Is Your Information System Working Up To Its Potential?

By Janice Simmons. In today’s environment, just having a practice management system in place is no longer enough. A practice needs to continually review its interactions with patients, payers, and providers to make sure these components are reflected in the management system's data.. "The benefit of computers is supposed to be that they can sit there and crunch all the data. But you've got to have the data to crunch," says Ron Sterling, president of Sterling Solutions, a Silver Spring, Md., firm that monitors physician practice management systems. "The data has to be there on a consistent and comparable base, and has to be accessible to the physician in the course of patient care.". Practices and physicians have to understand that to move forward, the management system has to be viewed as "a strategic weapon...and tool," Sterling says. "The most important thing practices can do is empower themselves and manage their care systems.". While many vendors are responsive to today's health care challenges, there are still those who haven't updated their systems in years, Sterling notes. "If you don't have somebody sitting on your side of the table who can challenge the vendor about what is going on, then you can end up with a situation that you don't want to be in. The vendor can have you running in circles, and you're ...

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