Warm wishes for a successful new year!
Let me start by wishing you, your practice teams and your families happy holidays and a successful New Year. I’m Kristen Heffernan, the General Manager at MicroMD. Some of you have known me for years working with the Marketing and Product Management teams. Others may be meeting me for the first time. I recently had the opportunity to accept the GM role when Heather Ansell was asked to join the Henry Schein animal health division. I’m following in the footsteps of Heather’s strong leadership that focused on innovation and client success. With that said, I wanted to share some of our direction for 2017 – a direction squarely focused on helping you navigate the challenging outcomes practices must meet to be successful.
My First Two Months as GM
My first two months leading the organization has been spent on gathering input from clients, MicroMD staff, KLAS, industry organizations, regulatory bodies, our eSERVICES partners, competitors and our reseller channel. From that input, two things are very clear. First, the pace of change within healthcare has increased at an unfathomable rate. Second, ambulatory practices that aren’t experienced with fully managing a business are at risk of losing their independence to practice how and when they want with their own staff and patient base. More and more physician practices are merging with larger practices or selling to a hospital network that has the operational backbone to manage the patient engagement, financial and regulatory side of a medical practice. Some providers are opting for hospital employment. Other practices are successfully maintaining their independence by embracing the changes and recognizing the value in learning how to manage their practice like a business, including implementing business models, tools and services to assist with operational, financial and clinical efficiencies.
2017 Focus – accelerate 2017
Going into 2017, MicroMD will continue driving forward with our focus on helping providers retain their independence. 2017 will be the year of what we’re internally calling “accelerate 2017” – the name for the overarching strategy and framework that we’ll use to guide our efforts throughout 2017. At a high level, we plan to focus on two critical areas: (1) Client Success and (2) Innovation. Focusing on initiatives that fit within these broad categories will help us make decisions on where to focus our time and resources with the goal of being your trusted advisors and helping you get back to the business of healing. Our plan includes providing you with education, guidance, solutions and services to help impact successful outcomes in the following areas:
Client Success and Innovation Areas
- Managing revenue and profitability
- Tracking and reporting for regulatory compliance
- Optimizing payment programs
- Boosting patient engagement
- Enabling administrative excellence
- Maximizing clinical quality and efficiencies
- Mitigating risk
- Minimizing cyber threats
Your MicroMD team is already hard at work on the following initiatives and will continue adding new ones that fit within the “accelerate 2017” strategy:
- Improved MicroMD team cross training, including how the MicroMD tools impact successful program outcomes
- The build out of a Help Desk knowledgebase to ease your search for support resources
- Outcome-based training programs
- New educational webinars, eBooks and blogs designed to help navigate the complex practice challenges and payment programs
- Proactive account management to connect with you in new ways to understand practice impacts and provide guidance to improve outcomes
- 2015 Edition EMR Certification
- Clinical Decision Support (CDS) knowledgebase tool available through a single click to all MicroMD EMR users
- An industry-leading rules-based CDS tool to help you manage better patient outcomes
- 2016 PQRS reporting and 2017 MIPS registry reporting solutions
- EMR usability improvements, including steps to continuing merging the PM and EMR databases, improving workflows, adding specialty-specific functionality and updating the look and feel of the user interface
- A new cloud EMR offering
- Tools for mobile patient insights to help providers maximize clinical efficiencies
We look forward to sharing more information about these initiatives as they launch – watch your Client Alert emails. Wishing you success in 2017 and beyond – Kristen Heffernan
