2019043015:30:57

How voice assistants can make an impact in a hospital

Published by: Steve

With advancements in AI, digital assistants are becoming more and more capable. What started as an advanced voice-based search device, has now become capable of helping us manage our daily schedules, book appointments, make reservations, play songs, and it may one day act as a complete assistant to all of us. They were first seen in smartphones, in the form of Siri in iPhones and Google Assistant in android devices and now they’re coming in the form of standalone devices such as Amazon’s Echo, Google Home devices and Apple’s Homepod.

Digital assistants, like in every other aspect of our life, have a huge potential in revolutionizing healthcare by assisting hospitals, doctors and other paramedical staff in record-keeping, managing their appointments, and help in taking better care of the patients in an efficient manner. Artificial intelligence is assisting doctors in making better diagnoses, and advanced robotics technology is making surgeries more precise. Digital assistants may one day be as ubiquitous as a stethoscope in a hospital as they become more automated. Recently some hospitals in USA introduced Alexa skills, with which patients can book appointments and manage prescriptions.

Digital assistants for patients

People are becoming more and more dependant on their digital assistants on their phones. Recent stats show that by 2020, 50% of all searches would be done by voice search and 30% of all searches would be done without screens. This number is bound to increase with the increasing number of smart home speakers and increasing capabilities of digital assistants.

With the integration of digital assistants to the hospital management system, patients would be able to book an appointment with a doctor, just by talking to their digital assistants. Patients would be able to upload their health parameters such as blood sugar, blood pressure levels on a daily basis if their health conditions require it without having to visit the hospital or filling complex forms. This would enable their doctors to provide more accurate and reliable advice for their patients. They can also get the results of their lab tests without having to visit the hospital or lab. With advanced hospital management systems, patients can currently receive their test results in a PDF form, but as digital assistants become more ubiquitous, they would prefer asking their smart devices, instead of looking at their screens.

Digital assistants would also be able to assist in providing first aid with real-time advice from doctors and summon qualified medics in case of an emergency. There are unconfirmed reports of cops being called using amazon Alexa in case of domestic violence, and this shows the potential for digital assistants being helpful in case of a medical emergency.

How doctors can make use of digital assistants

Doctors are required to maintain clear records of their patient’s history. Clear and accurate records help to provide accurate treatment when the patient has any medical issues in the future. Doctors usually have to rely on shorthands, or transcriptions to make accurate records in the short time they have, and there is a chance that they may forget to add minute details when the records are made at a later date. This has been reduced to a large extent by the use of electronic health records, which are often made as easily filled templates, but with the use of digital assistants, doctors can simply dictate the health condition of the patient, and with the use of smart prompts, they can be sure that they didn’t miss any info.

Smart assistants also have the potential to help doctors better manage their appointments and schedules. Doctors can easily get the complete details of their appointments, the timings, and the schedule simply by asking their digital assistant.

Digital assistants for hospital administration

Hospital management system have made it easy for hospital administrators to get accurate real-time information about the status of their hospitals, and manage it efficiently by making better use of their resources. But this also means they have to check their screens much more often, and this can become tiring on a daily basis.

With the use of a digital assistant, hospital admins can get quick reports of their hospitals, such as daily revenue, the total number of appointments, expenses incurred, and also about the stock of essential pieces of equipment, disposables, and medicines.

Alerts for emergency situations, such as when adequate doctors or paramedics are not available, or when essential supplies are running low, will ensure that the hospitals are making the best use of their resources.

If you would like to implement voice assistants to go with your hospital management systems, contact us

Related Blogs

What is an integrated hospital management system? How could it help the hospitals?

There are multiple departments in hospitals that carry out numerous activities daily. There is a lot of communication that takes place and information to share between departments which are crucial and need to be stored in a system with a good user interface. Hospitals use heterogeneous management systems like appointment scheduling software, telemedicine software, diagnostic software, EHR software, billing software, and more. It's a tedious task to maintain all this software and make a single report from various collections. Now, this requires a huge team! But what if a single management system could replace these heterogeneous systems efficiently?

