing findings confirming the idea that patients receive better health outcomes when practices are thriving and efficient.

“The positive takeaway and hope for sustainable healthcare reform is the majority of physicians remain focused on sustaining their practices independently and feel technology aimed at operational improvement and guidance from their peers will be key focuses for success in the years ahead,” added Santalo.

Some of the key findings point to an overall downward trend in profitability among U.S. physician practices. In fact, two-thirds of physicians surveyed said they were more likely to foresee a negative profitability trend, rather than a positive one, in the year ahead.

Longing for more? Download the entire Practice Profitability Index report on our sister-site Power Your Practice. 

Good news: as of January the nationwide EHR adoption rate for family physicians was at nearly 70%. The bad news is that non-adopters point to an increase in security risks for digital files as the reason why they continue to use paper health records.

But it’s actually paper records that leave your practice in serious threat of a security breach.

Although improper handling can leave both paper records and EHRs at risk, EHRs are simply an overall safer solution.

Several security advantages EHRs hold over paper records include:

Encryption
Anyone who can manage to access a set of paper records can read them. This makes the information in paper records highly vulnerable to even the most rudimentary of thieves.

On the other hand, the information stored in EHRs is usually encrypted. Files that have been encrypted can’t be read without a specific code. So even if thieves are able to access the data in your EHR, it will be indecipherable to them.

Internal Control
With paper records, anyone working in your practice could potentially access patient data and use it for malicious purposes. Unfortunately, there’d be no way of tracking exactly who accessed a particular set of records.

By tracking users, EHRs make it easy to find out who accessed a compromised file. The source of the breach can then be located and dealt with accordingly.

Data Backup
Paper records are susceptible to disasters such as fires and hurricanes. If your practice has to face one of these catastrophes, patient records are likely to be permanently lost.

Cloud-based EHR systems protect your practice in case of disasters by using off-site security centers to house protected health information (PHI). This ensures patient data will be safe and accessible in case of an unfortunate occurrence at your practice.

Although some believe paper is a more secure solution, it is EHRs that overcome paper’s shortcomings and leave you with a more secure practice.

If you’d like to chat about how our web-based EHR solution can protect your practice from security breaches, please contact us at 1-877-342-7517 or hello@carecloud.com.

A version of this article was originally published on our sister site, Power Your Practice. Click here to read the original story.

When things change in the healthcare industry, such as diagnosis or procedure codes, a new version of your practice management software must be written and offered for sale. Therefore, one of the most important factors to consider when looking for a new PM system is where your system will live.

We’re here to tell you that web-based practice management systems offer many advantages over client-server software. By using technologies like cloud computing to lower costs, increase security and strengthen patient connectivity, PM systems have improved considerably over the past decade.

Web-based PM software is updated remotely as changes occur at no cost to the user. With web-based software, updates usually occur automatically and overnight, so there’s little disruption to your workflow. You can also access a web-based system from any browser on either a desktop or laptop, making it a more portable solution.

But deciding where your software will be housed isn’t the only factor to consider when researching PM system vendors. Let’s take a look at other issues our clients consider to be very important.

Price
First, the PM system has to be cost effective. Look into the price carefully. Each company values software differently, so make sure to consider all costs.

Ease of Use
You want to make sure the program is user friendly. There is a lot to learn in the field of medical billing, and you want to ensure getting accustomed to your software isn’t impossible. This way, you save time, sharpen your workflow and avoid high turnover rates.

Capable of Multiple Providers
Most web-based practice management systems will be capable of billing for more than one physician, but they may charge you for additional doctors you register down the line. Find out what their policy is on multiple providers.

Reports
Make sure the software you purchase is capable of running a wide variety of reports. For instance, aging reports are important and you’ll want them to be easy to read and contain a lot of information. You need to be able to run 30-, 60- and 90-day reports of outstanding claims.

Also, the software should let you choose a specific insurance company and, for example, be able to run a report of all the claims out to Medicare only over 60 days.

Last, some web-based systems also enable the daily aging of receivables – a valuable tool if you find that your payers operate on less traditional payment schedules.

Clearinghouses
You will want to see whether you have a choice of clearinghouses. If you have to use a vendor-specific clearinghouse, make sure you inquire on the cost of sending claims through that company.

