If you own an addiction treatment center you have the usual things you need to be concerned about that all treatment centers must be proficient at for example:

• Clinical care (Staffing, UA, Toxicology, Beds, Stethoscopes)
• Operations team (transportation, banking/finance, food services, telephony, security, real estate/lease, payroll, HR etc.)
• Marketing, Admissions, Alumni

In order to keep all of these things connected you will require software tools in order to have them all talking together and be efficient.  More often than not we see many of the tools that the rehabs are using are  “client/server” type of tools being deployed. The problem with this is in a client/server type of environment you will require a lot of updating and maintenance on site. This is both time consuming and expensive.

To give you a basic example think about your accounting and billing systems. Too often as consultants we might require simple reports like balance sheets and P&L’s and the rehab owner tells us that they have to ask their accountant for the information. What?! Sometimes this can take weeks to get. Talk about inefficient!  Something really simple taking weeks? Really? In this day and age, we need information at our finger tips.Try something like Quick books Online. You will have the ability to have your book keeper and CPA to view your books in real time and make the adjustments like balancing the books and generating reports as you need them.

In the marketing world it is important to have call tracking in place.  Putting call tracking on your website is great but you want to be able to access it from the executive suite to the call center to your internal marketing team to the marketing agency so that everyone is on the same page.  We might use something like Call Tracking Metrics that we can give users various levels of access to as needed.

For things like payroll we might want to use Sure Payroll or Paychex to run our company payroll. Why?  Because it is relativity cheap.  You can deploy it from anywhere, while at work or on vacation and you have the ability to pay people their regular paychecks as well as bonuses all the while managing it from any computer connected to the internet.  Even if you have a team of people managing these tools for you, you as the business owner will always have access to the cloud and the ability to see and control the business.

Addiction Treatment Software Tools:

Some of the really big software tools you will require are EMR and billing.  With EMR you are basically managing the heartbeat of your clinical care and your patients. With billing you are managing the life blood of your business, your income.  Both software applications are critical in managing your business.  You will want to be able to customize, change, update, report and provide audited data to insurance and government agencies.  Being able to provide accurate and timely information will be absolutely critical to your business so you can spend more time on clinical care instead of paperwork.  Making all of this possible on a cloud based platform can allow you to focus on the business needs and not the application limitations and maintenance if you were to bring it in house.