Meeting Your Needs
The business of clinical medicine is being pulled in opposing directions. Physicians are faced with the need to see more patients more quickly than ever before due to reduced reimbursements and a relative physician shortage in many areas. To protect market share, physicians now almost always form groups of 3 or more. This trend to form first small and now larger groups has progressed over the last 20 years, so that the sole practitioner is now something of a rarity. The grouping of like-minded physicians has the advantage of pooled administrative expenses and better coverage arrangements for on-call time. As groups get larger, they often spill over into multiple offices to cover a wider area, thus protecting more market share. Unfortunately, these very advantages have created their own problems for medical groups: scheduling (often across multiple offices and hospitals), reporting, billing, accounting and the dissemination of information to primary referral physicians and amongst themselves for on call coverage. Pronto was designed to meet all of these needs. Pronto Office is designed to provide all the needed services for a single office and Pronto Professional is designed to provide the same services to multiple offices.
The importance of clinical note reporting should not be underestimated. There are medical, legal and financial implications on the quality and timing of clinical notes. After all, the clinical note is the primary medical information used to manage the care of patients. Notes that are not timely, complete or have errors can adversely affect patient care, sometimes directly leading to adverse outcomes. At the very least, the patient is inconvenienced by these problems, and at the worst there might be associated morbidity and mortality. The legal ramifications are not just related to the accuracy, timing or mistakes in a note, but also are related to the “completeness” of a note. This is because billing is related to the content of the note, and so incomplete or inaccurate notes can be grounds for legal action by payer groups against physicians. For all these reasons, a “smart” EMR package can help maximize billing, while at the same time help protect against claims of fraud and abuse. These issues are important to individual care providers and are critical for larger groups.