Medical Practice Management Software Development: Features, Services, Use Cases

Posted on April 26, 2023April 26, 2023

In this article, we’ll consider everything there is to know about medical practice management software development: requirements, processes, functionality, and technical nuances specific to this healthcare IT product type. Medical practice software functionality covers every business operation, from patient appointment scheduling and organization of health services to collecting patient payments.

⚠️ If you require immediate help building a practice-management system in healthcare, please contact our IT experts for deeper project consultation!

What Is Medical Practice Management (MPM) Software?

Modern medical offices work as small data-management factories, aspiring to orchestrate a wide range of administrative and clinical workflows under pressing conditions: the ongoing healthcare staff shortage and an aging population. These activities traditionally involve a lot of mundane administrative work specific to front-office and back-office departments:

Keeping track of patient visits and status
Managing appointment calendars
Updating medical records and prescriptions
Collecting patient feedback…and many more tasks.

According to research conducted in 2018 (good old pre-Covid times!), about 40% of healthcare practices registered in the United States had fewer than 5 physicians onboard. Almost 18% of American healthcare providers were solo healthcare practitioners and 23% of medical offices featured only 2 to 5 physicians (we assume these numbers could still be valid for 2023.) 🏥

At the same time, the total number of patient primary care visits is close to 1 billion every year. In other words, smaller medical practices with smaller admin staff are experiencing higher levels of tension as they attempt to rebalance their resources between administrative routines and core medical activities.

U.S. Healthcare Practice Distribution by Size - Smaller Practices Take the Predominant Market Share | TATEEDA — Smaller medical practices take the predominant position in the U.S. market.

According to healthcare industry reports, a consequence of this alarming situation is that physicians must spend nearly 4.5 hours per day working with electronic health records, which reduces the amount and quality of the health services they are able to provide. Despite the fact that a considerable administrative burden is put on healthcare professionals, U.S. doctors are expected to see 20 patients per day (this takes, on average, 51 hours per week). 😫

With that said, the primary goal of medical practice management software development is the automation and facilitation of administrative and non-clinical tasks so more time and resources can be reserved for core value-added healthcare services. Medical organizations of any size can optimize their efforts by using MPM software instead of paying painful administrative overhead resulting from continuous inefficiency.

Take a minute to learn more about our company before you proceed to the next section, where we will explain how medical practices can improve the situation with MPM software:

💬 How to build best practice-management software?

We are sure that the best product can be created only through a truly individualized approach guaranteed by custom software development.

TATEEDA GLOBAL has deep expertise in designing and creating cloud-based healthcare software solutions and products for American and foreign companies. This includes custom biotechnology projects, pharmaceutical inventory management systems, and patient portals for health-tech businesses.

If you are interested in a medical practice-management software development project, please contact one of our experienced medical software engineers for a free consultation:

Slava Khristich

Healthtech CTO

Based in San Diego, Slava knows how to design an efficient software solution for healthcare, including IoT, Cloud, and embedded systems.

Table of Contents

Why Clinics & Medical Offices Need a Practice Management Solution: Key Features of MPM Software

As mentioned previously, healthcare sector companies require efficient software systems to keep clinical and nonclinical tasks coordinated and synchronized to avoid excessive hours of administrative work.

Administrative activities normally stay behind the scenes, but if a medical practice fails to organize this domain, the entire healthcare facility operates insufficiently. This is why the adoption of a practice management system in healthcare is worth special attention and investment.

Streamlined Front-office Operations: Save Valuable Work Hours for Healthcare Staff 👩‍⚕️

This realm includes all patient interaction traditionally assigned to medical office receptionists and front desk administrators. Sometimes, in medical practices that avoid hiring full-time admin staff, these tasks can be partially undertaken by nurses or even the physicians themselves. (Of course, this represents serious responsibility creep and total mismanagement.)

In the past, these activities involved hours and hours of phone calls, greeting visitors in person, answering patient inquiries, scheduling office appointments, calling patients to remind them of upcoming appointments, and more. Nowadays, these activities can be minimized and facilitated with the help of medical practice management software development services.

Saving Valuable Work Hours for Healthcare Staff is Crucial for Higher Patient Care Quality | TATEEDA — Saving valuable work hours for healthcare professionals is crucial for better patient care.

With the automation options involved in a PMP system, medical staff can now:

Avoid manual entry of health data via EHR development and integration, which allows synchronization of information across numerous data systems and electronic forms.
Send automated email and mobile reminders, thereby reducing time spent on patient calls.
Offer chatbots via websites or mobile applications capable of guiding patients and answering frequent requests.

For this, the MPM system usually involves some type of patient portal solution that functions perfectly to let patients:

Review physician’s appointment schedules and check for availability of free time slots.
Use interactive calendars to select a convenient time to schedule an appointment with their medical specialist.
Check for e-prescriptions, medication plans, and lab test results online without the need for human receptionists.
Make use of educational self-service tools in a variety of ways. Patients can learn more about clinics and medical services without asking a receptionist for help.
Manage and verify profile details, including insurance policies and more.
Access and manage up-to-date electronic health records.

