Chief Operating Officer Software for Medical Practices — North County San Diego
I'm PJ, based in Encinitas. I build custom internal tools for medical practice COOs who are tired of stitching together spreadsheets, EMR exports, and vendor dashboards that don't talk to each other.
📱 Text me: 858-461-8054What a medical COO actually needs from a dev
- Tools that sit on top of your EMR — not replace it
- Real dashboards: no-show rates, provider utilization, AR aging, by location
- Automation for intake, referrals, prior auth follow-up — the stuff eating your staff's day
- Something your front desk can actually use without a training budget
Questions COOs actually ask me
Can you pull data out of our EMR (Athena, eCW, Epic, NextGen)?
Yes. Most have APIs or nightly exports. I work with what you've got — read-only where it matters, write-back only when you've signed off on it.
How do you handle HIPAA?
BAA signed before any PHI touches a system. Infrastructure on HIPAA-eligible cloud services, encrypted in transit and at rest, audit logs on everything. I'll walk your compliance lead through it in plain English.
We have 4 locations and 18 providers. Can you build one dashboard?
That's exactly the use case I build for. One view, filterable by location, provider, payer. Updates nightly or real-time depending on what your EMR supports.
What does a project cost?
Depends on scope. Small internal tool: a few thousand. Multi-location ops dashboard with integrations: more. I quote fixed-price after a 30-minute call — no hourly surprises.
How long until we see something working?
First usable version in 2–3 weeks for most projects. I'd rather ship a rough v1 and iterate than disappear for three months.
Do you work with practices outside San Diego?
Yes. Half my clients are remote. Local just means I can stop by if you want me in the room.
Practical moves for medical COOs
Stop running ops out of spreadsheets
If your weekly ops meeting starts with "let me pull the report," you're losing hours. A lightweight internal dashboard pays for itself inside a quarter.
Measure no-show rate by provider and time slot
Not just the practice average. The data usually shows one or two slots doing all the damage — fixable with reminder logic or scheduling rules.
Automate prior auth follow-up
The staff time spent chasing auths is brutal. A simple queue + automated status checks recovers 5–10 hours a week in a mid-size practice.
Track denial reasons in one place
If your billing software buries denials in PDFs, you can't act on patterns. Pull them into a structured view and the top 3 root causes jump out fast.
Watch referral leakage
Referrals out that never come back = revenue walking out the door. A referral tracker with closed-loop reporting is one of the highest-ROI builds I do.
Don't buy more software — connect what you have
Most practices own 6–10 tools already. Before adding a seventh, see if a thin integration layer solves the actual problem for 10% of the cost.
Real note from PJ
I've worked with enough practice ops leaders to know the real bottleneck is usually one specific workflow — not "the whole system." Text me what's eating your week. If I can't help, I'll tell you who can.
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