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5 Things that can Quickly Boost a Hospital’s Performance with an HIMS

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.

Pharmacy Management

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.

Stock  and Inventory Management

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.

Hospital’s Laboratories 

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.

HR And Legal Operations Management

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.

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5 Advantages of Document Management Software for Hospitals

Advantages of Document Management Software for Hospitals

Maintenance of paperwork is a practice that is slowly going out of fashion. Documentation processes are now making a shift into the digital space, to preserve information securely, streamline access and make editing of data much easier. Similarly, in the world of healthcare IT, Paperless document management processes are the need of the hour now more than ever. Which is where an EMR System or Document Management System comes in.

Considering the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the fear of transmission of the virus, hospitals today are also inclined to digitize all levels of documentation. But why is Digital Documentation so necessary for hospitals? Lack of a digital document management system can reduce staff productivity, increase paperwork management and processing times, minimize TAT, lead to document leaks and hamper document retrieval.

Here’s a list of benefits of a Document Management Software:

1. Faster documentation and zero errors:
An ideal document management system enables the automation of MRD Processes and helps digitize incoming patient data and documents to make it easier for management. These systems include functionalities for automated document indexing and scanning with multiple levels of categorisations to organize the documents as the staff deems fit. The software helps automate the process of creating digital medical records so that any patient data stored is easily retrievable only in a few clicks. 

It streamlines quality checks processes to avoid errors in scanning and indexing which helps with accurate storage of data. This digitized process being automated adds to the credibility of EHR Systems as it speeds up all document centric processes to follow. This system helps in overall error reduction and makes the storage and retrieval process of documents faster. 

2. Improved employee productivity:
One of the major advantages of having a DMS present in the hospital framework is the tangible improvement in employee productivity and proactivity. With the availability of a single application running across the hospital departments makes managing end-to-end digital workflows seamless. Doctors, nursing staff and administrative staff can reap the benefits of digitised document management by accessing the patient information digitally.

The DMS Software provides a centralised collaborative space for staff and makes it accessible at any time as long as the staff is authorized to use it. With centralized access to a patient data repository, authorized staff can get easy access to data in real time on a single application. With facilities such as digital logs of patient files and smart search options using predefined document categories, it makes the overall placement and management of patient data much more streamlined. 

With the ability to receive and make digital file requests, staff can request patient data across departments and deliver files digitally for faster response times. The ability to map out and recover from loopholes in the document management process is also vital.

employee productivity

3. Healthier Patients and better healthcare measures:
Once the hospital front desk assigns  patients with unique patient IDs, a Smart DMS with its easy integrations of all departments pulls the data of the patient and saves it onto a centralized repository, in tandem with the unique ID of the patient. This information is then available for viewing in a structured format in real time. 

This helps doctors, nursing staff, pathology staff and radiology staff, and other admin members to access the data as per their requirement and analyze patient health trends based on past medical history and enables practitioners to prepare a treatment trajectory for the patients. 

This ability to digitally compare patient progress over various cases in their medical history leads to improved healthcare and faster analysis of treatment measures.

With access to a central data hub and forum for authorized users, doctors across departments and specialties can collaborate on cases digitally and work together on patients that require extra care. With the ability to tag and annotate digitally, without modifying the patient data, it is easier for doctors to indicate to other staff the treatment that is to be delivered. 

4. Better Security Compliance:
Document Management Software for Hospitals today provides an activity log that monitors the whereabouts of the patient’s sensitive healthcare data. With specific rules for file viewing, rights and authorization levels to restrict staff access to sensitive documents; restricted information can be kept secure from unauthorised views. These settings can also be configured at group or individual level for your staff based on the requirements of the hospital’s internal policies, medical case or patient condition.

Maintaining patient data privacy is of prime importance. Not only is patient data a sensitive information but any violation of patient confidentiality falls into the realm of strict legal action against the organization and also compromises the reputation of the hospital. A document management system allows the staff to treat and manage confidential case files separately. With the added ability to mark some files as confidential and to restrict those who need not have access to them. 

This is where Medical Security Compliance is of utmost importance. Every DMS System must be Compliant with HIPAA standards of patient information security and other medical regulatory laws. This signifies that a software is up to the mark in terms of coding standards and meets the requirements of document governance. This includes the patient data, documentation and history retention and deletion policies to adhere to various medical laws. This feature helps patient retention due to an elevated level of trust and also increases trust among stakeholders.