Patient Statements
If you are going to be billing patients, your practice management system will need to be able to print out patient statements. All practice management systems will allow for this, but they offer them in different formats.

You may want to look over the capabilities of the patient statement formats. They offer different layouts and some are easier for the patients to understand than others. The easier the statement is to understand, the fewer phone calls you will receive from patients questioning their bills.

A practice management system is one of the most important tools you can use to run your office. If you carefully consider all of the above points, you should be able to choose a PM system that integrates well with your workflow and practice culture.

If you’d like to chat about how our web-based practice management solution is more efficient than servers-based systems, please contact us at 1-877-342-7517 or hello@carecloud.com.

A version of this article was originally published on sister site, Power Your Practice. Click here to read the original story by one of our contributors.

Would you allow someone with no previous dental experience perform a root canal on your son or daughter? Of course not.

Likewise, having an understanding of your practice’s workflows and processes is essential when selecting an EHR vendor. You’ll see it’s easier to recognize issues in advance and use procedural knowledge to choose the EHR features and functions that will streamline your workflow.

Practice workflows tend to focus on paper charts and the individuals each chart is passed to as it moves through the office. On any given visit, a chart can be handed off from a physician’s assistant to a nurse to a doctor to a biller, and so on.

With an EHR, though, the physical transfer of paper is eliminated and converted to a digital login process, which enhances workflow processes and PHI security. In turn, workflow processes that paper practices normally carry out mentally should be fully fleshed out prior to EHR implementation, which will carry out some of these practices in a more structured manner.

The implementation process is beneficial to your patients as well, seeing as paper charts don’t empower patients the way EHRs do. Nowadays, patients expect to be more involved in their personal care and will want to contribute data directly to the process.

This multi-level collaboration between physicians, staff and patients will help eliminate paper charts while bolstering health data through improved accessibility, accuracy and completeness.

By outlining your practice’s processes and workflows, you’ll know what your physicians and staff members need in an EHR. Use this information to determine the specific functional requirements of your new system and decide which questions to ask your EHR support team.

If you’d like to learn how our EHR solution integrates with your practice’s workflow, please feel free to contact us at 1-877-342-7517 or hello@carecloud.com.

A version of this article was originally published on sister site, Power Your Practice. Click here to read the original story by our seasoned Health IT Editor, Ahmed Mori. 

Prior to March, you could count on receiving your Meaningful Use incentive payment within 8 to 12 weeks of successful attestation. Not anymore. In March, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services began conducting Meaningful Use prepayment audits, which will delay payments.

According to CMS, between 5% and 10% of attesting physicians will be chosen for prepayment auditing. This is in addition to the post-payment audits that CMS has conducted since 2012, which will continue to affect another 5% to 10% of physicians.

What does this mean for you, the physician?

Jim Tate, President of EMR Advocate, Inc. and nationally recognized EHR expert, will address this question and more in our upcoming webinar on Meaningful Use audits.

In a bit of a preview, we sat down with Tate so he could answer some of our most pertinent questions about Meaningful Use audits.

1)   How do Meaningful Use audits disrupt a physician’s practice?
An audit requires a practice to immediately allocate sufficient resources to answer the request for documentation. There will be timelines associated with the audit, and they must be met.

2) What are a few things physicians can do to avoid getting audited? 
Some audits are totally random but some are generated by the presence of unlikely data provided during the attestation.  If all percentage based measures you report have the same denominator, it is highly likely that the attestation has errors. Pay attention to the details, and don’t submit any attestation unless you clearly understand the details.

3)   How do physicians know they have been chosen for an audit?
Physicians are notified based upon the contact information documented during the registration/attestation process. A sample of the “Audit Engagement Letter” is available here.

4)   What should physicians do to prepare for the auditing process?
The retention of all documentation used during the attestation is necessary. The auditors will ask you to provide evidence to justify your attestation and any discrepancies must be explained.  One of the most misunderstood requirements is the Security Risk Analysis. This does not apply to the vendor, but to the practice or hospital.  The auditors will want to see your Security Risk Analysis documentation.

