Frequently Asked Questions
Company
What is ModMed®’s mission statement?
To place doctors and patients at the center of care through an intelligent, specialty-specific cloud platform.
What are your core values as a company?
Every day, we strive to:
- Align passion with purpose.
- Save time.
- Think big. Have fun. Do good.
- Innovate boldly, then make things happen.
- Create customer delight.
What career opportunities does ModMed offer?
ModMed is growing rapidly and looking for passionate, innovative and creative rock stars to join our team! Check out our list of job openings here.
Where can I read reviews for ModMed and EMA®?
To hear what clients have to say about EMA and other ModMed software, visit our client stories page or watch our client spotlight videos here.
EMA – General
What is EMA?
ModMed‘s Electronic Medical Assistant® (or EMA®) is an electronic medical record (EMR) software application that is designed to save physicians time as they collect patient information, record the diagnosis, order tests and prescriptions and prepare billing information.
What medical specialties does your EMA EMR software support?
EMA supports allergy, dermatology, OBGYN, ophthalmology, orthopedics, otolaryngology, pain management, plastic surgery, podiatry and urology. We also support gastroenterology through our gGastro® EHR.
How is EMA different from the over 300 EMRs out there?
EMA is virtually keyboardless. You don’t need to type fast to document fast. Doctors can write most of their notes with a touchscreen or mouse. EMA automates documentation. Prescriptions, billing sheets, pathology requisitions, lab orders and consent forms can be simultaneously generated at the time the note is completed.
EMA adapts to each physician’s style of practice. When it comes to EMR, one size doesn’t fit all. EMA learns the way you practice, not the other way around. As you use the system, EMA will remember your preferences for exam descriptions, procedures and prescriptions and adjust to show the diagnoses and treatments that each physician uses most. EMA knows medicine. We don’t expect you to take a week off of work to program templates. EMA doesn’t use them. EMA has domain knowledge of thousands of diagnoses. For a given diagnosis, EMA can offer you an array of possible plans which can range from counseling, prescriptions and lab ordering to surgical or cosmetic procedures.
I don’t have a practice management (PM) system. Do I need one?
You can install EMA and gain its electronic medical record-keeping and documentation benefits without a PM system. However, if you want to have full support for your administrative staff with complex intake, scheduling and billing, you will need to add a PM system. EMA works best with our innovative PM system, but it is also compatible with over 500 other PM systems.
What is the best practice management software to use with EMA and gGastro?
ModMed’s Practice Management software fully integrates with EMA, and gPM™ fully integrates with gGastro, creating a seamless experience that brings together the front and back office with robust scheduling, document management, billing and reporting functionality.
How can electronic health records help me improve patient satisfaction?
A good EMR system helps speed up documentation, so you have more time to spend interacting with patients. Instead of typing at a computer, you can face your patients when using an iPad-based EMR and even engage them by using photos, diagrams and drawing tools to illustrate diagnoses or procedures. In addition, some EMRs help shorten patient wait times with integrated patient kiosks, and EMR patient portals can provide easy access to educational materials and other key health information.
What do I do with all my old paper patient records?
You can use EMA to record information from now on and refer to the paper records as needed, or you can have the paper records scanned and attach the scanned files to the EMA patient records. Most physicians choose the first alternative and gradually phase over to electronic records as time passes, but the choice is up to you.
Who can use EMA EMR software?
EMA is designed for use by providers and their staff in the following specialties: allergy, dermatology, OBGYN, ophthalmology, orthopedics, otolaryngology, pain management, plastic surgery, podiatry and urology. We also offers industry-leading solutions for gastroenterologists with our gGastro platform.
What are the benefits of using an iPad EHR?
iPad-based medical EMR programs allow you to simply tap the screen instead of turning away to type, helping you provide more personalized visits for your patients. Plus, the iPad allows patients to easily sign consent forms, and medical staff can even take photos and use drawing tools for easy body atlas documentation and patient education.
Does EMA work for both large and small practices?
EMA is built with flexible workflows and a provider-centric adaptive learning engine specific to your medical specialty, helping the system adjust to both the practice as a whole and an individual provider’s clinic. This helps EMA fit many different practice sizes.
What happens if medical knowledge changes?
EMA has a database of built-in medical knowledge that is periodically updated and modified to reflect changes to that medical knowledge. Since the knowledge base is centralized, all of our clients can benefit.
