How To Choose the Best Care Management Software

Want to implement care management software into your practice? With the healthcare industry evolving continuously, care management software has come up as a reliable tool focused on improving patient engagement and streamlining care delivery model.

There are a number of factors you need to consider when choosing the right care management software. It assists in care coordination, patient engagement, improving outcomes, maximizing reimbursement and patient data management. However, choosing the best from the most popular and emerging technology can be daunting.

In this blog, we’ll discuss some key features, factors, use cases, and best practices for choosing the most reliable care management software for your healthcare practice.

Key Features of A Robust Care Management Software

It goes without saying that reviewing the software features and capabilities is the absolute first step. Some key features of good software include:

Patient Monitoring: The software platform should have all the necessary features to enable continuous monitoring of the patients.  Features like connected devices, automatic time tracking, audio/ video calls, SMS, reports to measure monitoring and staff productivity helps providers in effective and efficient monitoring of patients with chronic conditions.

• Care Coordination: This software feature allows different care teams to communicate and coordinate care plans amongst each other.
• Data Integration: For ease of management and for exchanging data seamlessly, the software should be capable of integrating with electronic health records (EHRs) and other health information systems.
• Patient Engagement: For patients, good healthcare software allows patient self-engagement that prompts them to participate in their own care, via easy to access vitals, care plans and analytics dashboards.
• Reporting and Analytics: For software to be referred to as healthcare provider centric, it must have integrated tools for evaluating care effectiveness, tracking outcomes, and reporting on performance measures.

Factors to Consider When Choosing Care Management Software

In addition to the above key features, you need to consider the factors that influence the software performance, scope, ease of usability, and many others before deciding to go with one, including:

1. Software Features: First and foremost, the software of choice should align with your goals, objectives and requirements. Here are the most common ones:

• • Risk Levels: There must be a risk hierarchy or levels to help identify high-risk patients and prioritize their care.
  • Care Team Collaboration: Make sure the software allows easy communication between multiple healthcare providers, physicians, clinicians, nurse practitioners, and therapists.
  • Patient Engagement Tools: The patient must be able to access their health information, communicate with their care team, and participate in their self-care.

2. Integration Capabilities: Software integration with an existing system or an Electronic Health Record (EHR) plays a critical role in ensuring the compatibility of a software with your healthcare organization. A good software must ensure a hassle-free integration with top EHRs and ensure better care delivering, including:

• • EHR Compatibility: It must be able to integrate with your current EHR system for quick and easy data exchange.
  • Data Management: It must deliver easy data management and security by allowing export of patient data from other healthcare systems.

3. User Experience and Interface: The platform should be user friendly and intuitive for the care staff to optimize their monitoring efforts. You should consider:

• • Ease of Use: It must have a simple interface with clutter-free navigation for better understandability.
  • Customization: Should offer customization to meet your healthcare organization’s care delivery goals.
  • Mobile Friendly: It must be user friendly, mobile friendly, and 100% responsive to ensure accessibility from any screen size and device.

4. Compliance and Security: When it comes to healthcare services, meeting compliance is not a requirement but compulsion. Some of the common compliances include:

• • HIPAA Compliance: It must adhere to the most relevant Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance for data protection.
  • Data Encryption: It must promote or follow data encryption techniques to ensure secure transmission and storage of critical patient data.

5. Customer Support and Training: Since all patients or healthcare providers may not be tech savvy, round the clock or reliable customer support is a must to ensure smooth software operation for both healthcare providers and patients. To ensure everyone is able to use it, good software must provide:

• • Training Programs: To ensure easy and hassle-free usage, most software providers help their clients with training programs for better understanding of software workflow.
  • Customer Support: It should also provide a dedicated technical support executive ready to provide round the clock support in case any technical error arises.

