2021030815:40:30

Why use an integrated hospital management system?

Published by: Rithika S

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.

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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

How voice assistants can ...

With advancements in AI, digital assistants are becoming more.....

Published by: Steve 2019043015:30:57

Hospital has become one crucial & mandatory part of the current digital world, and every human requires their services. In this case, the hospital must take good care of things to track the reports of their patients. Hospital Management System (HMS) is the hottest trend at present to keep track of every detail of the patients clearly and instantly.

Hospital Management System is a software system that makes back-office activities, administrative, and clinical activities paperless. It means you can save plenty of time and money as they are capable of controlling every operation in the hospital. Healthcare IT solutions play a crucial role in enhancing the services in healthcare by managing bills, reports, and other activities of their patients.

Technology act as a bridge between the healthcare system and people leading to excellent healthcare services. Many staff at healthcare centers is also gaining a good insight into the trending technologies to provide the best for their patients, like offering them needed comfort and time. There are so many modules that Hospital Management Systems offer namely

Administrator - the main module of HMS, which holds every permission and right to handle different hospital modules.
Patient Management: The module which deals with complete management and patient care related to OPD, Reception desk, Radiology, Laboratory, IPD, and more. Apart from this, they also control visitors, appointments, and other aspects of outdoor and indoor patients.
Stores and Pharmacy: The module deals with medicine stock and other relevant records.
HR and Personnel Management: The module manages the hospital payroll features like leaves, bonuses, incentives, substitute management payroll modules, daily attendance, payslips, salary, and more.
Finance Management: The module is needed to eliminate the paperwork as the financial department is the one crucial part when considering hospitals.
Clinical Services: It includes operation theatre management, housekeeping, dietary, waste management, ambulance management, mortuary management, maintenance, laundry, and more.

How does HMS enhance hospital productivity?

There are many reasons to state how the Hospital Management System helps in increasing the productivity of any hospital. Here are a few of them below.

Increases Decision Making:

Hospital Management System helps the professionals in healthcare to check out the clinical documents, diagnoses, patient records, and other relevant things in a single view and therefore results in the healthcare professionals making decisions at the right time.

Enables Patient Interaction:

The HMS software helps strengthen the relationship between patients and doctors. It also helps in making it more interactive and also enhances communication for the right type of treatment.

Appointments:

Patients and other people who need to visit the doctor can schedule or book their appointments with their doctors online. It helps to save time and money for the people.

Sharing:

The HMS helps information sharing between specialists in healthcare.

Decreases Human Errors:

Hospitals need to be clear, and a small error can lead to critical issues. The Hospital Management System, as an automated process, helps in eradicating the mistakes in the medical reports.

Enhances Data Security:

The Hospital Management System is more secure and, therefore, no chance for data thefts to occur as they happen in manual systems. Healthcare centers and other hospitals can keep their critical information safe from hackers or unauthorized persons. Everything in Hospital Management is accessed by a controlled method and, therefore, no chance for errors.

Web-based:

Hospital Management System is web-based, and therefore, it is an affordable option.

Payments:

The Hospital Management System provides access to process claims and makes online payments easily.

Technically Advanced:

The HMS is advanced and, therefore, capable of handling every operation at a hospital. The healthcare system that sends electrical information about the patients is the most preferred option for many people as there are many choices like choosing their doctors and grabbing the reports of tests taken without any hurdles.

What are your views about the Hospital Management System on Hospitals? Any other queries or information regarding HMS are welcome.

How HMS improves the prod...

Hospital has become one crucial & mandatory part of the c.....

Published by: Sanjana 2019102218:17:47

Introduction:

In the past few years, the HMS market has exponentially developed. Private healthcare hospitals and providers are interested in different investment opportunities and are looking for intuitive ways to enhance their ROI (Return On Investment).

Private and public hospitals & providers need to take the right decision regarding the investment in the right Hospital management system as well as demanding an excellent analysis deal. They should check whether HMS is capable of fulfilling their objective goals to provide exceptional support to their financial gains and their patients.

Let’s check for the several criteria you need to consider while choosing HMS system.

Brainstorming With Stakeholders
HMS Software Demo
HMS Customization & Stability
Data Transactions & HMS Software Setup
Upgradation & Support

Brainstorming With Stakeholders:

Before you go for getting the right hospital management system, please make sure you do some brainstorming with the stakeholders and vendors so that you will be able to choose the right HMS system for your hospital. Make sure every person in your hospital management is clear off getting the right things they need from the software.

Discuss and list out the ‘Need to have’ feature requirements so that you can choose the right HMS system without any confusion, and this will also provide a clear-cut knowledge of comparing the different pros and cons of various HMS vendors.

HMS Software Demo:

Do not get the Hospital management system from the Vendors without processing an online demo as they are considered to be the best method of validating the specifications of your products, and you can also know whether the HMS system will reliably useful for your hospital and patients.

Ensure you have a list of concerns and significant pain points in your hand before checking the online demo. During the demo, you should get a clear understanding about HMS System, how it can be used for delivering useful results and how to sort out different problems with this simple HMS System.

HMS Customization and Stability:

Even though you choose the HMS system after checking out different features carefully, there are high chances of HMS system to missing some essential specialty you need. So it's important you go for the customized Hospital management system to sort out these problems.

Customization is considered to be the inevitable part of your automation journey, stick to the HMS system only if the vendors can develop the software to be customized as per the private or public hospital workflow.

Data Transitions and HMS Software Setup:

An entire implementation of the HMS system will include pilot testing, basic setup and staff training. The conventional approach is that to get started with a deferential start and then reaching the greater prospection level of automation. Apart from that, the phased approach to effective HMS implementation means that they are capable of reducing the hospital operations taken the day-to-day.

Its good to follow all the above factors before picking a HMS system for your private or public hospital, make sure you get prepared to know about the features to make the transitions of data painless and smooth.

Upgradation and Support

The HMS System, exposed to real-time scenarios and loads that mandate the hospital staff’s reputation after HMS software sale and implementation completion. There are many unanticipated and spontaneous issues which need to be handled correctly within the right service level agreement (SLA). Hospital reputation is essential for the organization to grow, in this case, HMS Vendor provides the proper support for the success. HMS systems include regular upgrade like other software, and therefore HMS software support is one of the primary vital factors to be contemplated when evaluating the proper HMS system.

Visit Mocdoc HMS to know more

How to choose the best Ho...

Introduction:In the past few years, the HMS market has expone.....

Published by: Sanjana 2018103113:25:56

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.

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

Published by: Steve 2019070617:50:30