Besides being a savior to the plethora of complications that can arise at a hospital, a Hospital Information Management Software establishes itself as a one-of-a-kind and immediate solution to the overall administration of the hospital. While the more tangible outcomes of an HIMS are viewed through departments that are overt, such as Operation Theaters, IPD, Radiology, etc., there are also the departments that may appear to work low-key on the surface and are also usually overlooked.

The reality is that these parts of the organization have a lot of dependencies for other crucial operations to take place smoothly. Here’s where an HIMS expands upon its utility. Most of these departments are paid less attention to but have immense potential to fastrack day-to-day hospital operations drastically if automated with the right technology. Their automation and digitization can bring about a much needed and more vital change in operational efficiency on a grand scheme of things. 

Here are the 5  easy-to-operate and quick-to-organise areas of your hospital that you probably didn’t know, functioned a lot better with an HIMS.

1. Your Hospital’s Pharmacy Management
This department serves the out-paitent and in-patient medication requirements round the clock. Digitizing all the information stored here on a specific automated module and integrating it with the hospital’s network can help streamline the workflows related to medicines requirements and consumption against every department and make medical emergencies easier to handle.

Responsibilities of a pharmacy range from maintaining the patient database based pertaining to their pharmaceutical requirements, handling doctor and ward requests for medication, tracking stock and availability of medication and constantly updating and maintaining a record on the database as per usage or purchase of items. Purchase orders, receipts, vendor requests and payments and sales reports can be handled easier. Automating these processes can reduce errors and leakages, and prevents mismanagement.

HIMS Vendors today offer fully auto-generated monthly billing, pharmacy revenue management and auto-generated GST reports. This is largely done by connecting the department to the hospital’s main billing system and transferring charges of individual’s medicines purchase to their final bill.

2. Your Hospital’s Stock  and Inventory Management
An HIMS allows your organization to take direct control over storage and inventory. Pilferages in hospitals are a growing concern. In these cases, having manual monitoring falls more into the realm of micromanaging employees. 

Instead, with the digitisation and automation of the storage and inventory departments via a Hospital Information System, it’s easy to keep track of the available stock of utilities without any manual intervention. 

It also helps in: 

• Making new orders for the depleted items
• Maintaining a record of all purchases with receipts 
• Gives an overview of inventory usage, spends and costs with an automated monthly inventory tracking. 
• Helps in racking organizing and shelving stores items as required.
• Provides alerts when an item may be nearing expiry or depletion in stock.

All of these tasks can be tracked in real time.

This module of HIMS has the ability to maintain an account of all items with the purchase information and the accounts and events in which those items have been used. Additionally, it also records the employee ID when an item is taken out for usage. This allows the head of the department and bookkeepers to keep a close watch on the staff that may indulge in pilferage of hospital property.

3. Out-Patient Department of Your Hospital
Management of the Outpatient Department is a serious pressure point for hospitals of any scale. There are just too many variables to keep track of and pen and paper today just won’t do the job. It’s best to identify the hospital’s needs and adopt a robust solution that is specifically designed to cater to a hospital’s OPD.

Most hospitals today have a diverse OPD department with various doctors from different practice specialities and medical backgrounds. Accommodating them all at once may not always be possible and they may work on a schedule. An OPD management System of an HIMS works digitally and provides a completely paperless experience for managing all the consulting services and doctors lists. 

An HIMS assists the front desk with access to a digital appointment calendar and a list of doctors based on their schedule. With online integrations and appointment services for patients on the hospital’s website or at the reception, the OPD Calendar is constantly updated in real-time, allowing the staff to work faster and direct patients to the right doctors. This begins a loop of efficient care by tying in patient registration, care plan templates, patient check-in, billing, prescription verification, report verification services, follow-up requests and electronic medical record updation and retrieval onto a single module. 

4. Seamless Connectivity with Hospital’s Laboratories 
Almost every hospital today has Laboratories within its premises. Which means that for every patient that they perform a laboratory diagnosis on, whether from the OPD or IPD, there is a record to be generated and appended to the patient’s other information. The report generation is usually performed by a separate system known as a laboratory information system.

While Laboratory Information Management Systems do exist as separate entities, it is highly recommended to have an HIMS that can integrate with it to fetch relevant information relatime and store it with the patient’s master data. This module of the HIMS is designed effectively to manage all the tests prescribed and scheduled, and is used to store reports of all patients. 

With the digitization and automation that an HIMS offers, this  patient data related to all his tests can be accessed remotely by doctors across various departments and by the OPD reception for patients to collect physical reports. There is a log that is maintained to keep track of the commercial records and to generate bills for both inpatients and outpatients automatically at the counter. This helps make document access faster and in turn helps doctors assess situations sooner to provide faster and better healthcare.

5. Hospital HR And Legal Operations Management
The legal department benefits quite a bit from the presence of an HIMS system. IT isn’t necessarily interfaced with the department, but the employees can make requests to study various cases and identify loopholes.

Mishandled insurance claims, overbilled/ underbilled patient cases, medical malpractices, revenue mismatching and billing errors can, in rare cases snowball into bigger issues if not handled properly. Since care today is highly focused on patient satisfaction, any setback, true or falsely claimed, can cause a repercussion and damage hospital reputation and revenue. For this reason, the Legal department must be abreast with every major occurrence within the hospital. 

This also directly ties into HR since, employee satisfaction scores/feedback, schedules, calendars and salaries are under the database within the HR Department.  

It is vital for the HR And legal departments to keep a tab on the Insurance management along with the account department. Any policy, fraudulent claim, vendor malpractice, payment failure, patient doctor dispute must be proactively handled by the legal team at a hospital. When the team has a consolidated overview of all the procedures and practices surrounding a case in digital format, it is much easier and a lot faster to act and solve a case with finesse. This is largely thanks to a Hospital Information Management System. This helps avoid delays in other responsibilities that the department may designate as pressing.

Having a smart network powered by AI and machine learning to help automate and digitize every single node of your organization can help productivity across the hospital and boost the scope and quality of patient care. An HIMS can assist hospitals with its advanced digital solutions to make workflows streamlined, work hassle-free and keep your employees and patients happy. For more information on how you can integrate a Hospital Information Management System at your organization, visit us on our website.