Wayzata-Based Empathic Clinical Suite Endorsed By Major Insurer

Health care insurers seeking to hasten the behavioral health care community's move to electronic medical records (EMRs) are working more closely with companies such as Wayzata-based Empathic Clinical Suite, a leader in fully integrated, user-friendly EMR and clinical practice management systems for behavioral health therapists.

“As the technology for producing, processing and securing EMRs evolves and matures, health insurers are ramping up their efforts to motivate more therapists to make the switch to fully integrated EMR claims processing systems now,” says Debra Lindell, founder and chief executive officer of Empathic Clinical Suite.

As proof, she cites her own company's recent experience in being recognized as a “preferred provider” of electronic practice management systems solutions for a national insurance company's large client base of behavioral health therapists and clinics. The insurer enthusiastically endorsed Empathic as a preferred vendor and allowed Empathic to offer special discount pricing on its subscription-based software as a service product to stimulate therapist interest in converting to the EMR process.

Use of EMRs in the behavioral health field is still a work-in-progress, says Lindell, whose company provides a cloud-based practice management system deploying artificial intelligence and Web 3.0 technologies to enable mental health professionals to better manage their businesses and provide improved patient care.

“Behavioral health therapists have lagged behind the health care industry as a whole in embracing the new architecture of EMR's and software-based practice management tools,” says Lindell. “But the benefits of moving to a paperless practice management system solution are becoming more and more pronounced, both as a means of delivering better patient care and in achieving greater operating efficiencies that ultimately reduce the cost of providing mental health services."

Insurance companies want to foster greater acceptance of practice management system solutions because they do reduce their administrative costs—state-of-the-art practice management system solutions provide for fully electronic processing of insurance claims with participating insurance companies—and because they result in improved quality of patient care.

As of now, participation in electronic medical record keeping is voluntary on the part of behavioral health therapists and the health care provider industry as a whole. But the federal government has mandated that all patient records be kept in a government-certified EMR format beginning in 2014.

“It's important that therapists not wait until the last minute to make their practices compliant with the government's mandated EMR procedures,” says Lindell.

First developed and launched to the behavioral health market in 2009, Empathic Clinical Suite comprises four discrete practice management modules and molds them into one fully integrated package of tools designed to make life easier and more profitable for the individual practitioner and group practice manager. The four distinct areas of Empathic involvement are:

• Automated Agenda with Clinical and Practice Management Alerts
• Centralized Patient Scheduling
• Clinical Notes from Intake through Summary of Closure
• Financial Center:  Digital Billing, Claims and Accounting

Empathic incorporates semantic ontology search routines, based on Web 3.0 technology, to read and interpret clinician notes as they are entered into the system. The software runs multiple searches through the  entire 1,400 page database of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV-TR, bible of the therapeutic community), generates recommended diagnostic codes – and even suggests alternative “outside-the-box” diagnostic scenarios if appropriate. All of this happens in real-time, as the clinician enters the notes.

Lindell is herself a former family therapist. She started the company because she felt that people working in the mental health field were unduly burdened with excess paperwork and administrative duties, to the point of burnout. She produced the software as a way to automate a large amount of that paperwork, and to give therapists a leg up on getting their practices in alignment with the government mandate to have all patient records available in Electronic Medical Record format by 2014.