Physicians Are Replacing Practice Management And Revenue Cycle Software

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

Are your clients more likely interested in upgrading their software, or replacing what they have? A recent study from Software Advice may have the answer.

IT research group, Software Advice, analyzed a random selection of 385 interactions with medical practices from 2014, to examine physician behavior around the software purchase process.

Your most valuable takeaways from this study will likely be physician behavior around software replacement, and physician preferences regarding Web-based solutions vs. on-premise systems.

Software Replacement

Most of the buyers that Software Advice spoke to — 55 percent — already had commercial practice management software in use. An additional 8 percent were also manual methods. This means that 63 percent of the buyers sampled were replacing their practice management software because of dissatisfaction with their current systems.   

Outsourcing also made a notable appearance in the data, with 14 percent of buyers indicating they were currently outsourcing their billing service. However, in many cases, those same buyers were interested in bringing the billing back in house, primarily for reasons of cost, control, or to improve first-pass acceptance rates. Only a small handful of buyers had created their own, proprietary software systems that they were looking to replace with a commercial product.

What First-Time Buyers Want

In a nutshell? Organization and efficiency. The study found more consolidation around purchase drivers in the first-time buyer category, with 70 percent citing a desire to improve organization and/or efficiency as their reason. Other reasons included regulatory compliance and wanting a single solution for EHR and practice management.

Web Or On-Site?

The report highlights that most buyers (69 percent) did not have a preference either way when it came to the option of having their practice management and revenue cycle systems on-premise vs. being Web-based. However, among those who did have a preference, 88 percent were interested in evaluating Web-based systems.

What’s Moving Buyers

Respondents emphasized the need for integrated EHR in a practice management system — 40  percent of buyers who did not already have an EHR system, stressed the need for integration, while another 20 percent stressed the need for mobile support, specifically a desire to operate a practice management system on an iPad or tablet, with only occasional references to smartphones. After mobile, came coding assistance and claim scrubbing capabilities.

Demographics

Half of the buyers in the survey were practitioners — 33 percent being physicians and 13 percent being non-physician practitioners. Administrators were the next largest group, with practice administrators and office managers representing 22 percent, and practice owners or directors representing 17 percent.

Go Deeper

You can view the full results of the study here.

Want to read more about the potential benefits of revenue cycle offerings for your clients? Click here to learn more.