Practis Forms greatly increases practice efficiencies and improves patient satisfaction through either custom forms or an extensive database of 6,000 medical questionnaires and sophisticated healthcare software that translates patients’ answers into clinical terminology. Renowned institutions, such as the Mayo Clinic and American Academy of Family Physicians, published that 60% of the visit note is completed and saved in the EMR before the start of the exam. After-hours documentation is no longer necessary and office visits are reduced by 4 minutes.

“The impact of this new medical software is astounding,” explains Elizabeth Pettrone, President of Practis, Inc. “The savings in under-coding and data entry combined with additional revenue opportunities can potentially increase monthly revenues by $10,200 per physician—or $122,400 annually, per physician.”

Through this partnership, Practis and Primetime developed a series of pre-packaged solutions to meet the needs of a variety of practices—no set-up is required by the practice. The software easily integrates with current practice websites, top EMR vendors and is compatible with mobile devices, allowing for a seamless transition.

“Enabling the direct flow of patient-entered information into the EMR increases the data quality and helps to improve the focus and efficiency of the patient encounter.” explains Matthew Ferrante, President, Primetime. “Partnering with Practis will enable this medical software to be accessible to more practices, improving countless physician-patient communications.”

About Practis, Inc.
Since 1998, Practis has been designing, developing and maintaining custom websites for medical practices and health care organizations. Their clients represent health care organizations nationwide, ranging in size and scope from physician practices to hospitals and medical centers. Located in Charlotte, NC, this full-service medical web site design firm provides strategic planning, web site design and web application development. For more information, please call (800) 238-0095 or visit www.practisinc.com.

The Essure® procedural content is now available to physician practices that participate in the Encounter Health Website design program or access the Encounter Health API solution.  For more information or to add Essure® content to your website, visit www.practisinc.com/contact.

Who better to manage your online reputation and create a positive first impression, than you? Here’s a couple of free on-line profile services to consider.

About.me

Think of it as an on-line business card, About.me is an online service that allows providers to create a professional on-line profile.

Start by creating a profile on www.about.me and then linking your profile to your practice website (or directly to your physician profile or bios). Your splash page points visitors to your content from around the web – including social media sites, review sites and email, should you wish. Your profile also provides some basic stats – i.e., how many people see your profile, where they’re coming from, and what they do on your page.

View an example.

Zerply

Zerply is great way to present yourself professionally on-line. They offer professionally designed templates, including mobile. What’s unique, patients can give you an endorsement and help build your “personal brand”.

How to promote your profile

So you’ve set up a profile but not really sure how to use or promote it. Here are some handy suggestions:

• Add it to your physician bio or profile page
• Add it to a hospital and or payor provider directory
• Add it to your Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter accounts, or blog
• Add it to your e-mail footer
• Print it on your business card

Sharpening your survey skills: How practices can measure patient satisfaction

Insurers base their pay-for-performance programs in part on patient satisfaction scores, and CMS will do the same thing. So how should physicians design their surveys? AMA News April 18, 2011

Read article now

Our program websites are an easy, affordable, and comprehensive turn-key solution that includes all the tools that you need to get your site up and running. This program is an all inclusive solution that not only includes web design, development, content management and hosting, but use of patient education content, developed by BARRX, and syndicated through Encounter Health.

To view an online demo of this exciting new program please visit http://www.practisinc.com/barrx-reach.

Physician directories, quality review websites and user-generated content websites are often the first organic search results to appear when you go online to search for a physician. At times, physician-rating websites (directories) contain inaccurate profile information and, perhaps, biased feedback. You may feel these websites are out to get you.

On the contrary, seize the opportunity these websites provide and proactively manage your online reputation, enhance your profile listing and drive more traffic to your website. These sources can also provide relevant inbound links to your website – an important factor when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Bottom line it can mean more patient referrals.

Take control. Utilize the profile information found on these websites to your advantage.

Who are these websites and how can you change your profile? Let’s take a look.

HealthGrades

HealthGrades is a health-care ratings company, providing online ratings and profile information for hospitals, nursing homes and physicians to consumers, corporations, health plans and hospitals. Using healthgrades.com users can rate physicians they have seen. This data is compiled and presented along with a physicians profile information.

Using your National Provider Identifier (NPI) and other basic information, you can register through the Physicians Portal. Once registered and logged in, you can not only update your profile information, including your website address, but also access customized reports about your profile activity including data on patient satisfaction.

Vitals

Vitals is a free physician directory that offers peer reviews from other physicians, a physician profile, and consumer reviews.

Once registered with Vitals, you can add and manage the information that patients and others see. You can also take a look at what consumers are saying about you as well as respond to and manage that feedback.

The registration process collects some basic information including your full name, address and contact information. It also will ask you for your date of birth, state of license and license number. According to their website, Vitals verifies all physician registration through confirmation letters which are mailed to the primary address associated with your Vitals profile. This confirms your account setup and associated information.

Once registered, there are options to add a photo, your website address, credentials, insurances accepted, awards, office information and more.

