Medical billing software South Africa? Are you looking for solutions?

If you’re a healthcare practitioner in private practice in South Africa, you no doubt have a few options for your practice management. However, there have been much changes in the industry over the last 5 years. This is mainly due to the technology, mobile phone and internet related advances that we’ve experienced. Whether you like these changes or not is immaterial – they are here to stay. And they’re disrupting many industries including healthcare practitioners in private practice.

I can sum up my experience and knowledge into two distinct camps – traditional desktop based software (such as Medemass, HealthBridge, MedEDI, MeDAP, SoluMed, Panacea) and online based practice manage software solutions (such as smeMetrics).

Medical Billing Software South Africa – Changing Tastes?

While I have tons of respect for established companies such has Medemess who have pioneered the software solutions in the healthcare practitioner market for over 20 years. They have assisted these practitioners in their private practices for many years. But they need to change drastically to meet the needs of the more informed and changing tastes of healthcare practitioners.

Why the change? And why now?

Because we experience and expect things differently. Email is no longer optional. Having a mobile phone is no longer optional. So healthcare practitioners expect these changes and more importantly their patients also expect these changes. Healthcare practitioner providers must provide solutions that will appease their patients. This may be the difference of keeping that client or not.

For example, do most medical billing software in South Africa, have email and SMS reminders for their client appointments? I know some private practices that get their receptionists to phone clients one day before their appointments to remind them of their appointments. This is great. But what about healthcare practitioners in private practice that do not have receptionists – such as clinical psychologists, educational psychologists, counselling psychologists, occupational therapists, dieticians, physiotherapists, speech therapists, audiologists, social workers, chiropractors, dentists and doctors.

Medical Billing Software South Africa – Features You Can Expect

We can delve into many features and this could turn into a really long article. But I want to concentrate our information around the medical aid claim submissions. This is probably the most important consideration for most healthcare practitioners. It is also the sole reason that most choose a practice management software for their private practices.

Medical Aid Claims – EDI?

Since most products started with the simple task of submitting claims to medical aid, this is the first big feature. The software must be able to store the information for a medical aid claim. And it must be able to submit this claim to each medical aid. Traditionally, this was done using a medical aid switch and claims are said to be sent using EDI. This mechanism to submit claims is still used today, and smeMetrics supports this method as well.

Each medical aid claim using EDI has a cost per claim. This can vary from R3 to over R10 per claim. smeMetrics costs R3.50 per EDI claim.

Medical Aid Claims – Email?

But another change in the healthcare practitioner market has been the ability to submit claims using email. This was largely introduced by the Discovery medical aid. Due to their efficiency of receiving claims, this became a standard for some healthcare practitioners. But they could simply use Microsoft Word and generate an invoice, and then send it via email to the medical aid.

Simple solution? Yes! But it did require lots of time.

Cost-effective solution? Most definitely!

Until this point, the only way to submit the medical aid claim to the medical aid was to use the EDI option. The only way to use the EDI option was to get a practice management software. Since all of the practice management software was expensive, this left very little options to healthcare practitioners in private practice.

When we designed smeMetrics, we were armed with this knowledge around EDI and email based medical aid claims. Hence, we choose to use just email based medical aid claims for our first 2 years.

Our clients loved it. And some didn’t.

And when one of them left (our very first client who left us for a valid reason) since we didn’t have EDI claims, we made the changes. We introduced EDI into smeMetrics. We then had a practice management software that could support both email based and EDI based medical aid claims. I’m not sure if many of the medical billing software South Africa supports both options. We do find that most of our clients use the email based options, since it works remarkably well.

Medical Billing Software South Africa – Your Options

We have presented a short overview of the major considerations around medical billing software South Africa. The in-depth analysis into each feature is probably still worth considering and I’ll add these into another article.

We have compiled a list of resources for you summarising some of the main options around practice management software in South Africa.

We’ll start with smeMetrics as the simple, secure and online practice management software for your practice – go to Online Medical Billing Software

Medemess, you can visit their website Medemass Website as an smeMetrics Alternative

HealthBridge, you can visit their website HealthBridge Website as an smeMetrics Alternative

MedEDI, you can visit their website MedEDI Website as an smeMetrics Alternative

MeDAP, you can visit their website MeDAP Website as an smeMetrics Alternative

SoluMed, you can visit their website SoluMed Website as an smeMetrics Alternative

Panacea, you can visit their website Panacea Website as an smeMetrics Alternative

For more information on practice management software and in particular smeMetrics for your private practice, go to Practice Management Software