Physician's Practice - November 2008 - (Page 58)

TECHNOLOGY eight ofﬁces throughout central Florida. A simple time and attendance program allows multisite practices to import employee information into a single database. With all of that information in a central location, the practice can run reports that help it identify staff drains and reduce overtime costs. Equally as important is the time-saving factor. While Atlantic Urological outsources its payroll to a third-party organization, some HR software is designed to interface with time and attendance programs to make the payroll and beneﬁts process seamless. “When you use a software package, you lose a lot of time involved in having to manually compile those records to process the payroll,” says Abrams. Time and attendance programs also allow you to compile trending reports. Is your stafﬁng conﬁguration correct? Does the physician have an adequate amount of support staff? Are employee absences more prevalent at certain times of the year? These are all questions that the software can help you answer. Time and attendance programs can also make the process of establishing a new hire much easier by helping determine average salary, establish pay grades, and monitor the average annual salary increase for each position. THE DOWNSIDE OF BENEFITS Whether it is health insurance or a 401k plan, employee beneﬁts are great incentives for retention. They also take a large amount of time to manage. Typically, the office manager takes care of enrolling new employees, fielding questions about insurance benefits and reimbursement procedures, and acting as a liaison between the retirement plan and the practice’s staff. Not only does this require a lot of time, it usually entails an incredible amount of paperwork. Luckily, many beneﬁt providers have implemented Web solutions that can make life easier for both employees and their practices. These Web programs allow employees to interact directly with the provider to receive reimbursement information, locate appropriate services, and change beneﬁt allocations when needed — all of which moves the work away from the ofﬁce manager and onto the provider itself. This can prove especially useful with retirement beneﬁts, where the process of managing accounts and fund allocations can prove time consuming. Many health and retirement beneﬁt providers can also handle new employee enrollment over the Web. While there will still be plenty of paperwork for the practice to deal with, at least these third-party provider programs can help make the process more manageable. AN EMR FOR EMPLOYEES? If you are looking for a versatile solution to your practice’s HR needs, you should consider software that can help you build a database 58 | PHYSICIANS PRACTICE | NOVEMBER 2008 WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM http://www.emdeon.com/onepassword http://www.emdeon.com/onepassword http://WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Physician's Practice - November 2008

Physician's Practice - November 2008 Contents Death of Solo Practice Just a Myth Letters HSAy What? Noteworthy Finding Lost Revenue: The Search for Billing and Coding Gold Getting More: Our Annual Physician Compensation Survey ’Tis the Season to be Neutral Ask the Experts Evaluating Paperless Labs HR in a Box? The Guide Coding Third-Party Audits on the Rise Branding the Cash-Only Practice Intra-Office Tug-of-Wars Stickin‘ Up For Yourself Classifieds Advertiser Index

Physician's Practice - November 2008

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