admin

With so much going on at your hospital, it’s hard to constantly keep track of all your financial sources day in and day out. Several hospitals face money related spillage in some shape or the other which is a reason for losing benefit and income. Facing a revenue leakage can mean that you’ve potentially lost the opportunity to get your hands on the money your hospital has earned. What is the solution?

When going through the monthly accounts, asking yourself where the leakages most frequently occur and understanding the revenue leakage points at your hospital is step 1. But would you really want to keep tabs on such a draining and lengthy process manually? Moreover, are you sure that nothing gets missed from your manual tracking? This is where the hospital automation using an HIMS can help you with the financial discrepancies and fix revenue leakages at your hospital.

Here are a few ways an HIMS can help fix revenue leakages at your hospital:

1. Handle Hospital wide transactions:
A Hospital Information Management software provides all the necessary interdepartmental integrations that you may need. With such a large network of departments and monetary exchange happening almost constantly, missing out on a transaction can be harmful for your organization.

An HIMS provides a central billing solution which helps you supervise and direct all the incoming and outgoing transactions within each department within a few clicks. It can allow you to effectively set rules for certain types of charges and auto-generated patient bills as per those pre defined rules.

For example:

• The charge for a senior citizen may be subsidised.
• You may have fixed charges for individuals coming in an emergency.
• Fixed rates for follow ups and first time consultations.
• Fixed charges for different doctors.

Such transactional activities, when digitized will reflect lower mistakes since the manual intervention is minimum. This makes it easy to track details of the payment such as part payments, completed payments, credit notes, etc. and the chances of entering the wrong data and experiencing small losses in payouts is lowered.

2. Manage Insurance Effectively:
If you’ve been a hospital administrator long enough, you’ll know the consequences of an unprocessed claim, let alone several claims at once. With so many patients from all walks of life receiving treatment constantly, a majority of them choose to use their insurance schemes.

In these situations, credit becomes nearly unavoidable and keeping track of the collection of these payouts on a daily basis is absolutely essential, since missing out on a payment can be detrimental to the hospital in the long run.

Here’s how an HIMS ensures that you never lose track of an unprocessed claim:

• It maintains a digital log of the insurance details of each patient.
• Keeps track of every insurance vendor’s policies that are claimed by patients.
• Generates an automatic invoice of payment and notifies/reminds the staff for due payments.
• Helps keep a record of payment collection.

3. Identify the leakages in maintenance:
Heavy medical equipment and machinery at your hospital require maintenance. Every machine has its predefined annual/bi-annual maintenance suggested, which when overlooked can lead to devaluation of machines.

At the same time, identifying whether there is an ROI in the long run after investing in a maintenance request, is essential to avoid leakages. Maintenance also ties into the usage of these assets and with every you incur a cost. If your hospital spends recklessly on maintenance without properly assessing its need or equipment utilisation, there may either be foul play from within the department or a discrepancy involved in your current monitoring system. A recent case study showed that the installation of an HIMS led to a 27% reduction in leakages ever since staff accountability was monitored constantly.

An HIMS allows you to keep tabs on the maintenance requests, its cost and even the expenses incurred as per the utilization of the medical equipment. To ensure you get the desired ROI from these equipment, keep track of the utilisation rates and set usage targets for the respective departments. Maintaining a complete digital monetary record of every asset in your hospital can help you plug these leakages and drips.

4. Pinpoints Inventory expenditure:
The HIMS implementation in your hospital can allow you to check your inventory spends and helps track inventory which is used, neglected or isn’t accounted for. This may include smaller medical Instruments, linen, bedding equipment, syringes, stationery, etc.

This also applies to pharmaceutical spends. Managing an in-house pharmacy means you have the added responsibility of taking inventory of medication and its usage against every department, costs, profits and losses. A Hospital Information System helps you to manage the entire pharmacy digitally, within a few clicks, with all facilities from billing to indents, discrepancies and consumption of medication.

As you generate monthly or quarterly reports, it is ideal when you’re able to find all the accumulated data on a single system which allows you to track the usage, wastage, and pilferage costs. This effectively reduces manual intervention, maintains a count of all items and manages costs of orders efficiently.

5. Ends Pilferages:
Perhaps the most debilitating and damaging aspect of not keeping tabs on your leakages, is that pilferages can occur more often than not. The abuse of hospital resources for the staff’s personal use must be made an actionable offense. But with a multitude of other administrative tasks under your belt, it can get frustrating to have to look for loopholes in a system and constantly try to fix them, only to have the pilferage occur over and over again.

