Physical Therapy Software:
A Comprehensive Resource Guide
Regardless of the care setting within which you work, the ideal physical therapy software solution, or physical therapy electronic medical record (EMR), will help you efficiently manage all facets of your pt practice, therapy clinic or department.
Those operating a physical therapy practice are looking to save time while taking detailed notes, safely recording patient data with defensible documentation, and keeping medical records compliant, all while seeking to improve patient lives. Using the right PT software is key to meeting these objectives, as this is extremely time consuming.
From patient scheduling and check-in to billing, coding, revenue cycle management, clinical physical therapy documentation, analytics, reporting, and even engagement and communication, physical therapy software exists to save time, protect financial health, and make your team’s job easier – not harder or more complicated.
In this vein, physical therapy software should promote productivity, adapt to the way you work, grow and evolve to your future needs, and make a positive impact to your team’s bottom line. The ideal electronic medical record solution will be comprehensive, robust, intelligent, secure, compliant, engaging, compatible, and ultimately focused on promoting optimal patient care.
Below, we at Net Health® provide specific features to look for when considering physical therapy software solutions for PT practices.
As there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution, we also take a closer look at physical therapy software features that are most beneficial within specific skilled treatment care settings, such as hospital, outpatient, acute, private practice and SNF.
Physical Therapy Software: What Should You Look For?
As a physical therapist, you have a lot of choice when it comes to physical therapy software options. While this is typically a good thing, the diversity that exists throughout the market can sometimes make it difficult to thoroughly assess and compare solutions that boast different features while seemingly promising universal success.
Focusing on just a few critical features can help you cut through the so-called “fluff” so you can better evaluate the solutions an EMR company offers, gauging effectiveness within your environment.
Regardless of care setting, an optimal physical therapy software solution will be proficient in the following:
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Net Health® offers unique physical therapy software solutions for each care setting, spanning the patients’ continuum of care, from hospital acute care and outpatient services to skilled nursing facilities (SNF), senior living (assisted living facilities, or ALF), and private practice rehab therapy.
Improved Physical Therapy Documentation Efficiency
When it comes to physical therapy documentation, select an EHR that truly knows and understands not just the physical therapy profession, but also your specific care setting. This may include hospital outpatient, private practice outpatient, inpatient, hospital acute, SNFs or ALFs.
The advantages of selecting a solution that is built specifically for your care setting are vast. Such Rehab Therapy software is most likely to fit the way your team of physical therapists or occupational therapists works by. For instance, offering specialized PT documentation workflows that include therapy-specific clinical content.
And, as physical therapy documentation requirements can often get in the way of such things as patient care and PT job satisfaction, look for an EHR solution that allows your team to complete compliant, therapy-specific PT documentation at the point of care – with no need for duplication.
Complete and Compliant Coding and Documentation
If built by people who truly understand your profession and care setting, your physical therapy software solution will continually receive updates that ensure it always meets all regulatory requirements while safely capturing the medical history a patient presents.
In addition, it will provide the tools your physical therapists need to optimize coding accuracy and reduce claim delays and denials so your department or clinic is reimbursed appropriately. The best of these tools will provide alerts that draw users’ attention to potential claim errors before they are sent to payers.
Also look for options to customize and automate the billing process, ensuring specific payer requirements are applied whenever relevant.
Efficient Patient Scheduling
The success of a physical therapy department or team often comes down to the productivity of its therapy staff. The ideal EMR or EHR will empower supervisors to continually manage, track and optimize the productivity of their providers through efficient scheduling.
Depending on your care setting, at-a-glance scheduling features can help you more seamlessly manage therapists’ time in the face of outpatient cancellations and no-shows, changes in acute-care patient status or location, and physician treatment order changes.
Such scheduling tools enable supervisors to keep up with ever-changing staffing needs while ensuring physical therapists can access real-time scheduling information that keeps them productive.
Analytics and Reporting Tools
Access to robust reporting tools via your physical therapy EMR for Clinics and LTC, or Physical Therapy EHR for Hospitals, helps you manage both the clinical and operational aspects of your department. Reporting and insights obtained via such tools are most effective when they can be seamlessly shared with those who most need it and who are better positioned to act on the data.
Drawing insights through data and reporting allows managers, owners and stakeholders to make the most informed decisions when it comes to both clinical and operational aspects of your department – issues like staffing, performance, productivity and revenue.
In addition, analytics tools with built-in treatment guidance – recommendations based on the therapy industry’s most advanced outcomes management solutions and measures – enable rehab providers to improve patient outcomes through effective planning.
Web-Based and Device Agnostic Solution
Secure, HIPAA-compliant, cloud-based systems are currently the gold standard of modern physical therapy software solutions. Not only do they provide a higher level of flexibility, make it easy to document medical history and levels of patient pain or a recommended patient exercise, and keep data secure, but they also enable a greater ability to integrate with other systems and tools, including your hospital information system (HIS).
Also, the option of accessing your EMR/EHR through a browser allows providers and other therapists on your team to access patient records and maximize therapy resources via any device in most any location.
Patient Engagement
Studies continually show that improving patient engagement not only helps get patients in your PT clinic’s door; it can also help improve plan of care buy-in and ultimately lead to better patient outcomes.
Needless to say, an EHR solution that provides a suite of tools that improves the patient experience within your particular care setting can help boost success in both outcomes and your bottom line.
Patient engagement tools strive to improve the patient experience through greater online visibility and reputation, and better communication through appointment reminders and other communication tools that connect, inform and motivate. Nearly any effort that increases the likelihood prospective patients find and choose you over your competitors can be part of one’s patient engagement efforts.
Supporting Continuity of Care Across Care Settings
Continuity of care is another important matter to consider when reviewing physical therapy EMR and EHR options for your department or clinic.
From data and documentation to billing, coding and payer information, the ability of an EMR/EHR to securely support the flow of data from various facilities – say, a hospital acute care setting to a SNF or outpatient therapy team – can be advantageous for patients as well as providers.
Therefore, selecting an EHR solution from a specialized electronic medical record company like Net Health, which provides robust solutions specifically designed for a wide spectrum of physical therapy care settings, can ensure your PT department’s and your patients’ needs are most optimally met.
Physical Therapy Software Across Multiple Care Settings
Net Health understands that the goals and workflows of acute-care rehab therapists are not necessarily the same as those who work in private practice. Nor are they the same in other care settings like outpatient, SNF or ALF.
Yes, the patient is always No. 1, and each of our products enables rehab therapists to boost productivity so they spend less time documenting and more time with patients. Yet, we understand each setting operates and measures success based on objectives that can be quite different from others.
Our line of Net Health physical therapy solutions reflects these differences, providing features that specifically address the continuously changing landscape of your department as well as your profession.
Net Health Therapy offers the following solutions that provide all of the above proficiencies and features, plus other value propositions that specifically address the needs of individual care settings:
Rehab Therapy EHR: Key Benefits of Our Outpatient Rehab Software for Clinical Therapy Providers
