How to Automate AdvancedMD

An independent practice runs on one platform and no IT department

AdvancedMD is a cloud EHR, practice management and billing platform built specifically for independent practices rather than health systems, sized for groups of roughly one to fifty providers and configured per specialty. It is also sold to the medical billing companies that work on behalf of those practices, which is unusual and shapes the product.

A four-provider urology group has a waiting room, a procedure suite, a surgical list at the hospital and a payroll to meet on the last day of the month. Two people work the front desk, one person does the billing, and the owner is seeing patients all day like everybody else.

So the whole practice has to live in one system. Nobody here has the time to reconcile three systems that disagree, and there is nobody on staff to call when one of them stops talking to another. The software has to be the thing that works, because nothing in the building will make it work.

Nobody in a small practice does only one job

In a hospital group there is a department for authorisations and another for denials. In a practice this size there is one person, and that person is also answering the phone.

They file the authorisation for a cystoscopy, then remember on Thursday to check whether it came back. They work the rejected claims when a gap appears. They find the procedures done last week and never coded, by reading the schedule against the charges by eye. They print statements for balances that have been sitting since spring. They ring the patients on active surveillance whose next test was due in March, when they get to it.

Every one of those is a queue, and every queue is only as current as the last free afternoon anybody had. That is not a discipline problem. It is arithmetic.

AdvancedMD

The procedure nobody billed for Yesterday's completed procedures set against what was actually coded, so revenue that quietly went missing shows up the next morning.

Surveillance patients who drifted The people whose next test was due months ago, listed with how overdue they are and a reminder drafted for a clinician to send.

Takings matched to the bank Card payments and membership charges compared with what actually reached the practice account, rather than assumed to agree.

Rhythm automates the parts of the day it can see

AdvancedMD has built a lot of this in, and a practice paying for it should be using all of it before adding anything alongside.

Rhythm is the platform the practice works in, and its Practice Dashboard is described by the company as an automated workflow analyst that pulls together the moving parts of a specific practice, with Patient Cards arranging chart information by specialty and workflow. The AI Clinical Assistant does ambient listening and transcription so the note comes out of the conversation, and on mobile it adds pre-visit summaries and action items. Insurance verification runs automatically down to secondary and tertiary coverage. Patient appointment cancellation automations let a practice set a threshold, so a late cancellation creates the charge and the note by itself.

All of that reads and writes inside AdvancedMD, which is exactly what it should do.

The insurer's authorisation portal is somewhere else. So is the hospital's surgical scheduling system, the pathology laboratory's result site, the bank, and the supplier's order tracker. An independent practice has the least pull with any of them, because it has no contract manager and no volume to complain with.

The outside organisations do not scale down for you

A free hour is what all of this depends on, and a small practice does not reliably have one. The work itself does not need the hour.

Pending authorisations checked on each payer's portal every morning, sorted by how long they have been sitting, so a procedure booked for next Tuesday is chased on Wednesday rather than discovered on the day. Rejected and denied claims collected with the payer's stated reason and the date the window shuts.

Yesterday's completed procedures compared against what was actually charged, so a missing charge is a line on a list instead of revenue nobody ever notices. Balances past sixty days assembled with the amounts and ages on them, statements drafted and waiting. Patients on active surveillance whose next test has passed its date, named and ranked by how far overdue. Card takings and membership charges set against what landed in the practice account.

The line in a clinical setting is firm. Reading a screen and assembling a list can run unattended. Anything that changes a clinical or billing record, or that reaches a patient, is prepared for a qualified person to check and send.

A billing office of one gets a second pair of hands

The reason none of this happens is not that it is hard. It is that one person cannot hold six queues current while also answering the phone.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as your staff are. It opens AdvancedMD and the payer, hospital and laboratory sites beside it, reads what is there, and hands back the worklists with the amounts and the dates filled in.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, a workflow can be locked to a named list of domains, and sessions are not shared between tools. Nothing that touches a chart or a claim goes anywhere without a person approving it.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.