An integrated hospital management system is one such system. Like any other hospital management system, it does not just store information but also connects all the departments under a single interface. It supports the various departments of a hospital such as a laboratory, clinic, and pharmacy in a single interface, making it easy for the departments to interact and share patient information.

Interoperability is the constant chain in any hospital as on average, a patient visiting a hospital engages at least with two departments. Well, taking the chain of interoperability digital with an integrated hospital management system will help the hospital attain efficiency in its core aspects. Here are a few points on how this helps the patients and the hospital.

Patients part:
1. Appointment: Make appointment booking hassle-free by letting your patients book appointments online via the website/mobile app.
2. On the dot: Share electronic patient records with departments or patients themselves in no time.
3. Reduce no-shows: Send SMS or email reminders to your patients, reminding them of their upcoming appointments.
4. Personalized: Send health tips or diet plans to your patients based on their health conditions.
Hospitals part:
1. One for all: An integrated hospital management system will eradicate the need for different systems as it combines all the department modules.
2. Performance Report: Generate weekly, monthly, or yearly performance reports of the hospital in a snap of fingers (No! You don't need a team to do this.)
3. Reference: Makes it easy to manage and estimate referral payments to clinics and outsourced laboratory tests.
4. Marketing: Conduct medical camps remotely with the help of offline camp management modules and let your patients know through email.

Thus, integration is crucial between all the departments of the hospital owing to interoperability. Integration between the departments will take their communication on a digital pathway, making the hospital's workflow seamless and easy. Here are the various areas of integration regarding a hospital.

Hospital-Laboratory: Have you ever had a phase where the laboratory used different software from that of the hospital? If yes, then you must know how time-consuming each process with the laboratory could get. However, an integrated hospital management system will allow you to share patient health records and required tests with the laboratory. Likewise, the laboratory can send you the patient's electronic test results in no time. This eliminates paperwork and other possible manual work.

Hospital-Pharmacy: How different is a hospital’s pharmacy from a standalone pharmacy? A pharmacy integrated with a hospital can get patients' e-prescriptions from doctors and provide timely medications to the in-patients. Further, the pharmacy can even take care of the supplements that are to be provided to the OT department. This integration allows the doctor to know about the availability of medicine in the pharmacy or its alternative before prescribing it to the patients.

Hospital-Clinic: Well, parent hospitals do have multi-location clinics, and these clinics can be integrated with the hospital in a single interface, cases that need prior attention are often shifted to the hospital and this lets the hospital learn about the patient's history quickly through the health records. An integrated hospital management system allows the hospital to overlook the functioning of its multi-location clinics by just switching between the identities of the organization.

Centralized Data vs Distributed Data: (Point of discussion)

Centralized Data or Distributed Data, you have got data to handle. Data needs to be taken care of efficiently for the smooth everyday functioning of the hospital. But which is the better way to do so?

When every department is integrated into a single software, the data is centralized. Thus a patient ID once created is just carried forward by every department, whereas in the dominance of heterogeneous software, a patient has to get themselves registered, with every department attended.

Organizing data and generating revenue or performance reports is very easy when the data is centralized. Most of the integrated patient management systems have the feature of an analytic dashboard which lets the management create weekly, monthly, or yearly performance reports of the hospital. When the data is distributed, it takes a lot of time to collect and organize them. This process is quite a lengthy one and requires a huge team at work.

Cost-wise advantage: Software has different types of pricing patterns, which may be budget-friendly or not. Like subscription-based, a percent of your revenue is based on the number of patients visiting. Having different software is going to charge you in different ways and might end up very expensive too. On the other side, when just a single piece of software is in use by all the departments, you are charged by a standard pattern. This gives you the advantage of forecasting the cost you might have to endure and if it's budget-friendly

Patient Experience: Patient satisfaction is a goal that any hospital wishes to achieve. It is the key to the productivity of the hospital. Perhaps, it creates the goodwill of the hospital. But how can software keep you far from achieving this?

