Most medical practices are now using medical office software in order to improve efficiency and accuracy. Moreover with HIPAA requirements in today’s medical business environment, a medical office software solution is no longer a luxury but a necessity.

But what is medical office software? In general most practices need medical billing – coding software, medical scheduling software, SOAP note software and finally Electronic Medical records.

Medical Office software prices vary considerably, depending on various features and level of support and available training. However in general the prices are sky-high with hidden costs in some cases and thus not affordable for small practices. Moreover instead of simplifying medical office tasks, they complicate them with large learning curves. The time required to enter billing, patient accounting and treatment notes necessitates dedicate (expensive) stuff, the data entry is very complicated and slower than paper based. Finally the need of IT support in order to run effectively is OBVIOUS IN MOST CASES .

The main reasons that medical software is so expensive are:

1. Large investments in time and software planning.

2. Expensive development tools.

3. Outdate development techniques for medical environment.

4. Expensive software requirements (like SQL Server or Oracle).

5. Support availability and training.

6. Small number of potential customers.

7. Numerous competitors.

8. Vendors silently targeting ONLY large practices.

Is there any way to less expensive but efficient medical software packages? The answer is the combination of Rapid application development (RAD) and reliable free redistributable runtimes of database systems like SQL Server Express 2005-2008 and Microsoft Access 2007 runtime. Another crucial parameter is the remove of unnecessary functions and procedures that complicated the user interface without reason as far as medium practices are concerned.

1. RAD refers to a type of software development which uses minimal planning with prototyping techniques and data driven information engineering. The lack of extensive pre-planning allowed software to be written much faster with reduced development cost.

2. With royalty free redistributable runtimes vendors can produce complete preconfigured ready for use applications without any additional costs for the end users.

In fact the whole concept of combination of Microsoft SQL Server Express and Microsoft Access 2007 Runtime can greatly reduce the cost for the end user, offers a robust affordable solution for medical office. The software engineering abilities of programmers and common sense can also simplified enough the user interface making the learning curve shorter. Our efforts at Biosoftworld Medical Software are to make medical software as easy as taking the software right out of the box and installing it.

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