EMA – Features
Does your EMR include ePrescribing? If so, what ePrescribing network do you use?
Our EMA EHR software is certified to offer a variety of advanced ePrescribing features through Surescripts, the industry leader in electronic prescribing. Visit our ePrescribing page to learn more.
Does EMA provide drug-to-drug and drug-to-allergy interaction checkers?
Yes. To learn more about our ePrescribing functionality, visit our ePrescribing page.
What can patients do using the EMA patient portal?
Patients can use ModMed’s patient portal to access key information, request refills, send encrypted messages and more. They can view diagnoses, visit notes, educational handouts and test results, helping them gain a deeper understanding of their health and how to improve it. They can even review, input and edit past medical history, medications, allergies, family and social history, preferred pharmacy and contact information. For more details, visit our patient portal page.
How do EMR software updates occur in EMA?
Updates are delivered automatically through the Cloud. We notify users of updates via email, and support and education for new enhancements are available through our ModMed Central knowledge base and ModMed Practice Sandbox training environment.
Does EMA provide computerized physician order entry (CPOE)?
Yes. For more information about EMA’s functionality, get in touch with our team.
Does EMA support inbound and outbound faxing?
Yes, outbound faxing is included when you implement EMA, and inbound faxing may be set up per your request.
Does ModMed software currently support any medical dictation (speech-to-text) software?
Yes, we support Nuance Dragon Medical Speechkit via our native EMA iPad EHR app.
What document management capabilities do you offer?
EMA allows you to upload old charts and incoming paper documents to have them available within the patient chart. In addition, this information can be attached to intra-office communication, associated to visit notes, tracked and easily sorted for reference later. EMA also offers inbound and outbound e-faxing as well as direct mail capabilities.
What does PFSH stand for in EMA?
PFSH stands for Past Medical, Family and Social History. In EMA, this information is stored in the patient’s clipboard, and it can be inputted by the patient using our ModMed Kiosk iPad app.
Which ophthalmology subspecialties does your EMR system address?
Our EMA EMR system is tailored to meet the needs of ophthalmologists specializing in cornea and refractive, glaucoma, oculoplastics, retina and pediatrics. Learn more on our subspecialties page.
Which plastic surgery subspecialties does your EMR system address?
Our EMA iPad EMR system for plastic surgery is tailored to meet the needs of reconstructive surgery, cosmetic surgery and aesthetic medicine.
EMA – Documentation & Billing
How do I generate a bill in your EHR system?
Just by documenting in EMA, you can capture the information EMA needs to automatically generate an encounter form. The encounter form displays the patient’s name, insurance or patient financial responsibility, diagnoses/ICD-10 codes, provider, date of service, procedures/CPT® codes, services rendered and associated fees.
If you use ModMed’s Practice Management software as well as EMA, our all-in-one solution will also auto-generate a clinical bill once the note is finalized in EMA. Also called an electronic superbill, the clinical bill includes the same information as the encounter form.
What documentation does EMA automatically generate?
As you document the exam, EMA automatically generates billing codes, visit notes, encounter forms with ICD-10 codes, orders, prescriptions, pathology requisitions and patient education handouts based on the data you enter. This can free up your MA or scribe from having to create each individual document manually, allowing them to focus on helping you with the note.
Can I still use my paper superbill system with your EHR?
No; for each encounter, EMA will automatically generate an electronic superbill known as the encounter form. This piece of clinical documentation summarizes the visit and identifies the patient, the financially responsible party, diagnoses/ICD-10 codes, staff that provided the services, date of service, services rendered, procedure codes and associated fees.
If you use ModMed’s Practice Management (PM) system, our all-in-one solution will also generate a clinical bill or electronic superbill when the visit note is finalized in EMA. The clinical bill includes the same information as the encounter form—the patient, provider, date of service, procedures/CPT codes, services rendered, corresponding diagnoses/ICD-10 codes, financial responsibility and associated fees based on the provider fee schedules you have set up.
How can I get the 99203 code on ModMed’s EMA?
As you document, EMA auto-populates suggested codes, such as the 99203 E&M code and CPT codes for procedures your team performs every day.
What is the difference between a superbill, encounter form, clinical bill and patient bill?
A medical superbill is a paper form containing a list of procedure codes that the provider circles to indicate services performed during the clinical exam. The superbill also includes corresponding ICD-10 diagnoses, which are often handwritten, as well as the patient’s name, date of service and financial responsibility. At checkout, the patient typically hands the superbill to the checkout staff, who then hand-enter the procedure codes into the practice management system as charges to bill the patient and/or insurance carrier. Our EMA EMR system eliminates the use of paper superbills by automatically generating a digital encounter form for each visit.
