From a financial perspective, one of the benefits of mobile charge capture software is a tremendous reduction in charge entry lag. This is the length of the time between when the patient is seen and when the charge is captured electronically - not on a piece of paper where it could be misplaced or accidentally used as a napkin.

Providers who see patients in an office or clinic setting typically have low charge entry lag. Patients come to them and the provider is always in front of a computer, so they can capture billing information at the same time as they're doing other documentation.

Everything changes the moment the provider heads over to see patients at an outside facility such as a hospital or nursing home. Suddenly they are walking from room to room, and they need to improvise a system (typically a paper system) to track what happens as they go along - or they have to reconstruct it from memory later, when they're in front of a computer. Then they have to figure out how get the paper or spreadsheet back to their billing office. This administrative burden can create a cycle of procrastination that leads to weeks of charge entry lag as busy providers struggle to stay on top of their paperwork.

The statistics tell the story. If you're looking for a mobile charge capture solution, you should ask each vendor what their median charge lag is across their entire customer base for these places of service: Hospital Inpatient, Hospital Outpatient / Surgical Center, and Skilled Nursing Facility. If a vendor tracks these statistics, the answers may reveal whether their charge capture solution is usable in real time. If they don't track these statistics, why not? Charge entry lag is one of the key metrics for charge capture software, and you should choose a vendor that helps its customers measure and improve it.

In February 2017, the median (typical) pMD customer had a charge entry lag of 0.06 days at these remote facilities. In fact, 84.9 percent of pMD’s customers had a charge entry lag of less than one day outside of the clinic setting. Of providers who used pMD to capture charges in February, 90.8 percent used the pMD mobile app to do so, and 91.2 percent of all February charges were created on mobile. These numbers prove that practices are living the dream of real-time mobile charge capture. The fast, intuitive mobile app that works offline is key to achieving this.  

What does all this mean for a medical practice? If you start out with a charge entry lag of one week at your remote facilities, and you become a typical pMD customer with a charge entry lag of less than one day, then you immediately recover a full week of revenue that had been floating out there somewhere in paper form. You could bill 372 days worth of revenue in a single calendar year of 365 days.