Pilferages may not just be financial either, it could be medication from your pharmacy, a first-aid kit from your ER or even a seemingly harmless blanket. The fact of the matter is, these small thefts may result in a cumulative effect that will pinch your hospital in the long run.

An HIMS allows you to reinforce the security across all the departments and keep a check on inventory digitally. This can be proven by another case study that shows evidence of receiving 100% accountability of staff and a drastic drop in pilferages, ever since the installation of an HIMS. It makes sure that whenever a staff member requires access to the pharmacy or inventory suite, their credentials are monitored. This ensures that an activity log exists in the system and over time the HIMS formulates a digital report.

We understand that it is difficult to keep up-to-date with every process, every insurance claim, every equipment and every medication that flows through your hospital. With the increasing responsibilities that lie on the shoulders of hospital administration, it is only a boon that Hospital Information Management Software exists to aid and monitor each and every avenue of monetary management. So don’t wait any longer, your hospital’s financial security is only a click away.

Healthcare informatics has seen a boom in the past decade, with a massive emphasis placed on automation in hospital management. With increasing scope to streamline the functioning of hospitals around the world, constant technological advancements have brought in picture the advanced technology led Hospital Information Management Software (HIMS) Systems. Knowing its importance, whether you are part of a new or upcoming hospital, here is how Integrated Healthcare IT can help your hospital perform better.

Tackling bottlenecks
Common bottlenecks that can be usually seen to slow down hospital operations and growth, arise due to the fragmented and unstructured operations. This happens majorly due to unavailability of integrated systems.
These bottlenecks are –

• Hospital Information inconsistencies – Non-standardised data residing in different systems in unstructured formats.
• Real-time data unavailability – Inability to check up-to-the-minute information needed to keep healthcare systems in sync.
• Lack of standard and effective data authentication and access control mechanism.
• Inability to maintain essential healthcare data compliance like HIPAA and HL7.
• Unethical shared user-identities – Non-supportive shared identities of system users that create hindrance in streamlining inter-department communication and activity tracking.

Let’s look at the benefits

1. Centralised Repository with Formatted Data
The hospital and the HIMS installed in the hospital have the same goal. To achieve the highest quality patient care. Improving patient data access while placing an importance on improving the workflow leads to faster functioning of the hospital.

And Integrated HIMS architecture offers a Central Data Repository of all patients. This is where the data from all departments is stored and updated. Through smart integrations the HIMS collects and stores every information in pre-configured formats in one place making it easier to access on a single platform.

2. Improved Efficiency with Real-time Access to Data
With traditional ways of managing your hospital data, there are scopes for erroneous and haphazard storage of data, which can lead to high information retrieval time and unexpected delays in patient care. An integrated HIMS enables realtime access to patient data allowing doctors to deliver faster and improved treatment.

This is not just crucial for hospital physicians but saves immense time for the hospital management too. The system logs every information as and when it’s generated and allows the management to take a 360° glance at the hospital performance with complete digital data available at a click of a button. So you no more need to have a personnel to sift through files manually which is outright tedious and time-consuming.

3. Stringent Data Access Controls
How do you ensure your patient’s data privacy is not compromised whatsoever and the confidentiality of the hospital’s crucial information is maintained?

Before the advent of Integrated software for hospitals, there was no fool-proof way to tackle this challenge. Data authentication was greatly affected since access control mechanisms were far and few between.

An advanced integrated HIMS makes this process truly digital. With all the information saved digitally it allows for strict data security controls. The hospital’s management can configure data access to professionals as intended, and can also digitally track the information access activities against every user. This greatly helps in improving the staff accountability and reduces the chances of the mishandling and unwanted exchange of patient information.

4. Automated Compliance Adherence
Before the advent of Integrated HIMS, managing patient data was a more tasking process that led to the failure of appropriate patient data security.

The benefit of an integrated HIMS system is that it automates patient data security while creating secure channels of information flow and offering desired access controls. In order to ensure your electronic health information exchange and flow is secured there are software providers who offer HIPAA and HL7 compliant software. A hospital implementing an HIMS must look for these features if the country their business operates in has it as a mandate to be followed.

5. Streamlined Operations with Advanced User-activity Tracking
In the past, confidential patient data was easily accessible by anyone or everyone in the staff or had limited security checks. This and the unethical use of shared user identities, leading to multiple system users accessing files between departments using a single ID created issues in activity tracking and caused a stir in inter-department communications. Today, HIMS comes with a well-defined user-based roles and rules engine, complemented with an activity tracker that provides secure access to only those doctors and staff who are authorized by the management.