An encounter form is a piece of clinical documentation containing information about the patient encounter and displaying the services rendered. It identifies the patient, the financially responsible party, diagnoses/ICD-10 codes, staff that provided the services, procedures/CPT codes, date of service and associated fees. The encounter form replaces the use of a medical superbill.
Once the provider finalizes the note in EMA, our all-in-one suite automatically generates a clinical bill for the billers to review, modify if needed and then queue up for submission to the clearinghouse through our Practice Management (PM) system. Also called an electronic superbill or digital superbill, a clinical bill is a statement containing all of the information from the encounter form, which includes all the information that would be on the superbill. This includes the patient, date of service, provider, procedures/CPT codes, diagnoses/ICD-10 codes, financially responsible party, services rendered and associated fees.
If the insurance company does not pay the full balance or if the patient is self-paying and did not pay the full amount at the time of service, a practice may issue a patient bill. A patient bill is a statement indicating outstanding balances that are the patient’s financial responsibility. This statement typically includes the same information as the clinical bill: procedures performed during the clinical visit, diagnoses/ICD-10 codes, provider, date of service, services rendered, the financially responsible party (the patient) and associated fees. If you use our PM system, our all-in-one solution can automatically generate and send the patient bill or statement when there is an outstanding patient balance.
EMA – Logins & Accounts
Where do I go to log into EMA?
When you implement EMA, your practice will create a unique ModMed login URL ending in .ema.md. This EMA MD login is the same URL that your patients can use to log into the EMA patient portal. You can easily bookmark your EMA login URL or add it as a desktop icon just like with any other website. Additionally, the EMA app can recall your EMA URL through Touch ID on the iPad. If you still can’t find your EMA login, please contact our support team for assistance.
Where is the EMA Sandbox login?
To access your EMA sandbox login on your computer, simply add the word “training” after “EMA” in your unique practice URL. For example, if mypractice.ema.md is your EMA login URL, then mypractice.ematraining.md will be your Sandbox URL. For access on your iPad, install the ModMed Practice Sandbox app and log in using your Sandbox URL.
Practice Management
What is the difference between an electronic medical record and a practice management system?
An electronic medical record (EMR) or electronic health record (EHR) system focuses on capturing clinical data, while a practice management (PM) system focuses on practice operations and finances. An EMR system is essentially a digital version of a patient’s paper chart, containing clinical data such as medical and treatment histories. EMR software can also provide clinical decision support and allow health information to be shared with providers in other organizations.
While EMR software focuses on documenting the clinical encounter, PM software captures information from the time a patient is scheduled through visit/service completion. Practice management systems can provide billing, scheduling, document management and financial reporting functionality, helping office staff manage claims, patient receivables and patient recalls.
For more questions and answers relating to Practice Management, visit our PM page.
Interoperability & Partners
Which vendors do you interface with?
ModMed has relationships with a variety of companies to help create better healthcare experiences for specialty doctors and their patients nationwide. Explore our partners pages to view the list, and if you don’t see a certain vendor, contact us and we’ll let you know if we can interface with them.
What are the benefits of interoperability between health systems?
By allowing healthcare IT systems and medical devices to communicate and share meaningful, useful data, healthcare interoperability has the potential to save time, lower costs, reduce errors, improve outcomes, enable truly coordinated care, and facilitate patient engagement and population health initiatives. To learn more about ModMed’s interoperability initiatives and the benefits of interoperability, visit our interoperability page.
Does ModMed interface with healthcare information exchanges (HIEs)?
Yes, ModMed interfaces with several HIEs. Practices can optionally exchange demographic data, visit notes, lab results, radiology reports, pathology and clinical lab reports, discharge summaries and more. Contact us for more details.
What data formats is EMA able to exchange?
EMA is able to exchange standard Continuity of Care Documents (CCDs) using HL7 protocols. EMA can also exchange demographics (ADTs), scheduling information and notifications (SIU), detailed financial transactions (DFT), order messages (ORM) and observation results (ORU) using standard HL7 protocols.
Which registries do you interface with?
For up-to-date details on what registries we support, visit our registries page.
Do you offer application programming interface (API) functionality?