Turnaround time: No hospital wishes to increase a patient's turnaround time, Neither do you. But this might be happening unintentionally by the use of different software by departments. For instance, A patient has to manually take all the health records to the laboratory and get themselves registered for a test. On receiving the test results, the patient will again have to take the results to the doctor, themself. This whole process is time-consuming for the patients, and such issues can be solved by using a single software.

Technical Issues: Diving into a scenario where a hospital maintains a separate billing software. Owing to a few technical issues the software turned faulty, which caused chaos at the reception. Problems like these are Stressful for the patients and are more likely to affect the reputation of the hospital. Such scenarios could be avoided with a cloud-based Hospital Management System where the cloud has a backup cloud to ensure such nightmares don't come true.

Flexible Meeting: With all the changes the recent time has brought, Telemedicine has become a need. Patients now prefer the telemedicine facility for smaller health issues so that long and discomfort travels can be avoided. Hospitals should adapt themselves to this method of patient appointment and make sure that their software supports telemedicine. This makes things easy for patients who are old or who reside far from the hospital. And also helps the hospital in obtaining patient satisfaction.

Ease for doctors and workers inside the hospital:

Integrating every department of the hospital will ease down a lot of work for the doctors and other workers of the hospital.

Generating analytical reports with the help of a dashboard.
Reduce manual paperwork by sharing electronic health records.
Effective marketing Via email and SMS.

The right software will increase the efficiency and productivity of the hospital. Hope you found this blog on the Integrated Hospital management system insightful.

Why use an integrated hos...

What is an integrated hospital management system? How could .....

Published by: Rithika S 2021030815:40:30

Inspiring patients to reach your hospital is not easy. It is significant to raise your patient base if you think you have to bring justice to all the pennies you have invested in your hospital. Effectively marketing your hospital can help you to bring much profit. You need to make sure that the marketing you do for your hospital should not be controlled by sales support or brand building. The important thing is that you need to make a positive connection with the terms of your patients.

Hospital Marketing has seen a tremendous change over the past few years, and some medical facilities are making use of hotel-like comforts to pamper and attract potential patients. In this blog, we will deal with the useful tips you can follow for marketing your hospital.

Create a responsive website:

The most important thing every patient does while choosing a hospital is that they go entirely through the website unless and until your hospital is located nearby to their location. Significantly, you make a responsive website with useful health information rather than build a website that displays information about your team or hospital. It would be good if you listed healthcare information so that patients themselves can take care of their families and themselves during an urgency.

Make use of SEO:

9 out of 10 people look for affordable or best hospitals online and know about the hospital, the doctor's availability, and other related information before merely visiting it. If you need to get listed while you search for the best healthcare clinic or practices, you need to make sure to use the power of SEO. The content editor and web developer focus on the effective keywords for your hospital to be listed at the top of the search engine results. You can hire an experienced SEO consultant and make the process more productive, more comfortable, and affordable.

Ensure your patients say Wow on your healthcare:

Branding is not just what you say about yourself to your customers. It's something that the patient or people say about you and your healthcare. Improve patient care, and make sure they keep your healthcare and treatment in mind for a long time. Ensure to provide them with attention and care so that they will speak for you and recommend you to their friends and family members too. Word of Mouth is the crucial thing you need to focus on.

Showcase your positives:

Show up your excellent work through videos, patient stories, testimonials, etc. on LCDs in your hospital waiting for areas so that people and patients visiting your website or hospital will come to know about you. Also, don't forget to post on social media, and talk about breakthrough treatments in conferences, public forums, and interviews.

Use Social Media effectively:

Social Media is one of the essential ways through which you can make everything possible. Social media websites like Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Linkedin, and Pinterest, can effectively improve the number of patients visiting your hospital as well as those is the best place where you can create brand awareness by choosing the targeted audiences and attracting them to visit your clinic.

