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Medical Practice Management Software

Features, Development Roadmap, Costs

In healthcare IT since 2005, ScienceSoft engineers custom PMS solutions for hospitals, outpatient clinics, and private practices, focusing on automation of daily operations, ease of use, and data-driven process optimization.

Custom Medical Practice Management Software - ScienceSoft
Custom Medical Practice Management Software - ScienceSoft

Medical practice management software (PMS) helps healthcare providers schedule patient appointments, code diagnoses and procedures, submit insurance claims and bills, track payments, and analyze the organization’s operational and financial performance.

Healthcare facilities and practitioners increasingly seek advanced and comprehensive functionality in their PMS tools. In the 2024 Gartner Tech Trends Survey, which involved 9,399 interviews with medical software buyers, 24% of participants mentioned they wanted to replace their current systems because of limited functionality (27%), lack of user-friendliness (19%), or inefficiency (19%).

Custom practice management software is often a preferred option when medical practices and clinics need a solution that offers:

  • Automation of complex workflows unique to the organization, such as patient referral processes, claim submission and billing for specialized services, or multi-location scheduling.
  • Interoperability and data centralization through integration with existing systems, including legacy software and third-party tools (e.g., EHR products by Epic, Cerner).
  • Tailored analytics, such as tracking claim denial reasons or patient no-shows, to optimize clinical and administrative procedures.

Implementation time: from 8 to 12+ months.

Typical integrations for practice management software: electronic health records (EHR), a revenue cycle management (RCM) system, a patient portal, CRM, an HR management solution, and health insurers’ systems.

Costs: $300,000–$1,000,000+, depending on complexity. Answer a few questions about your business needs to get a custom quote from our consultants.

Key Capabilities of Practice Management Software

Below, ScienceSoft’s healthcare IT consultants showcase PMS features that are often requested by clinics and healthcare practices among our clients.

  • Appointment scheduling dashboard with configurable presets for different specialties and patient groups, adjustable time increments, tags, color coding, and other customizations.
  • Scheduling appointments across multiple locations.
  • Flagging appointment conflicts.
  • Real-time waiting lists to fill up canceled slots.
  • AI-powered recommendations for appointment dates and times to improve schedule utilization.
  • Sending automated appointment reminders (via SMS, email, voice messages, or messengers according to a patient’s preference).
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Patient registration and authorization

  • Template-based and custom intake forms for patient demographic data, essential medical information, and insurance details.
  • Sending requests to insurers' systems to verify patient eligibility and benefits.
  • Sending automated prior authorization requests for medical procedures to insurers and tracking the status of requests.
  • Generation of explanations of benefits (EOB) and estimation of out-of-pocket costs (copays, deductibles, or coinsurance).
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Medical coding

  • A workspace for medical coders to assign and verify medical codes for diagnoses and procedures (according to ICD, CPT, and HCPCS).
  • Automatic extraction of diagnoses and procedures from medical records.
  • Search for codes across an electronic catalog of specialty-related medical coding standards.
  • Automated updating of the standards to the latest versions.
  • Smart search capabilities, including autocorrection of misspelled words and search by different parameters and keywords (e.g., by specialty, diagnosis, number, abbreviation, acronym).
  • Built-in automatic code error checks.
  • Rule-based or AI-powered automated coding suggestions for diagnoses and procedures.
  • Tracking assigned medical codes as well as all the changes made to them and generating relevant reports for coding compliance audits.
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Claim management

  • Claim generation based on medical codes and auto-population of claims with data from patient profiles and invoices.
  • Automatic claim scrubbing against payer-specific rules and clearinghouse standards to reduce denials.
  • Claim status tracking and alerting staff when follow-ups are needed (e.g., providing additional information).
  • Claim denial prioritization based on claim value and urgency, plus categorization by denial reason (e.g., medical necessity issues, non-covered services, or lack of prior authorization).
  • Automatic assignment of tasks related to managing claim denials to the responsible staff.
  • Template-based appeal generation.
  • Payment tracking and reconciliation.
  • Automated staff notifications on outstanding balances, payment due dates, and overdue payments.
  • Automated patient billing with options for e-statements, payments via patient portals, and installment plans.
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Analytics and reporting

