MacPractice, Inc. recently announced the first three health care practice management software applications designed especially for Mac OS X: MacPractice MD for physicians, MacPractice DDS for dentists and MacPractice DC for chiropractors. Among the features of these releases are integrated accounting, patient and insurance billing and tracking, patient followup, prescriptions, medical and dental imaging, and to-do functions, according to the developer.
 
"MacPractice MD, DDS and DC feature many modern accounting features Macintosh doctors have been awaiting for years, such as line-item accounting, the ability to group procedures by incident and to separate patient from insurance responsibility," said Mark Hollis, president and director of client relations for MacPractice.
 
"Apple has a very strong presence across the medical field, and health care practices globally are increasingly choosing the power, ease of use and stability of Mac OS X to drive their business," said Ron Okamoto, Apple's vice president of worldwide developer relations. "We're excited to see MacPractice uniquely leverage innovations in Mac OS X to deliver next-generation practice management tools."
 
These latest releases also feature reporting for all aspects of a practice, according to MacPractice. For example, doctors can click a referring practitioner's name and instantaneously view all the patients referred, their charges and payments. A billing manager can click an insurance plan and instantaneously see all the patients covered by that plan. Another click immediately displays all of the office's receivables.
 
MacPractice permits the doctor to see a snapshot of a patient at a visit, and view the patient's clinical images. Documents in PDF or native format may be stored with a patient record, or with a payment entry (a convenient way to file an explanation of benefits). Future plans include the integration of MacPractice software with electronic medical record and digital radiography solutions.
 
Recently MacPractice invited Macintosh developers to leverage the MacPractice SDK, due in the second quarter, to provide more complete, empowering health care solutions for doctors.
  
MacPractice utilizes MySQL, an open-source database with over 6,000,000 active installations worldwide. Some of the world's largest organizations -- including Yahoo!, Sabre Holdings, The Associated Press, Suzuki and NASA -- use MySQL for business-critical enterprise applications and packaged software.

Ms. Haak is senior associate editor of ADVANCE for Health Information Executives.