Utilize Internal Marketing too:

Every employee in your hospital is the spokesperson. Grab your HR head to make use of it, create the experience of the employees at your clinics, and make them say positive things about the hospital.

Shoot Emails:

Emails are an efficient and powerful thing when it comes to marketing. Make sure your company's IT team maintains the email list of subscribers and shares relevant and positive information emails regarding the illness of the patient. It indicates that you have proper care for your patients even after they leave your hospital. Maintaining a good and effective relationship and communication with high-value, helpful, and useful information is key to developing a powerful hospital brand.

Bottom Line:

Show your society and patients in general that you have excellent care about their well-being and health. Also, show them you do not need them to go to a stage where they don't want to go to the hospital next time.

For More details Visit MocDoc Hospital Information System.

Seven effective tips for ...

Inspiring patients to reach your hospital is not easy. It is .....

Published by: Sanjana 2019083015:33:15

When searching for software, almost everyone looks for free ones. If you simply type in the name of any random software, you’ll probably see a google autocomplete suggestion “free download”. In some cases, it does make a lot of sense in using free software. Why pay for something when you can get it for free?

Searches for downloading free EMR software have increased with government legislation mandating their use in hospitals. Let us look into why this is a bad idea.

If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product

As a general rule, nobody ever gives you something for free. As economists would say, “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”. In the case of most free software, this is the case. Recently it was found that most of the free antivirus apps in the Google Play store actually did nothing. Their purpose? Probably to collect data from your device. This may not affect an average person very much, but if you’re concerned about privacy, you should probably stay away from these software. And when you’re dealing with a hospital management software, this is a key aspect. Data security is a very important aspect especially when you handle patient data. A data leak, however small has the potential to damage the reputation of your hospital.

Lack of accountability

A hospital management system has to have certain qualifications that assure you that a particular software can fit your needs. When you purchase a software, it is possible for you to verify if these software fit the criteria. But when you download a software for free, there is no way for you to be sure if these software fit the criteria. And since there is no monetary transaction between you and the software provider, it will be difficult to hold them accountable.

The lack of accountability will be an issue if the software faces any glitches. If the software crashes, customer support is not provided for the system, and you will be on your own. A software glitch in a free android app may be annoying, and will not cause any huge problems even if is not resolved. In case of a hospital, the software handles sensitive patient information and a software glitch can compromise this data, and with no tech support from the providers, it can cause a lot of problems.

Upgrades? Nope

As government regulations change, and as the technology improves, you may face the need for a better software. If you’re relying on a free software for very important tasks, such as managing your hospital, you may find yourself stuck with an old software. Free software rarely provide any upgrades for long durations. And when you want an upgrade, you may find yourself searching for a new software, and you’ll have to import the existing data into the new software which will require additional resources.

The story of the open source software

A commonly trusted free software are the open source software. Ubuntu is an example of an open source software. They are usually made by developers across the world, and their source code is available for free, and you’re free to change or modify the code as you wish. Since the source code is available for everyone, it is unlikely that the software can have malicious intents. And as long as the developers continue to improve the software, it will remain up to date with the required features. Open source software appears to offer a very good deal, and they do, in the case of most of the software. But in the case of a hospital management system, it is never a good idea to use an open source software. This is because of a combination of reasons discussed above. First of all, there are no hospital management software with the kind of community that a software like Ubuntu has. If you face any issues, you’re on your own. In the case of popular softwares, there may be forums in which users can discuss issues, and they may get resolved. But for a hospital management software, there are no such forums, and when you’re managing a hospital, you cannot afford to wait for a solution that may never come. And as we discussed, updates will be available for open source software only as long as the developers are working on the project.

What about the free trials?

If you have been looking for free HMS downloads, you may have come across many SaaS healthcare software companies offering lite or trial versions of their software for free, or maybe the complete version of their software, but for a limited time period. These software are generally secure and will be much more robust than software from other software providers. They may even offer regular updates. But remember that these trial versions are just for that. They will be severely limited in their capabilities, and you will definitely have to upgrade at some point. And the providers may not provide tech support if you’re using the free version. But they do provide an easy way to evaluate a software and if available, they serve as a demo for the complete version.

