The allied health industry employs more than 195,000 people within Australia who represent more than a quarter of the health industry. With such a diverse workforce providing health services via a range of different outlets, including the private sector, government, aged care and educational institutions; it stands to reason that each individual, business or organisation seeking a Practice management software solution will have varying needs and requirements.
As our Support Specialist, Deepika Mukkapati has previously written about in part 1 and part 2 of her blog posts, Bp Allied already provides our customers with “out of the box” solutions for a range of allied health professionals, but what happens when a business has workflows and requirements that are a little different to the standard needs of most businesses? That’s when customising Bp Allied presents itself as an invaluable benefit.
There are a few different options out there for businesses with unique requirements:
- Build Bespoke Software – while this might be appealing for some businesses, the cost can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars to build unique software to explicitly suit your business. This option is ruled out for most, simply due to the prohibitive cost.
- Square Peg into a Round Hole – make do with an off-the-shelf product. Unfortunately, for most businesses this option causes extra workload, with tasks requiring manual and paper intervention to maintain workflows. Eventually, the administrative burden this solution causes outweighs the low product cost.
- Bp Allied Customisation – with the ability to create your own reportable fields within the Client Details record, you have the power to build and/or replicate workflows to record the information you need to record, how you want to record it. Custom reports can also be created to extract any custom data you have created within Bp Allied.
Being an account specialist for Bp Allied, I regularly engage with clients and guide them on how best to go about the process of customising Bp Allied. Let’s take an in-depth look at what can be achieved with Bp Allied.
Firstly, customising the Bp Allied client record can be achieved by the end user to ensure you can maintain low setup costs. While we do offer customisation of Bp Allied as a fee for service, we also provide you with detailed help guides, videos and guidance during deployment so you are empowered with the knowledge to perform the task in house.
Any area within the client record can be edited; fields can be renamed, added and removed. A selection of date, numeric, tickbox and text fields are available for use which provides you with the flexibility to create a record that is truly bespoke to your business.
Recently I have worked with different organisations to assist with providing solutions to meet their requirements. Below are some examples of customisation, some are quick and easy “hacks” that have made a huge difference, while Case 3 is a complete overhaul of end to end work flow.
Case 1 – a psychology clinic within a university required the ability for a supervisor to “sign off” on client notes written by students.
A simple consultation tickbox and accompanying text field was added to the top of the “Consultation” area of Bp Allied.
A custom report was then written for the university to report on which notes have been approved and to follow up on the notes that had yet to be signed off.
Case 2 – a health clinic working within a school setting had the need to record incidents within Bp Allied.
Using a range of consultation tickboxes and text fields, a form was created for the information to be recorded.
A letter template was then created to pull the information from the record and for this information to be easily distributed by email to other staff, the student’s family and GP.
Case 3 – a group of physiotherapists and exercise physiologists within a football club had specific reporting needs to ensure injury management was maintained.
This was a significant amount of customisation that required an end-to-end overhaul of existing workflows, customisation of the client record as well as custom reports, however, all of this was achieved without any programmatic changes to Bp Allied.
The result was a custom report that could be pulled from Bp Allied, exported as .xlsx or .csv format and seamlessly uploaded to the injury management portal.
We recently chatted to Bloomhill Cancer Care who performed a significant amount of customisation to Bp Allied, you can read more about their success story here.
I hope this article has sparked some ideas for how customising Bp Allied might work for you. If you’d like to learn more about customisation or any other areas of Bp Allied please feel free to contact our sales team at sales@bpsoftware.net, or call us on 1300 40 1111 in Australia, or 0800 40 1111 from New Zealand.
Authored by:
Melissa Dobell
Bp Allied Account Specialist at Best Practice Software