Chronic Care Management (CCM) Software

Buyers Guide

Last updated: June 08, 2023

Chronic care management software is an add-on service that can be integrated with EHR/EMR software to improve clinical efficiency and patient care. In this guide, we’ll talk about all of the factors you need to understand chronic care software. Here’s what we’ll be discussing in this buyer’s guide:

What is Chronic Care Management Software?

Chronic Care Management Software Features

Choosing a Chronic Care Management Vendor

Chronic Care Management Software Benefits

What is Chronic Care Management Software?

Chronic care software is used to assist in simplifying chronic care and provides services to cater to patients with chronic care. It’s an add-on service that can be integrated with your EMR/EHR software easily to help streamline your clinical workflows, improve chronic care, and increase productivity.

This tool helps set up a criterion for chronic care patients, identify patients with chronic care symptoms, and classify the patients based on the extent of their pain. It also helps in recording various tasks and procedures that require chronic care management, exporting data for numerous administrative and operational purposes, and tracking each patient’s medical history for a better understanding of their chronic pain.

Here are some of the top benefits of implementing chronic care software in your practice:

• Saves time and effort of physicians by eliminating the need for manual charting.
• Offer patient care to patients with chronic pain symptoms.
• Automate patient data documentation.
• Customize treatments easily without too much hassle.

There are hundreds of chronic care software in the market today. They range from providing the mere basic services to a full-fledged chronic care software that caters to all of your operational needs. All of which are designed to simplify the chronic care management process and create ease for practitioners.

Here, I’ll be going over the various features of chronic care software along with the requirements of selecting your software vendor for your practice.

A successful chronic care software implementation offers numerous benefits to your practice. For instance, these benefits include reduced costs of administrative tasks, minimized chances of error, enhance patient satisfaction, and improved clinical efficiency.

Here’s all you need to know to make the most of your chronic care software.

Chronic Care Management Software Features

Here are some features of chronic care software that help improve patient care, streamline your clinical workflows, and simplify administrative tasks.

Coordination – Your chronic care management software should be able to offer coordination features among various physicians.

Extensive Planning – Your software should also include an extensive treatment planner that includes each patient’s individual treatment plans.

Risk Assigner – Your chronic care management software should be able to associate a degree of risk to each patient’s condition depending on the pain.

HIPAA Compliance - A chronic care management software also needs to ensure patient information confidentiality and privacy through compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) guidelines.

Choosing a Chronic Care Management Vendor

Now that we’ve discussed the necessary features of chronic care software, let’s talk about some of the requirements you’d need from your vendor. These may differ for each individual medical practice.

Vendor Size – What type of practices does your vendor typically cater to? Some vendors only provide services to small-scale practices, while others cater to large-scale practices. Therefore, if you have a small practice, paying for services that help large practices, won’t do much good. Similarly, large practices won’t be able to function with services designed for small practices.

Design – The design of chronic care software’s infrastructure depends on your choice. Whether you would prefer a cloud-based, web-based, or even standalone EMR.

Web-based EMR: These companies focus on a web-based approach and practitioners can access their patient information through their web browser.

Stand-alone EMR: Although not quite popular as the others, this EMR is an on-premise EMR that can be accessed remotely through smartphones, iPads, etc. as long as you’re connected to your practice’s network.

Cloud-based EMR: Companies that provide native cloud EMR offer you access to patient information through cloud storage.

Certification – Vendor certification ensures patient information confidentiality and security and is perhaps one of the most important things to look for in a chronic care management software vendor. So make sure your vendor has ONC-authorized testing and certification body (ONC-ATCB) certification.

Most EMR vendors focus on providing cloud-based EMR services to enhance security and provide seamless services.

Chronic Care Management Software Benefits

An effective EMR software helps streamline your clinical workflows, simplify administrative tasks, and help reduce cost. Here are some of the most advantageous benefits of chronic care software.

• Improved clinical efficiency.
• Enhance profitability by lowering costs.
• Seamless insurance claims management and denied claims.
• Improve administrative efficiency by simplifying processes.
• Improve revenue and ROI.