  • Financial analytics: tracking revenue and profitability metrics, claim rejections, denials, and reimbursement rates.
  • Operational analytics: tracking patient flow, provider workload, workflow efficiency, staff productivity, and utilization of facilities and resources.
  • Patient engagement and satisfaction analytics: survey-based satisfaction scores and rates for overdue payments, canceled visits, no-shows, skipped medical procedures, etc.
  • Dashboards supporting data filtering (e.g., by period, patient group, insurer), drilling up and down, and ad hoc and scheduled report generation.

Advanced analytics powered by AI and machine learning:

  • Revenue cycle forecasting: predicting future revenue, reimbursement timelines, and potential cash flow issues based on billing patterns, payment cycles, claim denials, and payer contracts.
  • Operational optimization: identifying bottlenecks in patient throughput and suggesting optimal appointment schedules, staffing levels, and room assignments to enhance efficiency.
  • Fraud detection: flagging suspicious billing practices, such as upcoding, unnecessary testing, or billing for no-shows and undocumented treatments.
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Patient self-service capabilities

(Available via a patient portal or a mobile app)

  • Access to personal data, visit history, lab results, and physician recommendations via the app.
  • Independent appointment scheduling for patients.
  • Uploading insurance and identification information via a personal profile in the app.
  • Appointment registration forms with auto-population of fields with patient data that is already in the system.
  • Pre-visit screening questionnaires with electronic signing of consent forms and privacy notices.
  • Notifications on completing different steps of online pre-visit registration (e.g., validation of patient registration data, appointment confirmation).
  • Contactless check-in when a patient arrives for an appointment.
  • Paying bills online and linking payment cards for quick out-of-pocket payments during or after visits.
  • Enabling automatic billing, customizing payment amounts, and setting repayment periods.
  • Requesting prescription refills.

Advanced:

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Compliance, security, and data privacy

  • Role-based access controls and action permissions for healthcare practice executives, physicians, medical coders, admins, etc.
  • Multi-factor authentication (MFA).
  • Encryption of all data at rest and in transit.
  • Audit trail mechanisms for recording all user activities.
  • Compliance with patient data privacy regulations (HIPAA, HITECH, GDPR) and payment security standards (PCI DSS).
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Featured Custom Practice Management and Scheduling Solutions by ScienceSoft

Need Assistance With Your Practice Management Software Initiative?

ScienceSoft has successfully delivered over 150 healthcare IT projects and has skilled experts ready to handle all aspects of PMS engineering, support, modernization, integration, or feature expansion. We are here to discuss your needs and provide a non-binding project estimate.

Essential Integrations for Practice Management Software

Essential Integrations for Practice Management Software

  • Electronic health records (EHR) — to synchronize patient information between the EHR and PMS; to pull diagnosis and medical procedure details from EHR for claims.
  • Revenue cycle management (RCM) system — in case an RCM already exists as a separate system or part of the EHR, the PMS would integrate with the RCM to exchange claim and billing data. In the integration scheme above, RCM is an internal module of comprehensive practice management software.
  • A patient portal —to let patients book appointments, register for visits, check coverage details, and pay bills online.
  • Insurers’ systems — to validate patient insurance eligibility and coverage details; to send claims and track their status.
  • Customer relationship management (CRM) system — to collect patient engagement data and allow administrative staff to update patient and appointment info directly via the CRM.
  • HR management system — to obtain staff schedules for booking patient appointments.

How to Develop Custom Medical Practice Management Software

Below is a general process overview highlighting the key steps of custom development for practice management software. In real projects, ScienceSoft’s experts adjust this plan to suit the needs of each particular healthcare organization and turn it into a detailed roadmap that specifies the budget, milestones, and risk mitigation strategy for each project stage.

1.

Business analysis and requirement engineering

Business analysts communicate with the healthcare provider’s representatives (executives, medical coders, administrative staff, etc.) to understand the organization’s specific patient registration, appointment scheduling, and claim management workflows. Then, they compose a PMS feature set that can simplify workflows for all user groups, achieve better data consistency between systems, and ultimately increase the bottom line by improving operational efficiency and reducing claim denials.

ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft

2.

Compliance planning

Medical practice management software generally has to comply with patient data privacy requirements outlined in HIPAA, HITECH, or GDPR (depending on the country), as well as payment security standards (e.g., PCI DSS) if the solution includes online payment capabilities for patients. Before the development starts, compliance consultants identify features required to meet applicable regulations and standards, such as role-based access control (RBAC), multi-factor authentication (MFA), patient data encryption, full audit trails, and more.

ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft

3.

UX/UI design

UX/UI designers create interfaces and dashboards that allow users to conveniently access all the necessary information to complete their tasks.

For example, staff at multi-specialty practices and hospitals might benefit from an appointment scheduling dashboard that shows the recent patient test order statuses and turnaround estimates from EHR or LIS. By alerting staff when a specialist appointment is scheduled before the results are expected to come, the system prevents booking specialist visits too early.

Advanced versions of such dashboards can also recommend the optimal appointment dates based on patient preferences, test result timelines, and physician availability.

ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft

4.

Development and QA

At this stage, developers create the back end and front end of a practice management solution according to the requirement specification and UX/UI designs.

When features are delivered, medical staff can beta-test them and provide feedback so that developers can improve the software in future iterations. For example, medical billing specialists can evaluate the adequacy of claim prioritization and categorization capabilities and request to include additional claim types.

Testing is usually done in parallel with development. One of the key QA processes for custom PMS software is testing integrations with the partnering insurers' systems, as delays or inaccuracies in data exchange can lead to revenue losses. Another crucial step is security testing, which validates whether the software meets the requirements of HIPAA and other patient data protection regulations.

ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft

5.

Implementation and support

Post-launch, the team monitors the solution’s performance and fixes emerging issues. It also provides the initial training to the healthcare organization’s staff by offering user manuals and consultations. A support team may also be assembled to quickly respond to user queries, provide assistance, and update the PMS as needed.

If you decide to pair your scheduling system with a patient-facing AI chatbot to offload the administrative staff, I suggest implementing several ways to control and enhance its performance after the launch. For example, this can be done by asking patients for feedback on chatbot answers, reviewing and evaluating dialogue samples, and introducing AI self-learning to have the model treat low schedule utilization as a negative reward.

Senior Business Analyst and Healthcare IT Consultant at ScienceSoft

How Much It Costs to Develop Custom Medical Practice Management Software

In ScienceSoft’s experience, custom practice management software development costs vary from $300,000 to $1,000,000+. Key contributing factors are the need for complementary functionality (such as a full-scale RCM module, patient portal, or advanced analytics) and the number of integrations with internal and external systems.

$300,000–$500,000+

PMS for midsize practices that enables patient registration, appointment scheduling, and basic analytics. Claim management capabilities are enabled via an integration with the existing RCM system.

$500,000–$1,000,000+

PMS for midsize and large providers with dedicated features for automated medical coding, patient self-service, RCM capabilities, and advanced operational and financial analytics.

Learn the cost of your PMS

ScienceSoft's experts are ready to provide a non-binding quote for your specific case.

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Why Choose ScienceSoft for Your PMS Project

ScienceSoft as a Trusted Partner for Custom Healthcare Solution Development

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With ScienceSoft on our side, we can fully focus on delivering tailored healthcare solutions to our clients. Highly recommend them!

Our project required a large amount of industry-specific methodology and algorithms to be implemented into our new software connected to EHR/LIS systems, which the team handled well. <…> They are reliable, thorough, smart, available, extremely good communicators, and very friendly.

They delivered a fully customized AI medical chatbot PoC in just two weeks, which was unbelievable. <...> I’m genuinely grateful to ScienceSoft for their hard work and would absolutely recommend them to anyone looking for top-notch results in health tech.

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ScienceSoft develops healthcare IT solutions that reduce care delivery costs and improve outcomes, no matter the challenges posed by diverse expectations of medical staff, shifting priorities, and resistance to change.

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