💬 A patient portal is one of the most important medical practice software features, as it allows healthcare facilities to alleviate administrative burdens put on medical and administrative staff by encouraging patient self-service.

You can view an example of a patient portal app below. It includes a wide spectrum of health service management options: EHR access, diagnosis, lab test results, downloadable medical documents, e-prescriptions, medication plans, and more.

Medical practice software features: A conceptual front-end portal interface for patients, with EHR, diagnoses, lab tests, downloadable documents, e-prescriptions, and medication plans.

Facilitated Back-office Operations: MPM as a Lighter Alternative to ERP Packages for Smaller Medical Practices 🗃️

Back-office healthcare provider operations include bookkeeping, medical billing, insurance verification, inventory management, HR operations, financial analysis, and operational reporting.

While larger medical practices like public health centers or hospitals require enterprise-level healthcare ERP software that offers more powerful functionality, smaller private clinics or boutique medical practitioners most often require lighter solutions like custom practice-management systems.

With this software solution, medical practices can achieve the following results:

Reduced administrative overhead in healthcare facilities. Since PMP software helps automate administrative tasks, working hours and the attention required to complete them can be redirected in favor of value-added activities and enhanced patient service.
Improved medical billing and invoicing processes. More payment options plus better processing automation and reduced risk of human error ensure that payments are done quickly and efficiently. The results are improved cash flow and elevated overall financial stats/numbers.
Integration between front-office and back-office applications & modules. A powerful combination of website + patient portal/patient mobile application with other systems (medical appointment-scheduling system, healthcare staff-management portal, financial accounting, and medical payroll management tools) allows you to achieve unprecedented automation and synergy across departments.

Healthcare practice-management system development. This is a medical back-office interface featuring a dashboard with the business metrics of a medical facility. | TATEEDA — Healthcare practice-management system development. This is a medical back-office interface featuring a dashboard with the business metrics of a medical facility, including the consultation room occupation schedule and revenue rates.

💬 How to build a medical practice management system?

This is a question TATEEDA GLOBAL team members answer frequently.

Medical practice software requirements vary according to healthcare practice size, operational practices, and technological level. This type of project includes back- and front-end development efforts, including web, mobile, and healthcare cloud technologies. We can help you with the entire spectrum of these services. Contact TATEEDA today!

Learn more about our health-tech services:

Custom Healthcare Solutions

See how we can engineer healthcare software, validate your ideas, and manage project costs for you.

The Best Software Components to Consider for Medical Practice Management Software

Before getting down to medical practice management software development, we need to identify all existing or potential software products that can be included in this system. This software functions as a data-management hub and can be assembled by interconnecting several independent modules, including both readymade products and custom applications. Let’s check out a few examples:

Electronic Health Record (EHR) System 📤

Integration with an EHR system will empower your medical practice-management solution to parse and aggregate details from electronic records and display them via patient and physical access portals. Connection to EHR allows healthcare providers to keep track of patient information like medical history, diagnoses, treatments, and prescriptions while synchronizing data across all system modules. Almost all medical practices in the United States use some type of EHR software, so a variety of methods can be applied to sync systems, including real-time medical data interoperability and HL7-based health data exchange methodologies.

Telemedicine Software & Medical Device Integrations ☎️

Telehealth solutions allow healthcare providers to provide their patients with virtual consultations via video conferencing, messaging, and file-sharing options. In addition to these capabilities, it’s possible to deploy remote patient-monitoring IoT technologies to supervise patient health at home without putting them in inpatient mode. Practice management systems in healthcare can work as a central data point to aggregate and represent biosignal information captured with miniature medical devices like blood pressure monitors, glucose meters, and ECG sensors. Measurable physiological information can be recorded in EHR and other patient-management systems for analysis.

Custom Web-based and/or Mobile Health Portal for Patients 🚪

A web-based or mobile healthcare gateway app allows patients to…

Safely log into their highly individualized profiles
Access their medical records
Communicate with their healthcare providers
Schedule medical appointments
Provide feedback via electronic data-capture forms
Report health conditions
Request prescription refills.

A custom patient portal can include a number of additional features such as integration with affiliated pharmaceutical stores, educational materials, chatbots, and other helpful tools that save valuable time for patients and healthcare facility representatives alike.

Below, you can view an example of a mobile patient portal designed to work as a self-service front desk or gateway for patients, facilitating many administrative tasks traditionally performed by healthcare receptionists:

Medical practice-management software development. This is a mobile health portal app for patients featuring appointment-scheduling features and integration with other administrative systems. | TATEEDA — Medical practice-management software development. This is a mobile health portal app for patients featuring appointment-scheduling features and integration with other administrative systems.