Security Compliance

5. Cost Savings:
With a Document management system for medical records, all of the processes of secure document management are structured on a single digital collaborative space. This helps eliminate the need for large storage spaces and rooms full of cabinets to maintain paper based patient data. It also helps cut costs in terms of labor and data management or administrative personnel since the software is easy to use and helps in quick and accurate retrieval of patient documents. 

With increased performance around the hospital and from valued employees, the resultant patient satisfaction leads to patient loyalty. With faster paced healthcare delivery, a rapid inflow and outflow of patients across various departments can increase revenue over time. These benefits reflect in time when there is a better footfall of patients in the long run along with stakeholder satisfaction. An overall boost in turnaround time is therefore seen.

With the help of a Document Management Software your hospital can boost turnaround time, improve regulatory compliance and improve business ROI with a streamlined AI and ML driven, automated, digital solution. For information on Rescribe’s DocuPHI DMS, contact us on our website.

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Top 5 Benefits of using Mobile Apps with a Clinic Management Software

Benefits of using Mobile Apps with a Clinic Management Software

We live in an age where there’s a mobile application to serve almost every purpose, be it banking, e-commerce or food delivery. It’s a trend that is benefitting almost everyone today with an elevated value and level of convenience. This thought has now taken prominence even in medicine, and today we see mobile applications assisting medical practices as well.

In today’s day and age, healthcare technology and mHealth is leaps and bounds ahead of what it used to be. Patient care has become a priority and with the limitations of staying indoors due to the pandemic, mobile apps for doctors and for patients have come to play an important role in connecting medical professionals to patients in need, digitally.

How Mobile Apps for Doctors make Clinic Management a Lot Easier:
Having a mobile application to be connected to your practice allows you to leverage the power of mobility in operations to manage your clinic and to deliver top notch patient care, from anywhere and at any time with the convenience of a mobile application. 

The Rescribe app for Doctors pairs with your practice or clinic, thus making your practice portable using cloud technology and cloud data sync. Additionally, it lets you stay connected with your Clinic from anywhere and at any time, using a secure login through the mobile app itself.

The mobile application comes with the following set of features and functionalities:

1. Enables On-the-go operations for Doctors:

  • It allows for Mobility in clinical operations and helps doctors work on-the-go, thereby reducing the time it takes to acknowledge the requests of many patients at once. 
  • This helps streamline doctor-patient communication and assists caregivers in enabling round the clock  connectivity with the patients for appointment bookings and more.
  • Enables doctors to work remotely, access patient information and assess patient concerns even if they are physically unavailable at the clinic. This particularly helps in cases of emergencies.
  • Enables doctors to gain new patients through remote consultation opportunities and work from wherever they are.

2. 24/7 Connectivity with Clinic and Patients:

  • It allows doctors and medical professionals to view, manage and schedule/reschedule appointments as per availability and convenience based on the doctor’s schedule and calendar at the clinic.
  • Appointment processing and scheduling can be initiated by the patient based on a slot available at the clinic, at which point, doctors can confirm the availability and secure the patient’s appointment.
  • It enables a reminder and confirmation system for patients who have scheduled appointments at the doctor’s clinic through app notifications.
  • It also allows doctors to personalize healthcare, since the mobile app is integrated with the multifaceted clinic management software that is capable of making individual patient care easier with its ability to create case sheets, visualize data and provide a library of medical data to support treatment. 
  • Doctors can check patient history with a tap, connect with their patients to encourage better patient care scores and achieve patient loyalty.
  • Therefore, leveraging the power of clinic management software, Mobile applications can help immediate and efficient patient care.

3. Sharing E-prescriptions using the App:

  • E-prescriptions and electronic documentation can be easily managed using this mobile application. Doctors can create e-prescriptions, share with patients and notify them of a new or updated treatment regimen using the mobile app, further adding to the element of personalized healthcare. 
  • Patients too benefit greatly with such apps. More than using the app for booking appointments, they can also use it to store their family’s and personal health records, which can be securely accessed using just one application anytime anywhere. This may include health vitals, diagnostic reports, new and expired prescriptions, bills, etc. that are indexed.
  • Patient’s can also use it to leave appropriate feedback after a consultation. This helps doctors improve the quality of patient care.

Sharing E-prescriptions

4. Patient Data at your fingertips:

  • It allows doctors to view and manage patient information such as contacts, addresses as well as health information like prescriptions and lab test reports from the previous visit, past health conditions and ailments, etc.
  • It makes digital healthcare simpler by handing control of EMR procedures like creating and sharing medical records with the patient or their next of kin. 
  • It also comes with the added benefit of using the camera on a smartphone to capture images of patient data that can be saved onto the application incase of internet outages. These are uploaded into the clinic’s patient data repository, after connectivity resumes. 

