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Charitable hospitals often grapple with the need to make healthcare accessible while maintaining financial viability. Unlike commercial pharmacies that typically sell products at the Maximum Retail Price (MRP), charitable hospitals strive to provide medications at prices that are affordable for their patients. This creates a delicate balance between ensuring that the cost of healthcare remains low and covering the operational expenses of the hospital.

One of the key areas where this challenge becomes evident is in the management of pharmacy sales. While the purchase price of a product is fixed, selling it at the MRP might be beyond the reach of many patients. At the same time, selling at or below the purchase price is not sustainable for the hospital. This is where the concept of Differential MRP comes into play.

To address this challenge, we introduced the Differential MRP feature within the Goods Received Note (GRN) screen. This feature allows hospitals to set a sale price that is higher than the purchase price but lower than the standard MRP, making it an effective tool for charitable hospitals to provide affordable pricing while ensuring that they remain financially sustainable.

The Goods Received Note (GRN) screen is used to record the receipt of products by the pharmacy from suppliers. When adding a product to the GRN, three key pricing parameters are typically involved:

Differential MRP is particularly useful in scenarios where the hospital needs to offer a reduced price that is fair to both the patient and the institution. This appears in the GRN screen when the corresponding configuration is enabled in the product master. By entering the sale rate alongside the purchase price and MRP, the product can then be sold at this adjusted price on the sales screen.

 

To better align this feature with user needs and improve its usability, we have implemented several key updates:

To make the feature more intuitive, we have renamed "Differential MRP" to "Sale Rate." This terminology is more straightforward and accurately describes the purpose of this parameter, which is to represent the actual price at which the product will be sold to the patient.

We’ve expanded the visibility of the Sale Rate by incorporating it into several important Management Information System (MIS) reports:

The recent updates to the Differential MRP, now known as the Sale Rate, are part of our ongoing efforts to support charitable hospitals in their mission to provide affordable healthcare. By renaming this feature and integrating it more deeply into our reporting tools, we ensure that our users can more effectively manage their pricing strategies. These enhancements help maintain the balance between affordability for patients and financial sustainability for the hospital.

Managing hospital tariffs involves navigating a complex landscape of pricing structures, patient categories, and insurance policies. Ensuring consistency and accuracy in tariff management is crucial for both operational efficiency and patient satisfaction. This article delves into the challenges faced in hospital tariff management and highlights how MocDoc's Rate Plan Master provides an effective solution.

Hospitals must define and manage tariffs for a wide range of services, including treatments, investigations, consultations, packages, and room charges. Handling these diverse pricing structures can lead to errors and inconsistencies if not managed properly.

Different patient categories—such as cash patients, insurance patients, and corporate patients require distinct pricing agreements. Managing these varying tariffs can be challenging, leading to potential billing discrepancies.

Hospitals often offer multiple room types, such as general, deluxe, and super deluxe rooms. Pricing for services can differ based on room categories, adding another layer of complexity to tariff management.

Patients with insurance coverage may have various policies with different levels of coverage. Managing tariffs in line with these diverse policies complicates the billing process and affects revenue accuracy.

MocDoc’s Rate Plan Master feature provides a centralized platform for defining and managing tariffs across all service categories. This ensures consistency and reduces errors by consolidating tariff management into a single screen.

Hospitals can create and map different rate plans for normal, insurance, and corporate patients using MocDoc. This flexibility ensures accurate tariff application based on the patient’s payment method and agreement.

MocDoc allows hospitals to set specific rate plans for different room categories. This feature ensures that pricing reflects the amenities and services of each room type.

MocDoc supports the creation of different rate plans for multiple insurance policies within a single insurance company. This feature accommodates various policy terms and ensures precise billing based on insurance coverage.

A standout feature of MocDoc is its ability to map a common rate plan for an insurance company while defining distinct rate plans for room categories. Additionally, hospitals can specify the billing price of a service and the coverage amount provided by the insurance company. This feature automatically calculates the copayment required from the patient, simplifying billing and ensuring transparency.

Hospital tariff management presents numerous challenges, from complex pricing structures to varying patient and room categories. MocDoc’s RatePlan Master offers a comprehensive solution with flexible options to address these issues. By streamlining tariff management and providing customizable rate plans, including coverage amounts, MocDoc helps hospitals maintain accuracy, efficiency, and compliance in their pricing strategies.

In many hospitals, managing the billing process can become chaotic, especially when large volumes of patients pass through the system daily. Smaller hospitals often use a single billing counter where the registration, bill generation, and payment collection are all handled by the front office or receptionist. However, larger hospitals and pharmacies—especially those dealing with a heavy influx of patients—need a more efficient approach to prevent bottlenecks and patient crowding at the billing counter.

To solve these challenges, some hospitals adopt a segmented billing process, splitting the responsibilities between bill generation and cash collection. This approach prevents queues and speeds up service, especially in high-traffic areas like outpatient departments (OPDs) and pharmacies. However, managing these two sections efficiently, without confusion or errors, can be challenging.

MocDoc's "Save for Counter" feature simplifies the billing process in hospitals by clearly separating bill generation from payment collection. This workflow is particularly useful in high-traffic hospitals and pharmacies where crowd management is essential. The feature allows the billing department to quickly generate bills and send them to a dedicated cash counter for payment collection, ensuring smoother operations and a better patient experience.

In both outpatient departments and pharmacies, the billing team can generate bills and mark them with a special status called "Save for Counter." This allows them to quickly process the patient's registration and generate the necessary charges without handling payment, thus speeding up the workflow.

Once the billing team has generated a bill and marked it as "Save for Counter," the cashiers at the cash counter can access all pending bills in real-time. This allows them to efficiently collect payments, update the payment status, and ensure that the process is completed without any backlog.

This workflow is designed to work seamlessly across departments, ensuring that no matter where the bill is generated (OP, pharmacy, lab, etc.), the payment collection is streamlined through the dedicated cash counters. By adopting this method, hospitals can:

MocDoc's "Save for Counter" feature also provides detailed reports on billing and payments. Management can track:

Without a proper billing structure, hospitals often experience long queues at the registration and billing desks, creating a poor patient experience. In the absence of a segmented workflow, front office staff are tasked with handling both bill generation and payment collection, leading to delays, confusion, and errors.

In pharmacy billing, especially, these inefficiencies can cause patients to wait longer for their medications, further adding to their frustration.

By using the "Save for Counter" workflow, hospitals can significantly reduce the time patients spend waiting in line for billing and payments. Billing departments can focus on quickly generating accurate bills, while cash counters handle the payment process separately, ensuring smoother operations. This also allows hospitals to manage large volumes of patients more effectively, especially during peak hours.

MocDoc's "Save for Counter" feature resolves many of the billing challenges faced by hospitals, particularly those with high patient volumes. By dividing bill generation from payment collection, hospitals can reduce queues, improve patient satisfaction, and streamline operations across departments. With enhanced reporting capabilities, management gains full transparency into the billing process, ensuring that both operational efficiency and financial accuracy are maintained.