Lack of customization

Generally across hospitals, or even across departments, there is no uniform workflow. Each department head has their own workflows, and this is the reason why hospital management systems are highly customized. However such customization is not at all possible in a hospital management system, and if implemented, could affect the functioning of the hospital and may prove to be counterproductive.

To know more about hospital management software, visit MocDoc Hospital Information System.

Why you should never down...

When searching for software, almost everyone looks for free o.....

Published by: Steve 2019070617:50:30

Billing software is one of the essential software used in the healthcare industry. It is also called the medical practitioner's lifeline. Therefore, you must choose the right hospital billing software that offers a fantastic reporting system to manage the cash flow as well as the payment time speed.

The new hospital billing software helps to manage both insurance needs as well as patient payment reliably which is not included in other software.

Uses of Hospital Billing Software in HMS:

Each part of the Hospital Management System is integrated and automated effortlessly, and it also provides the opportunity to move forth and back from different data and reports.

There is no loss of bills and data.
Secure and safe reporting system.
There is a financial dashboard that tracks the practice's health efficiently.

The web-based practice management is used for managing and collecting the bill from any place efficiently, you can use and maintain this software in every area where it suits you best.

Automated Data backup is enabled.
You can view your daily schedule from anywhere.

You can easily understand the financial practice health of the practitioners, and the report makes it easy and efficient. The user features are used for deciding the right information to share.

The software offers Enabled visualizations in the form of figures and graphs.
You can track revenue, payer performance, and related ones.
You can easily customize and display them in the Excel format.
The software can deliver a report on a daily or monthly basis as per the requirements.

What are the Types of Billing in HMS?

Various departments use billing in the Hospital Management system to improve the billing facilities in the hospitals. Some of them include

Registration and Consulting Billing
Pharmacy Billing
Laboratory Billing
In-Patient Billing

Registration and consulting Billing:

Hospital billing software prebooks appointments for the patients they provided in advance for both follow-up patients as well as new patients.
Hospital billing software generates bills for the certified lab and radiology services.

Pharmacy Billing:

Our pharmacy billing software deals with providing the retail sales of medical supervision to OPD patients, and customers and also helps with the issue of medicines to the hospital inpatients. Our pharmacy billing software has the following features.

Able to offer an extensive collection of available drugs for clinicians.
Able to sort out the alternative drugs for the drugs that are not available.
The software aids in interfacing with a database of drugs.
Our software pops up the drug allergy alerts easily.
The billing software interfaced for dispatch along with the pneumatic tube.

Laboratory Billing Software:

The laboratory billing software helps to disseminate and record the information of the different performed tests. Here are some of the salient features of our laboratory billing software.

Test setup and do the services.
Excels different tests and diagnostic packages.
Offers the resulting process from the sample collection process, recheck process, and fetch from analyzer data.
The software does the recheck with the Sample Collections.
Our billing software offers the status update of the labs after a clear analysis.
The software works as per the NABL standards.
The software comes with a dashboard for TAT, authorization, progress works, tests, and parameters.

In-patient Billing Software:

The software takes care of the patients who are allocated in the ward bed after registration, and this deals with complete services and treatment offered to the patients while they stay in the hospital.

The features of our in-patient billing software include:

The software is capable of taking place the conversion from OP to IP.
The software takes care of the patients by allocating the beds, offers consultation for intern departments, tracks patients in the hospitals, and deals with bed transfers.
The software maintains the patient billing sheets.
The software comes with a dashboard for discharge summaries, patient access, billing audits, activities, and much more.

Track Profit and Loss Statements Easily:

The Hospital Management system products come with tally integrations, and therefore you can easily track and manage the expenses. The billing software in the Hospital Management system also monitors both the profit and loss statements so that you can quickly identify what lags in your Hospital information management.

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Published by: Sanjana 2018111211:54:23