The challenges facing many mental health and behavioral health practices today are stark: your services are increasingly essential for the overall well-being of clients and patients, but the complexity of operating a practice is making it harder to grow in a sustainable way. One area where many providers see opportunity is in practice automation. We’ll walk you through some key steps to get started.
Cut Through the Noise in Software Selection
There are a lot of vendors offering an array of software choices for mental health and behavioral health practices. The difficulty for many providers and office managers is sorting through all the dazzling sales pitches and the “noise” to get to the key features in the software that will truly make a difference.
It’s similar to buying a car—when you arrive at the dealership, you might quickly get caught up in a sales pitch about how fast this vehicle can go, what type of interior fabrics you want, and whether the car includes a navigation system. All of those things are great and may factor into your decision, but if you leave with a two-seater sports car when you intended to purchase an SUV for your family of 5, all that razzle-dazzle won’t make up for the lack of practical features you need.
It can be hard to cut through the noise, but you can quickly narrow it down by focusing carefully on four key areas during your search.
The Four Key Elements
At the risk of seeming oversimplified, these are the critical aspects to focus on in your practice automation software search.
- Complete – look for software that offers all the tools you need today, and that you can build on as your practice grows and changes in the future. Often practices focus on solving today’s challenge with software that addresses that one thing. They later learn it won’t share data or work well with other systems and hop from system to system or create patches and workarounds for new software.
- Unified – data transfer and data sharing is critical in any practice, but especially in behavioral health. It allows for seamless continuity of care and reduces the chance of data errors that can impact treatment and outcomes. It can also eliminate tasks that your team does by hand right now, freeing up more staff time for other essential duties.
- Smart – smart systems automatically collect, aggregate, track, and report on critical information, and remove labor-intensive manual tasks.
- Cloud-based – this allows you and your staff to access the system and the information from anywhere on any device and protects data with the highest level of security and encryption. Look for “native” cloud-based software (meaning it was built specifically for the cloud) versus systems that were originally server-based and modified for cloud delivery.
Take a deeper dive into all four of these elements, and learn about how you can evaluate your software options to find the one that best meets your needs based on these criteria by downloading our eBook Behavioral Health Practice Automation: 4 Essentials for Success. Let us know what you think and what questions we can answer to help your behavioral health practice grow.