5. Faster and Easier Online Payment and Billing through Mobile App:

  • The mobile application gives doctors the ability to set the payment amounts for new patients, returning patients, follow-ups, etc and gives the option to accept payments across many different payment methods like UPI, wallets, Cards and net banking right from the comfort of the mobile phone.
  • Bill generation is automated, per consultation and it makes a record of the revenue generated in the database of your practice. Giving you the ease of analyzing revenue at one glance, whenever you want.

Faster and Easier Online Payment

How do patients benefit from mHealth apps?
With so much emphasis being placed on patient health, we also have Rescribe for Patients app which works in unison with the Rescribe for Doctors app. Connecting with doctors over chat, SMS and video calls are only some of the major pros of the application.

These applications bring a lot of value to a practice. When a patient is in need of dire help at an odd hour, it makes it a lot easier for the doctors to have emergency documentation at the disposal, on their smart device, rather than having to look through tedious paperwork.

mHealth apps

How can it benefit a doctor’s practice financially?
With a large number of patients consulting doctors online using teleconsultation, it frees up time and makes it more convenient to take more appointments.

This, with the added personal touch of chat interaction, intelligent and safe document access features and uninterrupted care adds to the patient satisfaction score. When a software makes it easy to accommodate more patients in an hour than the clinic, it also eliminates wait times, extensive labor costs and streamlines workflow of the administrative work such as documentation, filing, reports, billing, etc. This ability to rake in more patients in a day surely gives a boost to ROI.

Mobile applications are now being made a secure portal/platform and healthcare vendors are leveraging the power of encryption software on mobile to ensure that doctors access, manage, store and edit important and sensitive healthcare information securely without a compromise on credibility or security. It is highly secured and comes with multilevel security checks to prevent unauthorized access to patient data. Two factor authentication is another welcome addition to strengthen patient data security. 

In the direction that healthcare is headed today, having a mobile application integrated into practice management software at your clinic is an upgrade. For more information on how you can integrate your clinic with a mobile application, visit us on the Rescribe website or download our app to learn more.

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The Importance and Benefits of Telemedicine

Telehealth and telemedicine software have brought doctors and patients closer, to seemingly remove any barriers that may stand between delivering better healthcare. From eliminating transportation costs, to making emergency visits more accessible by going online and even increasing the number of health providers available at any time, telemedicine has shown various benefits in the recent past.

Telemedicine is the optimal delivery of healthcare services using modern technology such as smart devices to diagnose and treat patients. It is a software based approach that helps patients and doctors connect digitally and enables medical professionals to deliver the best care in the shortest amount of time. It is often misunderstood that telemedicine involves only making calls to doctors. Though this is not an exclusive feature, it is provided as one of the  means to communicate with the physician in some cases.

Today, telemedicine software has almost become a staple in terms of delivering healthcare. Not only because we face a global pandemic, but also because of the ease it offers to both, the doctors and the patients, in giving and receiving healthcare. 

Here are some of the benefits of telemedicine that cannot be overlooked in this technology driven era:

1. Gives patients faster access to doctors:
With mobile applications becoming the playing field for telemedicine. The power is right at the fingertips of the patients and doctors. Teleconsultation sessions can be booked at the convenience of doctors on an on-screen appointment schedule that is shown to the patients. 

Patients can instantly access the calendar on their mobile devices and pick slots as per the doctor’s allocated session and availability. Because there is no in-person interaction, the appointment scheduling is also open 24 hours a day, which means a patient can schedule an appointment whenever they like.

2. Digital Patient Health Monitoring:
Telehealth software allows you, as a doctor, to create digital case notes and manage a record of each and every consultation. The records include patient health goals, prescriptions and prescribed tests, billing and payments, follow-up schedule and care plans that the doctor may have advised for the patients to follow. 

This is usually designed to work in tandem with configurable health sheets that help in patient health monitoring. With specific case sheets and customizable templates to capture relevant patient data, the consultation is made entirely stress free. This can be owed to the fact that the best telehealth software comes with vast libraries of clinical summaries to aid doctors in their specific practice.

