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11 Challenges and Solutions for Family Medicine Providers

Family medicine providers face a variety of different challenges. Some are specific to them and others are common for all medical providers. Below are the top 11 challenges family medicine providers are facing in 2023 and solutions to combat them.

1) Family Medicine Burnout

Physician burnout is seen throughout every kind of medical entity, both small family medicine practices, and large hospitals. Burnout involves a feeling of little purpose, physician exhaustion, mental tiredness, and a host of other negative symptoms. For family medicine practices, providers should protect the time of the physician. This means giving them tools that help them work effectively, focus on their patient interactions and less on administrative tasks.

2) Electronic Health Record

With the right EHR, providers can improve patient engagement, improve payments, decrease no-shows, improve follow-up care, and relieve your staff of tedious activity. With the right vendor, family medicine providers can access scheduling, communication, and information tools that improve the physician and patient experiences.

3) Staff

Staff turnover is a tough challenge that deeply impacts a family medicine practice. Taking the time to train new staff on the way your practice works takes up valuable. It is important that your staff have tools like quality practice management software and medical billing software. This can simplify tasks like scheduling, reminders, and insurance verification to make their job less stressful.

4) Patient Engagement

Patient engagement is the key to improving many areas of your practice. Some family medicine practices struggle to maintain higher levels of patient engagement. This is due to lack of resources available to them. With software, such as a quality patient portal and practice management software, providers can greatly increase patient engagement. It is possible to do this affordably in 2020 with the right vendor.

5) Increasing Reliance on Patient Payments

Due to an increase in high deductible health plans, family medicine providers are becoming increasingly reliant on patient payments. Without the right medical billing resources in place, it is difficult for a small practice to collect patient payments. A solution to this is to make sure your patient portal is integrated with your medical billing software. Also, your practice management software should offer manageable payment plan options. Finally, you can partner with a quality vendor of RCM services for difficult payment collections.

6) Vendors

Without the time to spend looking for a quality vendor of medical billing software, EHR, or practice management software, family medicine providers find themselves feeling stuck with terrible vendors who do not offer efficient solutions. Family medicine providers must partner with a quality vendor that offers cloud-based software partnered with quality customer support to make sure your needs are always met.

7) Medical Billing Software

A common challenge for family medicine providers is that their medical billing software is difficult to maintain, train on, and work with. With constantly changing billing codes, providers need medical billing software that is cloud-based, updating automatically with the latest industry changes. Providers cannot afford for their claims to be denied, quality medical billing software can offer clean-claim increasing solutions that improve first-time claim approves up to 99%.

8) Revenue Cycle Management

To ensure that each step of the revenue cycle is optimized, providers should partner with a quality RCM services vendor. An RCM services vendor can help your practice perfect claims processing while offering compassionate billing services to your patients.

9) Compliance

Whether it be physician industry compliance or patient compliance with their treatment plan, compliance is a very common challenge for family medicine providers. Having the right software that follows the rules, regulations and laws set in place can help physicians establish a compliance culture, protect patient information, and avoid costly fines.

10) Patient Volume

With new tools and services being introduced into the industry every year, it can be difficult to secure your patient base, keep patients from leaving for larger practices, and get new patients coming in. A solution to securing and growing your patient volume is to partner with a software vendor that promises to keep you in the loop with what patients are searching for. Examples of important tools include the patient portal, telehealth, and online bill pay.

11) Ever-Changing Landscape

The medical field is an ever-changing landscape that can sometimes be difficult to keep up with. Family medicine providers often find themselves left behind or having to sell to larger entities. The keys to avoiding difficult times are to keep your patients engaged with communication tools, outsource RCM services to increase clean claims and collect more payments, use quality practice management software to improve your staff/physician workflow and prevent burnout, and to partner with a quality vendor that understands what it means to be a family medicine provider.

To learn more about family medicine solutions that can help you, click here.

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