UCompareHealthCare

Part of About, Inc., a New York Times Company, UCompareHealthCare.com allows consumers to to measure the quality of health-care services. Measures of quality, location, credentials, past performance, and general capability collected are compared to data available from federal, state government agencies as well as multiple third-party sources.

They do offer a free basic profile listing or you can opt for a paid upgrade to include additional information such as adding your bio, credentials, virtual office tour, directions, contact information, and online scheduling.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Physician Compare

In December 2010, CMS added a new Physician Compare feature to their Healthcare Provider Directory.  While the information provided is relatively limited, CMS plans to expand the data provided. Currently the information on the website includes provider contact and office information, specialty, credentials, languages spoken and gender.

In addition, Physician Compare also shows consumers whether the practice reported certain data to CMS through the Physician Quality Reporting System, a voluntary reporting program on quality measures related to services furnished to Medicare beneficiaries.

The physicians listed in this directory are currently enrolled in Medicare and are added to this directory the month after the PECOS Extract is updated. If the information is incorrect or has changed, visit http://www.medicare.gov/find-a-doctor/staticpages/note/overview.aspx to follow the recommended action.

Bottom line – these websites are here to stay. You, and your website, stand to benefit by contributing to the information that’s out on the web about you.

Where to start

Plan. Start by determining what you’re trying to accomplish. This will set the course for what you need to improve upon with your website. For example, if you feel that your website isn’t coming up when searching for vague terms such as “hysterectomy”, or “ent doctor”, realize you’re asking for the impossible. Be sure to be specific (and realistic) on what you’re trying to do well with in terms of search engine results.  Are your trying to be found for a particular service in a certain geographical area? Remember – health care is for the most part local.. Be sure to include those words or phrases within the content and markup of your website. Give some thought about what your business metrics need to be to determine success? Are they based on conversions, pageviews, patients or some other measure? Strategy should identify the tactical, not the other way around.

Research. Determine what your visitors are searching for online, how it relates to you and create content that is relevant. It’s important to consider how patients will be searching for this information and not necessarily how you think they should be searching.

Write Content. Yes it’s true … content is king. Without relevant website content there’s little, if any, SEO can improve. Bottom line – create useful accessible content to earn links and references from relevant, credible sources that ultimately lead to higher search engine rankings and greater traffic.

Measure Accessibility. Make your website pages and materials accessible and optimized for search engines so they can properly display it when relevant searches are performed. Here’s where you may need to rely on your web developer for some help.

Next Steps

So now you have a sense of what needs to be done, its time to identify who is going to get it done.

Website content. If you’re adding content (and hopefully you are), consider whether to use someone internal or external to write copy. Regardless of who is writing your content, be sure that they follow a content model.  You’ll want a consistent tone and an organized approach. Random content that doesn’t enhance usability nor convey the right message will impair your visitor’s experience. Another key consideration – is this person familiar with SEO? Since optimization starts with good content, not having the right person develop this content with SEO in mind may mean redoing things.

Updating website code. While many firms provide SEO guidance, the reality is that your current website developer will most likely need to implement those changes. You don’t want an SEO firm mirroring your website simply to make coding changes. This can negatively impact your desired results. Also if you’re on a content management system, some of the suggestions made may require recoding that can typically be done with your current website developer. Its not to say that someone else cannot make these changes but they will need to get up to speed on your application, host environment and your website. Additional time spent will likely mean a higher budget to implement. And if the SEO expert breaks something in the process, you’ll need to contact your current website developer to get it fixed. Finally, keep in mind that you’ll need to provide ftp access to this outside company in order for them to make changes. If you offer any secure services on your website, you may not want to give this information out.

Link building. Bottom line it’s the quality of your inbound links, not the quantity. Google, and other search engines, see inbound links as a vote of popularity. Be sure to have your website listed on online directories that are relevant to health care, and more importantly your specialty.  Search engines reward websites that provide relevant search query results. Simply by listing your site on multiple unrelated directories will have little, if any, SEO value.

Keep in mind, it’s the tried and true, that wins the SEO race.

This program is an all inclusive solution that not only includes web design, development, content management and hosting, but use of patient education content, developed by Endogastric Solutions, and syndicated through Encounter Health.

To view an online demo of this exciting new program please visit http://egs.practisinc.com.

Simply said – Encounter Health addresses an unmet need. Many of the newer, minimally invasive procedures now available are often not included in existing patient education libraries. Interestingly, these are the very topics patients are often searching for online. Having access to this unique content on your website is critical to empowering patients to make informed decisions. Encounter Health brings knowledge of these breakthrough procedures into the lives of those who need it most – patients, at a trust point they value – their physicians.

Application Enhancements

In addition to its previous features of content control, consistency, maintainability and scalability, Encounter Health’s new features include multi-lingual and company support, and more importantly, the ability to add the Encounter Health Content Library to any website.

Current Encounter Health content includes topics on da Vinci Surgery, Balloon Sinuplasty, Stereotaxis, and soon  TIF EsophyX procedure as well as RFA Therapy. Check back often as we grow our library of topics.

For more information please visit www.encounterhealth.com.

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