6. Cost and Return On Investment: Since affordability is the main concern for small and mid-sized healthcare facilities, consider the affordability and return on investment of the software before choosing it. It must have:

• • Pricing Models: Software with varying packages as per features available, having an yearly pricing model and usage-based pricing is often considered better.
  • Return on Investment: Healthcare providers often consider return on investment as a markup to make the right decision and choose to go with software delivering higher ROI.

Benefits of Care Management Software 

1. Improved Patient Outcomes: An effective care management software allows doctors, physicians, and qualified healthcare providers to constantly monitor patient health and make timely interventions, resulting in better patient outcomes and higher engagement.
2. Increased Care Efficiency: To improve efficiency, a good software comes with integrated functionalities like appointment scheduling and patient data management. Since remote care software allows remote monitoring of a patient, healthcare providers can devote more time to patient care, thereby improving care efficiency.
3. Better Patient Engagement: With patient portals that allow self-care capabilities for patients to engage them in their self-care, such software boosts patient engagement and motivate them to take active charge of their health and deliver quality health outcomes.
4. Data-driven Insights: With advanced predictive analytics and AI reporting systems, remote care software is capable of delivering valuable insights about patient trends, thereby helping in making data-driven decisions.

Use Cases for Care Management Software

1. Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM): Care management software enables medical professionals to deliver personalized remote patient monitoring and care from the convenience of patients’ homes. It empowers your patients and streamlines your practice.
2. Chronic Care Management (CCM) : Care management software helps practices manage patients dealing with chronic illnesses by tracking their health indicators, monitoring medication adherence, and coordinating treatment plans.
3. Transitional Care Management (TCM) : Care management software assists patients in easy transition from hospital to home/ community settings, by assuring continuity of care, follow-up appointments, and tracking recovery.
4. Care Coordination: Care software improves ease of communication among healthcare teams, ensuring that all team members are providing the care and treatment as per the need.

Best Practices for Implementing Care Management Software

• Assess Your Needs: Start by assessing the specific needs of your practice. Identify the difficulties you encounter in care management and determine how software can help you in managing them. Gather input from stakeholders, including clinicians, nurse practitioners, and all others involved.
• Evaluate Multiple Software Providers: Compare several software, along with their product features, pricing, user experience, and client rating. Feel free to request a demo and trial versions to determine the software’s functioning and simplicity of use.
• Consider Future Needs & Scope : Choose a remote care software that fulfills your current demands while also adapting to meeting your future requirements. Consider scalability, flexibility, EHR integration, and other relevant requirements.
• Implementation & Integration With Internal Systems: Create a detailed implementation strategy that includes data migration, employee training, and integration with existing systems. Allocate time and resources for your staff and patients to ensure a smooth transition to the new healthcare software.
• Monitor & Evaluate Performance: After implementation, continue to evaluate the software’s performance and request feedback from your patients, to find out how well the software is performing and whether its meeting all patients needs or not. Make frequent adjustments as needed to optimize the software’s use over time.

Streamline Your Healthcare Goals With HealthArc’s Advanced Care Management Software

Choosing the right care management software requires careful evaluation of a number of requirements, including functionalities, integration capabilities, user experience, compliance, scalability, customer support, and cost. Understanding your practice’s goals and patient assessment needs will allow you to choose remote care software that improves patient care and operational efficiency.

HealthArc’s all-in-one advanced care management platform helps practices in connecting to their patients in a remote setting, without compromising the healthcare delivery. With our care software, optimize reimbursement and minimize documentation for increased clinical efficiency.

Being HIPAA and Soc 2compliant, we promise unmatched data security and privacy, along with adherence to CMS guidelines and policies. Monitor your patients 24/7, refill prescriptions, review diagnostics, and make referrals using HealthArc.

To find out how our digital health platform can help you reduce hospital readmissions and achieve your healthcare practice goals, schedule a free demo or give us a call at +201 885 5571.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Bibliography

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MedPage Today. (2023). Selecting the Right Care Management Software for Your Practice.