5)   Will the audit process delay the payment of Meaningful Use incentives?
Until early this year, incentives were distributed based on the submission of the attestation.  Audits were not performed until after payments had been made. These post-payment audits have now been joined by pre-payment audits. These pre-payment audits must be completed successfully before incentive payments are disbursed. A delay in the pre-payment audit process will lead to a delay in potential incentive disbursement.

Tate will go into more detail about each of these questions, plus share tips and tales from the industry, in our upcoming webinar. With his advice, you’ll be able to keep pre- and post-payment Meaningful Use audits from slowing down your practice.

Register for next Thursday’s Meaningful Use Incentives: How to Avoid and Survive Audits webinar to hear additional insights directly from Tate.

Too often, providers implement EHRs without taking full advantage of their revenue making potential.

If you didn’t get a chance to attend Tuesday’s ROI of EHR webinar, this month, we spoke on how to generate long lasting profits with your EHR software beyond the initial investment.

In-house CareCloud experts Grant Ho, Michael Pepe and Brian Foster engaged this topic with a stimulating discussion on how to use your EHR to augment profits — even after collecting that much sought-after Meaningful Use incentive.

Immersed in the subject, attendees flooded us with great questions as the webinar came to a close. So many, we decided to post the best ones, along with the responses, for the world to see.

Q: Is there a charge for practice management training of the EHR or is that included? Also, are there attestation implementation charges?
A: Training is included during the Charts EHR implementation process. There are no Meaningful Use consulting charges or attestation fees.

Q: Does CareCloud have an evaluation tool in place for quality improvement?
A: Running a more efficient and profitable practice starts with knowing your business from inside and out. CareCloud Central’s comprehensive, easy-to-use cloud-based healthcare reporting and analytics system gives you the tools you need to measure, manage and resolve.

Our powerful healthcare reporting capabilities allow you to measure your practice’s performance in a practical and simple way, so you can make informed management decisions.

Q: How much financial data is available? Can we bring up comparison reports from this year versus last year on productivity of the provider?
A: From daily financials to patient demographic information, CareCloud Central collects and analyzes your practice metrics in the cloud-based healthcare analytics module. Reports are highly configurable, allowing you to search and filter by provider, resource, location, date, payer, procedure, diagnosis, by payment batch or by charge.

Healthcare reports can be run in multiple timeframes and formats giving you a detailed or summary view for recent or long-term data analysis.

Q: How is the data protected? Do you have readily available service metrics regarding uptime, security and natural disaster recovery?
A: Often, cloud-based solutions are more secure than on-premise systems. At CareCloud, we take HIPAA compliance and data security very seriously with 99% up time and secure data centers. This whitepaper does a good job of explaining our security policy at CareCloud.

Q: Is ePrecribing part of your EHR?
A: Our user-friendly, EHR solution CareCloud Charts offers ePrescription services that will help you digitally submit prescriptions with the touch of a button. Check out the rest of our work smarter, not harder EHR features, designed to make your life easier.

Q: How accessible is customer service with CareCloud? Will we understand the technician helping us?
A: We provide live support when you need it, which means you’ll speak to a live person when you need it, by phone or online chat. Whether you have a medical billing question, an implementation issue or a Health IT concern, we have a team of US-based experts to simplify even the most complicated questions.

Q: What CareCloud’s costs and how do you structure your pricing?
A: CareCloud offers two pricing models for our PM, EHR and RCM solutions: monthly subscription and encounter-based. We can tell you tell you about it in writing, but we’d be doing our designers an injustice if we didn’t show you both models on this easy to understand Pricing Chart.

Q: How many physicians is CareCloud currently supporting? What is the size of your largest physician group?
A: We have thousands of physicians in 45 states and over 50 specialties using the CareCloud solution. Our largest physician group has more than 170 doctors.

Q: Does the system bill for dental physicians
A: No. At the moment, we do not offer billing services for dental physicians.

Q: For those providers who feel more comfortable dictating into CareCloud Charts, is Care Cloud looking at the ability to achieve Clinical Language Understanding allowing unstructured data to be captured as structured data for reporting purposes?
A: While CareCloud does not have built-in functions for vocal dictation, we play nicely with third-party applications like Nuance Healthcare’s Dragon. They even share a similar vision regarding the future of healthcare.

