Every practice management system ships with a set of standard reports, and every practice eventually runs into the same wall with them. The reports are accurate. They answer the questions they were designed to answer. And the question you have this morning is not one of them.
That is not a defect. Standard reports are built to serve every practice in the country, which means they report on what every practice has in common. The question that matters to you today is usually about something specific to how your practice works.
How do I get reports my practice management system does not ship with?
By identifying which question you actually need answered, then working out which two existing records have to be compared to answer it. Most of the views practices want are not new data. They are comparisons between things the system already records separately.
Standard reports read one thing at a time
This is the pattern behind almost every missing view.
A documentation report reads the documentation records. A charge report reads the charge records. An aging report reads open balances. Each is complete and correct about its own subject.
What none of them do is compare across two subjects, because a report is built to summarise a set of records rather than to ask whether something in one set is missing from another.
So the useful question is rarely what does the report show. It is what two things would I have to put next to each other, and does anything currently do that.
Five comparisons worth building
These come up in almost every practice and none of them require anything the system does not already hold.
Completed appointments against created charges. Finds visits that were delivered and never billed. Neither an aging report nor a documentation report can show this, because the failure is an absence rather than a record.
Signed documentation against created charges. Narrower and sharper. Separates a missing note from a missing charge, which are different problems needing different people.
Remittances received against payments posted. Finds money that arrived and was never applied. Distorts receivables in one direction only, and it can run for weeks before anybody notices.
Charges posted against claims transmitted. Finds claims that are complete, correct, and sitting unreleased. The cheapest delay in a practice, because nothing clinical or external is involved.
Expected return dates against booked appointments. Finds patients who should have come back and did not. The clinical cadence is usually already documented, which makes the expected date available without collecting anything new.
What each one needs to be useful
Three properties, and a view missing any of them tends to get produced once and never again.
Per person rather than practice-wide. Almost every problem in a practice concentrates. A group total shows the size and hides the location, and only the location can be acted on.
Valued rather than counted. Twelve items is administrative. Twelve items holding a specific amount is a decision. The figure is what moves it up somebody’s priority list.
Delivered rather than available. A report somebody has to remember to run gets run when there is time. The same view arriving on a schedule becomes a routine.
Getting deeper visibility from your AdvancedMD data
All five comparisons above draw on records the system is already keeping. Appointments, documentation, charges, claims, remittances, and treatment plans are all captured as a matter of course.
What differs between practices is how much of that has been configured into a standing view rather than left as something somebody assembles when a question comes up.
Start with one comparison rather than a dashboard. Pick the question that is bothering you most this month, work out which two record sets answer it, and build that single view. A practice with one comparison running daily is in a better position than one with a reporting project that never finished.
Then decide who receives it. This is the step that gets skipped and it is the one that determines whether anything changes. A view nobody owns produces awareness. A view arriving each morning to a named person produces work.
Why practices stop before they start
Two reasons, and neither is technical.
The first is that the comparison sits between two teams. Documentation belongs to clinical, charges belong to billing, and a view that spans both belongs to neither. Somebody has to decide it is worth owning.
The second is that the standard reports are good enough to be reassuring. Everything they show is accurate, the month closes, the numbers reconcile, and nothing prompts the question of what is not being shown. Absence produces no signal, which is the whole reason these views are worth building.
What this means for you
Take the question that has been bothering you and ask which two things would have to be compared to answer it. Then check whether anything currently compares them.
In most practices the answer is that the data exists, the comparison does not, and nobody has decided it should. That is a smaller problem than it feels like from the inside.
Grab 30 minutes with us. Prep nothing. You will see which comparisons your own records would support and what each one would surface.
Questions people ask
How do I get reports my practice management system does not ship with?
Identify the question you need answered, then work out which two existing record sets have to be compared to answer it. Most missing views are not new data. They are comparisons between things the system already records separately.
Why do standard reports not show what I need?
Because a report summarises one set of records and most useful questions require comparing two. A documentation report reads documentation, a charge report reads charges, and neither is built to ask whether something present in one is missing from the other.
Which custom reports are worth building first?
Completed appointments against created charges, signed documentation against created charges, remittances received against payments posted, charges posted against claims transmitted, and expected return dates against booked appointments.
What makes a custom report actually get used?
Three things. Broken out per person rather than practice-wide, valued rather than counted, and delivered on a schedule rather than available on request. A view missing any of those gets produced once and never again.
Why do practices not build these views?
Because the comparison usually spans two teams and belongs to neither, and because the standard reports are accurate enough to be reassuring. Nothing prompts the question of what is not being shown, since absence produces no signal.
PracticePath is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by AdvancedMD. AdvancedMD is a trademark of AdvancedMD, Inc. All references are for descriptive purposes only.