Yes, ModMed software is able to share structured data through a set of APIs designed for secure, high-performance, high-capacity application integrations.
Does EMA interface with other practice management systems?
Our EMA EHR works best with our integrated Practice Management system, but it also interfaces with over 100 third-party practice management (PM) systems. To learn more about our HL7 PM interfaces for demographics and insurance (ADT), billing and charges (DFT), and scheduling (SIU), visit our PM partners page.
Does ModMed interface with my lab?
Currently, ModMed interfaces with over 150 pathology labs nationwide and has clinical interfaces with Labcorp and Quest. Click here to view our current list of lab partners and learn how to get your lab connected.
How can I initiate a lab interface between my practice and my lab?
Please ask your lab representative to initiate an EMA lab interface for your practice. The lab will follow the specific internal process they’ve set up with ModMed for establishing new connections. Once the interface is approved, it will be sent to our engineering team. If you have any questions, please email [email protected] and our team will get back to you as soon as possible.
I don’t see my lab listed as a current partner. How can they get connected to EMA?
We are constantly adding new lab partners. To get the process started, ask your lab rep to complete the form at the bottom of our Lab Connect page. If you have questions, contact us at [email protected].
Security & Technical
What data security protocols do you use?
EMA uses the following security protocols:
- ONC HIT 2014 Edition EHR Certified
- Data is encrypted in transit and at rest
- Multiple Availability Zone (AZ) architecture allows for loss of an AZ without interruption of service
- Daily backups
- Audit logging
- Role-based security
- Emergency access
In addition, each practice has the ability to set password policies and can restrict access by time and IP address if desired.
Is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering as secure as an on-site system?
In fact, it can be more secure. Consider what an onsite system entails. You must purchase, install, maintain and upgrade complex hardware and software. You must manage security, intrusion protection and spam and virus control. You need to consider physical security, air conditioning and power interruption. That involves back-up systems, office procedures and audit trails, among other things. All of those things can impact the security of an onsite system.
A SaaS EMR system, on the other hand, manages all of that for you. The ModMed servers run in an environment managed by a large team of skilled professionals whose job is to maintain the security and high availability of the systems.
What are the minimum system requirements for EMA and other ModMed software?
ModMed’s applications can be accessed from any Internet-connected computer or mobile device that meets the requirements outlined in this document. The document is subject to change at any time by ModMed at its discretion.
What if my Internet connection goes down?
A single Internet connection is a potential weak point, and that is why we recommend you install two connections from different companies—one as the primary and the other as a backup.
From another point of view, the Internet connection is a very strong security feature. If, for any reason, your office is not usable—due to a fire, for example—you can log on to your EMA system from almost any Internet-connected PC or Mac and continue from there. That means you could move to another office and see patients with full EMA support, in a short time, with little technical effort.
How difficult is the technical job of installing EMA?
You don’t have to be a computer professional to install EMA. In fact, if you already have a computer network with machines with Internet connectivity, you may not have any technical work at all. If you have no equipment onsite or want to expand your network to new locations (and you are tech-savvy enough to buy and install a simple computer network), you can do it yourself. However, if your plans include a more extensive system, including network wiring, you probably will want to use an IT technical service to assist with the installation.
Do I need special equipment for EMA?
Generally, no. If you already have one or more PC or Mac computers with Internet access that were purchased in the last two to three years, you can probably use them. If you have older machines, or none, or if you want to expand your network, you will need to purchase new equipment, but standard mid-powered personal computers should meet the specifications. Of course, you can also add iPads or laptops for fully flexible exam room use.
Miscellaneous
Can you put me in touch with a client reference who uses EMA or other ModMed software?
Yes; we have nearly 1,000 client references! You can speak to one on the phone or even visit their practice to see our healthcare software in action. Just drop us a message here, and we’ll be happy to get you started.
What training options does ModMed provide?
ModMed offers web training, onsite workshops, corporate workshops and eLearning opportunities on ModMed U. Visit our Implementation Models page to learn more.
What support solutions does ModMed provide?
You can use ModMed Communities, ModMed’s knowledge base, to find quick reference guides, recorded webinars and how-to videos. Formerly known as ModMed Central, ModMed Communities even allow you to connect with your peers by role and specialty. You can also contact our tech support team by calling 561.880.2998 x2, emailing [email protected] or submitting a case through our support case portal. Our regular support hours are Monday–Friday, 8am–9pm ET. Visit our ongoing tech support services page to learn more.
