We all make mistakes, but not all mistakes are equal. Some will end up costing your practice time, profitability, and even patients. Here are the top five EHR mistakes behavioral health practices make and how to avoid them.   1. Not Investing in an Electronic Health Record (EHR) System This is critical. If you are…
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Great news: your practice is thriving! Bad news: you’re turning away new patients. Having too much business is certainly a good problem to have, but it can prompt a lot of questions in the mind of a solo practitioner — mostly around transitioning from solo to group practice, and whether or not it’s a transition…
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If you’re considering measurement-based care for your behavioral health practice, you probably know the benefits: better insight into patient progress, more targeted treatment, and improved patient outcomes, to name just a few. However, several barriers to the implementation of measurement-based treatment may slow the adoption of this method among clinicians. This may be the case…
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When it comes to practice management software, you need a product built specifically for behavioral health. EHRs meant to serve multiple healthcare disciplines may not offer your practice the functionality you need to deliver the best care to patients. Many EHR vendors will claim to have a behavioral health-specific version of their software, but a…
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In the world of EHR software, a mental health practice has two main purchasing choices: subscription or perpetual, with “perpetual” meaning a one-time purchase where the practice owns the software outright. While the overall EHR industry trend is to offer the subscription-based model, a few EHR vendors continue to cling to the perpetual license model….
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Data equals knowledge. Good clinical data provides the irrefutable evidence that goes beyond our assumptions and observations to give us actionable intelligence. Data keeps us from wasting time and resources. Clinical data in the behavioral health industry allows clinicians to establish patient baselines and benchmarks that can be used in setting up goals and treatment…
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If your practice hasn’t started administering outcome measures or using measurement-based care, you should be. Why? Not only is it rapidly becoming the standard of care, but it allows you to achieve better patient outcomes faster, and you can get paid more for using it. Measurement-based care is defined as the systematic administration of symptom…
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Measurement-based care is a term that’s been around since 2006, yet remains unfamiliar to many behavioral health professionals still today. It is defined as the systematic administration of symptom rating scales and other assessment tools to help initially assess behavioral health patients, inform beginning and ongoing treatment decisions, improve treatment outcomes, and measure results. How…
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Accepting credit card payments is a necessary part of business even in the behavioral health field. Your business might have a mix of clients including those who pay a co-payment, those who pay out-of-pocket, or those who may never pay you directly. No matter what the mix, you want to provide an exceptional client experience…
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Outcome measures have been talked about in the behavioral health field for over 20 years yet only 18% of psychiatrists and 11% of psychologists in the US routinely use outcome measures (Fortney, Sladek, & Unützer, 2015). There is a lot of evidence that suggests that using outcome measures to track and provide feedback on patient…
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