What to look for in methadone clinic software

Headnote

IT solutions can save time, produce better data, and help with the bottom line

Directors of outpatient methadone clinics always are balancing costs against benefits. Because they need to manage within budgets, they must be absolutely certain that improvements will yield an appropriate return on investment (ROI). Today, many technology vendors are making their software solutions very affordable, creating new opportunities for methadone clinic directors to upgrade service delivery. As a result, this is an appropriate time to revisit the considerations for evaluating methadone clinic management software.

Among the top goals of many clinic directors is having staff spend more time caring for patients and less time on administration, maintaining better records, and producing more effective reports. However, any effort to improve operations must be balanced with budget considerations. Let's look at these areas and determine what the appropriate software solution must have to accomplish these goals.

Timesaving Functions

Record keeping. Working in a substance abuse clinic requires a great deal of focus and energy because of the number of simultaneous activities. Patients are anxious to receive their medications, meet with their counselors, and get on with the days activities. The clinic must comply with federal, state, and local laws, regulations, and procedures; provide a multitude of services for their patients; and bill patients, Medicaid, and private insurance carriers. Other activities include:

* receiving, logging, and tracking class 2 narcotics, such as methadone;

* writing orders and dispensing medications;

* accounting for every milligram of medication in inventory, dispensed, or destroyed; and

* scheduling and tracking a range of supports such as social services, mental health services, and testing services.

A meaningful software solution should manage all of these functions and more. Record keeping should happen automatically in the course of a clinic's normal daily work. By this we mean that accepting medication shipments, scheduling appointments, writing orders, and providing patient services should be logical, automated, and provide all the information the clinic needs. Thus, clinic management software must be intuitive, as well as easy to understand, use, and configure.

Configurability. The ability to configure software to work as the clinic operates is important. Some software requires clinics to change their practices to adapt to the way the software has been designed. On...