This greatly reduces the likelihood of tampering with the patient information, and more actively keeps in check the authorization of medical staff privileges. This is because of the streamlined inter-department communication architecture that has introduced the ability to update patient information without the scope of an error, in turn increasing the scope to improve patient care.

Is every information of your hospital always at your disposal?

Are operations at your hospital agile, smooth yet error-free?

Anyone associated with the hospital industry would tell you about the perils of conventional methods of managing a hospital setup and why it is imperative to have a Hospital Management Software.

Providing the best care to ailing patients while managing medical records, consultant’s timesheets, machines and inventory, finances, staff, regulatory laws and so much more can be highly daunting and cumbersome. Let alone the critical decision making that goes into running this full-time activity zone for health care.

With so many tasks to juggle at once manually, methods for improvement usually get pushed on the backburner in the quest for simply finishing the tasks. A hospital Management System automates the various complicated operational workflows. Let us see how this digital platform benefits your hospital’s overall functioning.

1. Helps Deliver Enhanced Patient Care:
The smooth functioning of a hospital is determined by its standard operating procedures. This involves all the tasks that are allotted to staff; from trained medical and paramedical professions to non-medical staff who take care of hospital’s administration, billing, payrolls, etc.

HIMS maintains these  standard operating procedures on an integrated digital network which combines information from all departments on a single platform.
The network offers you access to:

• real-time operational and patient information,
• administrative staff and physicians’ schedules,
• live tracking of staff activities and inventory &
• automatic updation of clinical data across all the departments of the hospital.
  This lends itself to increasing the operational efficiency and pace of patient care at the organization.

2. Ensure Data Security and Retrievability:
Data Security is crucial for any hospital. Any data breach issues can put a hospital in serious problems. It is nearly impossible to ensure utmost data security manually. HIMS makes this easier for hospitals by automating several related tasks and involves:

• Protecting the privacy of patients and maintaining the confidentiality of their data.
• Eliminating inappropriate access and mis-handling of patient information.
• Preventing a data breach by providing a strong tracking mechanism and stringent controls. Data breach can cause harm not only to the patient but also to the organization, intrinsically and economically.
• Restrictions on unauthorised access to information which means only the medical professionals with access rights/credentials can access any patient information.

What is the use of having the information which is not easily accessible when needed? HIMS equips you with ways to retrieve any information at just a click of a button. This digitisation helps in solving the possible issues of manual file and folder management, document organization, and minimizes error associated with information handling.

3. Gives your hospital a better ROI:
With HIMS installation, the amount of manual labor that is required in the hospital can reduce drastically, thereby reducing operational costs and expenditures significantly. This is because human intervention is replaced by the automation put into place by an integrated HIMS. This also provides accelerated organizational functioning through increased scope of accuracy in processing patient and staff information.

4. Keeps a check on revenue leakages:
Plugging revenue leakages can be challenging and can keep a hospital from realising its actual profits. Having an integrated HIMS makes it possible to keep track of even the smallest of activities that can help you steer clear of any leakages. It helps you:

• Keep track of organizational expenditures and staff salaries
• Set credit limits
• Define concessions for all eligible categories, such as army veterans, senior citizens, students, etc.
• Generate automated department-wise and component wise bills (to help avoid revenue leakages)
• Keep track of inventory purchased and consumed as per the requirement to avoid any pilferages
• Keep a check on costs incurred on annual maintenance of assets and usage of these assets. These include Medical machinery and equipment management and spends

5. Reduces Scope of Errors:
When all the actions are run smoothly with the help of an HIMS system, there is a prioritized sense of urgency in delivering patient care, while also reducing the scope of errors.
Here’s an example:
Consider two patients with the same name, consulting two different doctors for two different conditions. These patients require separate medication and on a regular basis his scenario could create confusion. An HIMS stores and updates all this information using a unique patient ID for every patient. So with just a few clicks a staff member required to administer medication to Patient A, is able to do so by glancing over their records in no time, reducing the chances of any possible errors.
This is because of the end-to-end digitization within the HIMS network that leads to less manual work and enables a delay-free treatment routine to the patient in the long run, this positively impacts the hospital reputation and increases the organization’s score on the patient care index.

The appeal of an HIMS lies in how it can respond to specific bottlenecks that may exist in your hospital’s functioning systems without you even knowing it. Having the right automation solutions for your organization can keep the staff, management and patients happy. With seamless integration across various departments and modules within the network, a Hospital Information Management Software System could be just the tool required to bring a hospital one rung up on the ladder to epitomized healthcare.