Q: If I implement an EHR, but don’t attest for MU incentives now, will we still be penalized from CMA and Medicare reimbursements after 2015?
A: Yes you need to become a “meaningful user” to not be penalized by 2015.

Didn’t get a chance sit-in on the webinar? Click here to view a recorded copy and download the presentation slides.

Fun was in full effect last week when 25,005 runners took to the streets of Downtown Miami and Brickell Thursday night for the 2013 Mercedes-Benz Corporate Run. Whether walking or running the 5k course, CareCloud employees participated to promote fitness in the workplace and raise money for a good cause.

Let’s give Andres Gomez and Isirett Aguilar a hand for the fastest CareCloud mens and women’s times of 22:39 and 26:03.

View all of our results, here.

But, as you’ve probably already heard, there is much more to this race than just running, so sit back and enjoy the show.

Until next year, keep calm and run on CareCloud!

Nothing brings a community together quite like a winning sports team. The bars are filled every game night, the water-cooler talk is dominated by statistics and the bandwagoners descend upon the local Sports Authority in droves to buy the jersey of their newest favorite player.

The funny thing is, the success of a sports team doesn’t lie solely in the hands of the freakish athletes who run like gazelles and can seemingly jump over buildings. Oftentimes, a team’s fate is determined by the behind-the-scenes physicians, who don’t receive any credit from the casual sports fan.

See, even the greatest athletes on earth don’t do their teams any good when sidelined because of an injury or illness. Team owners know this, so they assemble the best medical staffs money can buy.

Medical staffs typically consist of physicians from a broad array of specialties such as orthopedics, neurology, cardiology and podiatry.

They are charged with three primary tasks: preventing injuries, returning athletes to top health as quickly as possible when injuries do occur and preventing teams from acquiring athletes who won’t be able to perform due to past injuries.

When a medical staff fails at these tasks, the losses can pile up quickly, putting sports medical staffs under immense pressure. An underperforming medical staff is prone to get the axe much like an underperforming player.

Just take a look at the Boston Red Sox. Their past three seasons have gone by without a post-season appearance, in no small part due to injury.

In 2010, injuries cost Red Sox players 1,018 possible game appearances. The number dropped a bit to 803 games in 2011 and spiked back up to 1,495 games last year.

Fed up with the injuries and subsequent losses, Red Sox general manager Ben Cherington decided the medical staff needed to be revamped, cutting ties with some staff physicians. He admitted that some of the injuries couldn’t be avoided, but suggested that players wouldn’t have lost as much time with better treatment.

In a baseball-crazed city like Boston, the Red Sox medical staff costing the team a playoff spot is simply unacceptable.

On the other side of the spectrum is when a great medical staff boosts their team’s chance of success by turning injury-prone players into consistently healthy contributors. A great example of this is the medical staff of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns.

This group of physicians and trainers are viewed as miracle workers in NBA circles. They actively take on talented, injury-prone players and give them a chance to make an impact on the court. Some of their greatest successes include:

• Hobbled superstar Shaquille O’Neal, who saw his average drop to 14 points per game with the Miami Heat. The Sun’s medical staff nursed him to health, as he was able to rediscover his form and boost his average to almost 18 PPG, returning that year to the All-Star game.
• Former-star Grant Hill averaged 48 missed games per season out of a possible 82 in six years with the Orlando Magic. With the Suns, he missed only 10 games per year and was a key player in their 2010 Western Conference Finals appearance.
• Two-time MVP Steve Nash was able to stay healthy and play at an All-Star level well into his late 30s with the Suns. This season, though, he’s seen his play fall off and his injuries skyrocket with the Los Angeles Lakers.

Looking at the entire team, according to BrewHoop, the Phoenix Suns averaged the third-fewest games missed due to injury from 2001-2011. Keeping their talented players healthy has helped make the Suns one of the more successful NBA teams of the 2000s.

When looking across sports, it becomes apparent that physicians who compose a team’s medical staff can have as much impact on a winning season as the athletes they treat.

While it’s true that physicians will never appear on SportCenter’s Top 10 or get stethoscopes retired in the rafters, fans should recognize the performance of the physicians on their team’s medical staff as a key determinant of wins and losses.

Have you ever thought about how your team’s medical staff had an impact on their season?