The short answer
Map the journey from enquiry to payment and mark every point where a person re-enters information a system already holds. Those points are your integration backlog, in order of how often they happen.
It is usually booking to billing, and billing to insurer. Both are high volume and both are error-prone.
Where the duplication is
- Patient details entered at booking and again at registration
- Appointment details re-entered to raise an invoice
- Treatment codes typed into both the record and the billing system
- Insurer claims prepared by copying from two systems
- Payment status updated manually in the practice system
Each of these is a small irritation and a source of mismatches that someone reconciles later. Together they usually account for a substantial share of administrative time.
Sequence by volume
| Integration | Frequency | Priority |
|---|---|---|
| Booking to record | Every patient | High |
| Treatment to billing | Every episode | High |
| Billing to accounting | Every invoice | High |
| Claims to insurer | Per insured episode | High where relevant |
| Marketing to booking | Per enquiry | Medium |
Do them in order of how often the duplication happens rather than in order of how interesting the integration is.
Insurance adds its own rules
Insurer requirements differ by company and by policy: pre-authorisation, specific coding, evidence requirements, and their own portals. Automating claims means encoding those differences, which is real work.
Start with the insurers that account for most of your volume. Covering the long tail of small insurers rarely repays the effort.
Keep one record authoritative
Decide which system owns the patient record and treat the others as consumers. Two systems that both allow editing of patient details will diverge, and then nobody knows which address to use.
Where a second system must hold details, make it read-only and refreshed from the owner, rather than separately editable.