Your Guide to Choosing an ASC Software

Is your surgery center ready to invest in software to better manage the day-to-day, optimize revenue, and improve patient outcomes? If so, you may not know where to start. We’ve put together this helpful guide to outline some questions you should consider when considering different surgery center software options.

• Does the ASC solution provider offer a comprehensive solution?
• Does the ASC software work for management companies and smaller surgery centers?
• What are the best surgery center management software benefits?
• Does surgery center software increase efficiencies? Why should I consider investing?
• Does the solution provide surgery center software communication tools?
• Does the system include ambulatory electronic health records?
• Does the software keep me in compliance with changing standards like the No Surprises Act?
• What do customers think of the ASC software?

Keep reading to learn more about answering key questions while reviewing potential ASC software solutions for your surgery center.

Once you’ve identified the types of software vendors you need to support your surgery center(s) needs, it’s time to move into the individual products and features. In addition to understanding the product’s offerings, like an EMR solution, case coordination, and patient engagement features, you should look at the overall benefits for your staff and center. Questions to ask include:

• What are the best surgery center management software benefits?
• Does surgery center software increase efficiencies? Why should I consider investing?
• Does the solution provide surgery center software communication tools?
• Does the system include ambulatory electronic health records?
• Does the software support patient communication, estimates, and the case lifecycle?

We’ll break down the different types of ASC software solutions that your center can take advantage of to enable better outcomes.

HST Practice Management is the industry-leading ambulatory surgery center practice management software designed specifically for your surgery management system. Gone are the days that you have to deal with surgery center inefficiencies, denied claims, and slower time to payments. With our surgery management software, you can:

• Get Paid Faster: Putting more money in your pocket is our goal. Our ASC billing software has built-in tools that will allow you to automatically scrub your claims prior to submitting anything, ultimately minimizing claim rejections. Our seamless integrations will help you transmit claims and statements directly to the clearinghouse and import ERAs for both patients and payer payments directly from the clearinghouse.
• Improve Supply Chain Management: Improve your case costing by using our built-in ASC inventory management features or by using one of our integrations with your preferred ASC inventory management company. You’ll also experience cost savings when you manage implants through our comprehensive workflow.
• Reduce the Margin for Error: From Scheduling to Pre-Op, ASCs using our surgical practice management system will be able to enhance insurance verifications and preauthorization workflows, thus reducing the margin for error and never worrying about operating on a patient that does not have insurance. ASCs will be able to maximize OR time by leveraging real-time alerts on room and equipment conflicts, missing preference cards, and expired provider credentialing.

HST eChart is our ASC EMR system inspired, designed, and built by clinicians like you for echarting on tablets, laptops, and desktops. It’s highly configurable ASC software and provides you with easy, real-time access to data. Make paper charting a thing of the past so your ambulatory surgery center can operate at peak performance. This includes:

• Increasing speed to revenue: A surgery center’s success is often dependent on the efficiency and rapid turnaround of surgical cases. With paper-heavy charting methods, ambulatory surgery centers get bogged down with slow, inefficient processes which delay payment. With ASC EMR software, speed, collaboration, and flexibility are built-in every step away, ultimately increasing your surgery center’s speed to revenue.
• True concurrent echarting: HST’s ambulatory EHR was the first to introduce an ambulatory electronic health record that allows concurrent echarting at all times, in all areas of the patient care documentation process. This advantage enables clinicians to continue documenting the patient experience in a concurrent manner without having to wait on others to complete their tasks electronically. Our LiveEdit™ technology shows—in real time—all updates to the patient echart being made by any logged-in user, providing ongoing collaboration about patient care activities, potential risks, and treatment indicators.
• Enhance clinical workflows: Patient safety is improved when clinicians can make immediate procedure or treatment changes based on another clinician’s documentation.
• 100% chart completion: HST’s ASC EMR system has built-in indicators that guarantee regulatory compliance for timely chart completion and allow you to easily identify incomplete charts. With these indicators, surgery centers will always know the current status of a patient’s echart, including any manual task assignments such as patient calls or charts for peer review. Through automated tasks based on pre-determined triggers, you’ll also be able to receive alerts for review of lab results, required operative reports, and more.

HST Case Coordination (formerly Casetabs) is surgical coordination software that helps surgery centers effortlessly coordinate surgeries through the surgery scheduling app and communicates changes in real-time giving you access to the important information you need to serve your patients. Say goodbye to faxes, missed appointments, and workflow bottlenecks. Our ambulatory care communication software makes sure you’re always in the loop!

Using surgical coordination software and a surgery scheduling app that automates the surgery scheduling experience leads to:

• Increase staff efficiency: Real-time visibility to add-on changed and canceled cases enables staff to respond quickly and significantly lessen the number of surgical communication points via text, email, phone, and word of mouth for any changes to those cases. In other words, no more “telephone game.”
• Take better care of patients: Our surgery coordination software creates a central hub for sharing surgery center case information and updates between surgeons, anesthesiologists, clinical staff, office staff, and vendor reps. The surgery scheduling app reduces the likelihood of missing or inaccurate patient information, unnecessary errors, and overall communication breakdown.
• Use your time better: Having access to ASC case updates right when they happen makes the day of tactical communication easier by improving inter-department surgery center connectivity so that all departments can perform their roles more efficiently. The digital surgery boards unite departments to increase collaboration, emphasize teamwork, and share decision-making.

HST Price Transparency is the ultimate patient responsibility estimator and patient estimation software for providing good faith estimates. Within minutes, you’ll be able to calculate an accurate patient estimate, deliver the estimate to your patient via text or email, and immediately provide ASC online bill pay.

• Improve Upfront Patient Payments: When patients feel like a surgery center is being proactive and transparent about cost, they are more likely to pay in full and upfront. By generating easy-to-read, accurate patient financial estimates with clear line items, patients become empowered and are comfortable paying their fair share of the bill. HST Price Transparency allows you to do just that and will help improve upfront collections.
• Save Valuable Time: When you are forced to generate good faith estimates by hand, you are wasting so much valuable time. An outpatient facility in Utah used to spend 10 hours a week manually calculating patient estimates. With our patient estimation software, they can now do it in 15 minutes.
• Improve Patient Satisfaction: Historically, the financial element of having surgery has been highly stressful for patients. In many cases, patients put off having life-improving procedures because they cannot understand what it will cost them. This causes significant tension between patients, providers, staff, payors, and everyone in between. By using a patient estimation solution like HST Price Transparency, you’ll be able to ease these tensions and ultimately have happier patients.
• Comply with the No Surprises Act and CMS Guidelines: The No Surprises Act went into effect January 1, 2022, and there are a lot of changes that ambulatory surgery centers need to make in order to comply. From disclosures to insurance verification to good faith estimates, HST Price Transparency has all the necessary elements built-in to help you immediately comply.