Patient data security is also prioritised as per the MCI guidelines and HIPAA compliance regulatory laws. This means that the practice data available on your teleconsultation software belongs only to you. Therefore, there is no chance of breaching patient information confidentiality guidelines. Video calls and messages are usually encrypted with 256 bit encryption which makes the messages nearly unattainable by third parties. If the software is integrated with your practice, it allows you, as the highest authority, to apply strict privacy and security controls to patient data.

3. Assured Digital Payments for every consultation:
Digital payment modes have taken the financial world by storm. This extends into the telehealth industry as well, giving doctors the flexibility to choose their fee amounts and arrange for digital payment methods to be active on their teleconsultation software.

Most times doctors are apprehensive about using teleconsultation software to engage with patients, mostly out of the fear of not getting paid for the consultation. This is nothing but a myth! It is common today for telehealth software to have a system which allows a patient to consult a doctor, only if the payment is completed. That way, doctors can rest easy, knowing that a consultation is taking place only under the assurance of having been paid first. 

With so many leaps in technology, payments have been made easier to complete with multiple online payment methods being built into the software. This allows patients to choose a method they are comfortable with whether it be UPI, netbanking or debit cards. Along with this, the features for automated bill generation allows for each bill payment to be recorded and added to your overall revenue generated.

4. Cost effective: 
If the teleconsultation software is integrated into or comes along with the practice management software, it is better for doctors in terms of cost effectiveness.

Telemedicine reduces overall operational costs for a doctor by making the consultations online. It also auto-generates records for digital information of the patients health condition, vitals, etc. and which eliminates the cost of maintaining paperwork too. In addition to this, the 100% digital appointment and consultation process saves time for doctors and patients, giving more footfalls of patients to doctors.

5. Easy Post Consultation Care and Rehabilitation: 
A very overlooked point of view is how after care of patients can be managed with telemedicine. The treatment of a patient is never really finished until the doctor ensures the patient completely gets rid of the illness. 

In many cases, patients require prolonged treatment and many may have to resort to remote post-consultation care techniques if they are under the care of a doctor for a major treatment. These patients benefit greatly from tele-rehabilitation services being provided over telehealth software. It helps with the smooth transition of patients back into their lives, which can be after the patient is discharged from a hospital or is back home after a surgery/procedure. Long term post-treatment home-care for patients is seen as extra value and is seeing a lot of innovation today.

Telemedicine is essentially a 21st century reimagination of delivering perfect healthcare to patients. When the most powerful devices that rest in our pockets are able to empower medical professionals and patients all the same, it is upto the technology providers to enable better healthcare for the future.

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Factors Leading to Revenue Losses in Your Clinic

While the healthcare space is quite profitable today, its potential to generate consistent revenue relies on appropriate administrative methods and improved finance management. Clinics often ignore the rate at which the operating costs may rise and this is likely to put pressure on the staff to manage more than they can handle. Infact, the challenges that these organizations may face lie in an entirely different realm of possibilities, thus leading to massive revenue losses over time. 

Where most medical practitioners chase the bottom line of avoiding revenue losses, they are misled by the old ways of administrative clinic management. This means that doctors may sometimes fail to address the factors that truly cause revenue losses.

1. Lack of Workflow Automation:
Automated clinical workflows achieved by the installation of a Practice Management Software have become the norm in recent years. Every clinic must have an automation solution that assists in delivering better and faster healthcare that allows doctors to handle appointments, clinical workflows, and patient engagement and data at the click of a button. 

These automated workflows are designed to adapt to the doctors style of practice and identify patterns in consultations & appointments by providing suggestions as the doctors work. This makes the consultation process, patient history evaluation, diagnostics, reporting and prescribing medication cumulatively faster. 

The lack of such a digital workflow automation would make the practice less productive and therefore rake in less money. When most of a doctor’s time is spent in retrieving patient history from a filing cabinet or in the re-evaluation of a returning patient’s illness using paper records, there is a lot of money lost along with the time spent on tedious activities. Not only is this counterintuitive to running a practice; patient loyalty takes a massive hit and can dent the reputation of the business.

2. Incorrect billing practices:
Incorrect billing can severely affect the bottom line of a practice. In a manner of sorts, this can be attributed to a lack of productivity or a burden on the receptionist to handle damage control every time a procedure or service is erroneously charged for. 

It leads to administrative staff letting go of more practical tasks at hand and spending time fixing the time-consuming errors while responding to grievances from patients. This leaves a bitter impression on the staff as well as prospective returning patients and can in extreme cases lead to legal trouble. 