Medical Billing Software 💳

Medical billing applications are used to manage payment and claim processing in healthcare practices. This component of the overall medical practice-management system can generate invoices, process charges, and submit claims to insurance companies. There exist a variety of protocols regulating financial operations in healthcare providers according to state and local jurisdiction.

A medical billing software interface can be incorporated into patient portals, allowing patients to securely manage online payments, perform direct bank transfers, or use other financial tools to maintain their credit balances with medical service providers. This functionality is subject to the highest cyber security standards in healthcare. If you require help with medical billing and claim-processing software

development, do not hesitate to contact our IT engineers at TATEEDA GLOBAL.

Medical Practice Analytics & Reporting 🗂️

One of the most important objectives of healthcare practice-management software development is to provide medical service providers with asset and resource-management insights. This involves accumulation of meaningful operational data and mining this data for important conclusions and decision-making. This module is set to help physicians and healthcare administrators track inventory and control key business metrics like patient outcomes, treatment efficacy, and revenue. Needless to say, this approach, which includes medical data visualizations, can also help identify areas for improvement and optimize practice performance.

Medical Practice Management Software Modules: How to build a Healthcare Practice Management System | TATEEDA — How to design a healthcare practice management solution. A simple software architecture concept with potential practice-management modules.

💬 Do you want medical practice-management software development services for your healthcare facility?

TATEEDA GLOBAL offers deep expertise in building healthcare IT products as well as outsourcing software development services for health technology providers. We can help you with the design and creation of a custom unique product for healthcare practice management.

This approach allows us to take all your medical practice software requirements into account and craft the most efficient toolkit that perfectly suits your exact business model and processes.

If you’re interested, please check our project health-tech portfolio:

Delivered Healthcare Software Portfolio

The leading American healthcare companies benefit from working with us.

Important Points to Consider When Choosing a Practice Management System

Whether you opt for a ready-made medical practice software package with customization options or an entirely custom project, there is a set of parameters to be respected and considered. Before you and your IT partners get down to business with how to build a medical practice management system, it’s necessary to find resolutions to the following questions:

Hosting options: Cloud, Onsite, or Hybrid? ☁️

Will your medical practice software database and server be hosted online or offline (or probably a mix of both)? This solution depends on your existing hardware and software configuration and infrastructure. Roughly speaking, cloud-based hosting of software (online option) can be a more cost-efficient and easier method. Deploying your system on local server hardware is often more secure, yet it can be expensive. There are other factors to consider, like the size of your database, the medical IT systems involved, and more, but the exact choice must be made by a skilled software engineer. A specialist will take stock of your specific situation and suggest the appropriate architecture. Sometimes, this can include upgrading legacy systems and/or moving your medical software products to the cloud.

Ease of Use and Staff Training 👌

Since healthcare practice management software development often includes building a data-processing engine (the central mechanism of the solution) and a custom user interface, it’s necessary to design the UI in the most efficient way possible. The user interface for medical practice software involves multiple dashboards, electronic forms with a variety of fields, role-based layouts, and report generators.

If you select a ready-made product, consider how simple, comprehensive, and flexible the software interfaces are. Make sure your UI/UX designers do their job in coordination with medical practice employees and administrators. Primary users are the best source for UI design requirements, guidelines, suggestions, and ideas.

Configuration and Scalability 🌡️

Sometimes, software packages for medical practice administration can be very large, with excessive modules and features. This increases costs despite the fact that many functionalities are underused. With custom software development, it’s easier to manage specific software configurations, avoid superfluous functionality, and add room for potential scaling. This means the ability to add more database space, users, and functions in the future without upfront overpayment for a ready-made package or tricky bulk offer.

HIPAA Compliance 🇺🇸

How important is HIPAA for healthcare practice-management applications? This requirement is of the utmost importance! If you want to acquire an off-the-shelf product or custom software, make sure it fully complies with the medical practice software requirements introduced by HIPAA. This includes specific spectrum regulations for patient privacy and data-access guarantees along with strong protective measures for electronic communications. See following HIPAA compliance checklist (not a complete version):

Technical precautions	🔹 Transaction encryption and authorization 🔹 Login control and activity monitoring 🔹 Automatic log-offs for devices
Physical precautions	🔹 Device access control 🔹 Workstation management 🔹 Device protection and use monitoring
Administrative precautions	🔹 Medical staff training 🔹 Signing of BAA (business associate agreement) 🔹 Document security measures 🔹 Risk-management policy
Privacy precautions	🔹 Respond to patient requests 🔹 Permission management for accessing PHI 🔹 Data integrity maintenance.

Do you need help building a healthcare facility administrative suite for your front and back offices?

💻 TATEEDA GLOBAL can help you with all the steps for healthcare practice management software development. We employ a full spectrum of IT specialists available for hire in the context of health-tech projects: UI/UX designers, software architects, developers, testers, and more.

Book a free consultation with one of our experienced IT engineers to discuss details and software options: