If you are managing a busy medical office, then you probably spend most days just trying to keep your head above water. The struggle is real, but you don’t have to go down swinging. When it’s up to you to get it all done, consider specialized training to help lay the foundation for more efficient practice operations.

What if you could learn how to streamline and delegate more of your workload, and learn more effective ways to streamline your operations without hiring another FTE? Fortunately, continuing education programs like the Certified Medical Office Manager (CMOM) certification can help to further boost your skill level, so you can perform better in your role.  

Medical information is the number one prime target when it comes to cybersecurity hacks, FBI Computer Scientist Thomas Ervin at Practice Management Institute’s National Conference for Medical Office Professionals in December. A single click on a phishing email can turn a machine into a “slave,” as termed in the cybersecurity industry. Phishing email incidents are not new and have increased more than 200 percent. It has become so prevalent that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity Division has set up a website to report phishing emails. Ervin, FBI Special Agent Raymond Martinez, and Cybersecurity Expert Richard Avery delivered an eye-opening demonstration to show how easy it can be for your personal and work data to be compromised by a hacker. Cybercriminals target all types of organizations and these experts warned that healthcare entities need to be especially vigilant.

Looking to start or advance your career in Medical Office Management? Earning a certification can be a huge bargaining chip when trying to snag a dream job or advance into a supervisory role with your current employer. In either case, you’ll want to weigh factors like the investment of time and money to know if a certification is right for you.

If you’ve been fortunate enough to assemble a team of medical office professionals that work well together to support the practice objectives, we applaud you! With today’s unemployment rates at an all-time low and medical jobs on the rise, cultivating a great team is hard work and can take months, even years to find the right fit.

If you break out in a sweat when it’s time to conduct employee performance reviews, you’re not alone.  For many medical office managers, this is a difficult but necessary step in developing your team. Your staff probably dreads it as much as you, but performance reviews are an important way to gauge your employees’ work successes and stressors, and create better overall communication.

The goal is to take a positive approach and avoid a few common errors. This will help put everyone at ease, including yourself. So, we put together some do’s and don’ts to use as a guide to help your next round of performance reviews go smoothly.

With patients to serve and open positions to fill recruiting qualified, caring healthcare professionals for your medical practice can be time consuming, overwhelming, and challenging. Learn how you can draw top talent and keep abreast of cutting-edge technology and new techniques with skilled, trained and knowledgeable employees. 

A Medical Office Manager’s Guide to Patient Collections

If you are managing a small- to medium-sized provider office, then you’re painfully familiar with the daily struggle to keep everything and everyone in line. These broad responsibilities probably include things like managing the patient-payer mix, staffing, provider schedules, patient relations, and accounting. It’s not easy; our hats are off to you!

The medical industry is constantly evolving. How are you able to keep up after your formal education ends? Don’t let these progresses in your field leave you regressing in your position. Take the first step in becoming a CMOM today! See if you're ready and take our free assessment today.

Is your medical practice following current HIPAA compliance guidelines? Keeping track of current regulations is challenging and time consuming. But disregard for mandatory patient privacy laws can bring costly violations, fines, and penalties if a breach occurs. The following checklists outline important steps that organizations must take to secure Protected Health Information (PHI). Keep these checklists on hand to help keep your practice compliant.

With rising costs in today’s medical practice, it’s becoming more important than ever to receive timely payments from patients. With the high costs associated with printing and mailing statements, and lingering late and missing patient payments, it’s enough to send the medical office budget into deficit. Though collecting insurance company payments is the lifeblood of all medical facilities, out-of-pocket patient expenses such as deductibles, copays, and coinsurance amounts can’t be dismissed. They can add up quickly in lost revenue if stricter collection procedures aren’t in place. 

Medical practice overhead is a growing concern for many practices that are looking to thrive and simultaneously maintain quality patient care. In today’s medical practice, overhead is directly related to patient volume, collections, and its general structure. These ongoing administrative and clinical expenses are necessary for the business to function but can have a negative impact on the practice’s revenue.

An excerpt from the new ebook: The Medical Office Manager's Guide to Time Management 

Key tips, best practices, insights—we've shared a number of ways to better manage your medical practice. But if you're looking for guidance in getting better at time management, all in one place, you'll want to download the latest ebook on The Medical Office Manager's Guide to Time Management. Not only does this guide provide you with educational and informative gems, it also shares how to help put all of this great knowledge into practice. 

We know CMOM is a huge investment. But the financial piece shouldn't keep you from personal development. In the  video below, PMI Faculty Member and CMOM Instructor Linda D'Spain discusses the different ways to pay for CMOM.

To be effective time administrators, concentration must be focused on what is important rather than what is urgent.

Learning to concentrate on the important reduces crises mode and urgency addictions. The important eventually becomes urgent, so the strategy is to act on the important before it becomes urgent.