For example, if a patient is charged for a procedure he didn’t request, it can be viewed as a fraudulent practice. Similarly, if a patient is not charged for a treatment that he availed, it is a monetary loss for the practice.

3. Lack of Online bookings and Automated Patient Registrations:
The online consultation and appointment booking space has been completely digitized as of today. There is even a deviation in the old trend of having to book an appointment by making calls. This is primarily due to the increased pace at which treatment is delivered and the immediacy that patients require to book an appointment. 

A practice management software can today offer completely online appointment options for patients by allowing them to choose an available slot as per the clinic’s schedule and convenience. Healthcare is an industry which runs on the urgency of the service provided. So making it efficient and effortless for both the patients and clinicians is necessary. Lack of automation that enables online booking management can lead to an image of complacency and therefore lead to a reduced inflow of patients. 

Software vendors therefore offer doctors a proprietary mobile application with the clinic management software that allows doctors to engage with patients from anywhere and at any time. They also offer an application made specifically for patients to help with consultations more urgently. When patients receive the acknowledgement of a doctor within time, it boosts patient satisfaction and loyalty.

4. Overstaffing:
When the going gets tough… practices may recruit more employees to micromanage each and every aspect of the clinic. While the initial impressions may lead to higher patient satisfaction scores and increased staff morale, over time this trend may become very expensive for the practice. 

With having to pay excess to hired staff, revenue generated may be constant but the expenditure may increase. This tips the scales negatively and affects the bottom line. Automating the practice with a clinic management software is the best solution to have menial tasks be automated using AI algorithms and the priority work be taken up with worthy and efficient staff members. This reduces labor costs and improves ROI.

5. Petty Thefts and Inventory Mismanagement:
Pilferages and petty theft can be detrimental to a practice. It’s one of the few instances where having a ‘once bitten, twice shy’ attitude will be profitable and help re-evaluate employee reservation and termination statuses. 

Whether it is a syringe, a vial or even rubbing alcohol, you need to make it clear to your staff that any kind of theft is grounds for termination and a criminal offence. It’s always good to keep the bigger picture in mind while taking administrative decisions such as this. In the long run, any staff member who resorts to stealing can cause a hole in the revenue generated which cannot be recovered. 

Inventory mismanagement and miscalculations in the finances allotted for inventory costs can also lead to severe financial downfalls. Since clinical inventory is expensive and must be reported upon usage or depletion. The best way to avoid such mishaps is to ensure the presence of an inventory management module within the practice management software that your clinic relies on. It helps get in-depth reports and analysis of daily operations, inventory used or purchased and spends/profits and losses incurred on the above.

It’s surprising how one seemingly tiny loophole can cause a ripple effect and perpetually uproot a practice due to mismanagement of resources, time and financial negligence. These problems are easily avoided with the latest offering in telemedicine and assistive technology of the same caliber. It’s always good to have a practice management system that is tailored to your requirements and can increase revenue in a carefree manner.

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Make Your Medical Practice Easier with a Cloud Based Practice Management Software

Medical practices today are seeing increased patient footfalls across the world. This can not only be chalked out to the global healthcare emergency, but also a general sense of awareness of one’s health. In tandem with the above, clinicians and medical practitioners now feel an urgency to deliver better healthcare on an independent level.

To ensure high standards of patient care, means to be efficient in one’s craft as a practicing doctor, having trained staff and having a technically optimized practice. Achieving the latter can be best managed with a ‘Cloud Based Practice Management Software. The benefits of having a cloud based software range from increased revenue, to improved clinic efficiency and streamlined clinical workflows to improve the standard of patient care.

Why choose a Cloud Based Practice Management Software?
With the pace at which practice management software development and improvement is going, emerging medical technologies have become the norm in a fast moving world aiming to achieve better patient care. 

Cloud based software coupled with AI And Machine Learning are powerful tools being used in every branch of business, and its implementation in clinic management has improved patient satisfaction while also making the lives of doctors and medical staff much easier and more profitable.

So if you are on the fence about a cloud based system, the following reasons may convince you to get a Cloud Based Practice Management System installed:

1. Easy to Customise:
The best way to achieve efficiency at your practice is to adopt technology that can be customised to the way your clinic operates. When your clinic management software is centered to handle the parameters specific to your practice, there won’t be a need to look elsewhere for solutions to manage your practice better. 

Always opt for a Clinic Management Software that offers customisations. You’ll find that there are a few that come with all the necessary tools and libraries of clinical summaries that are suited to your specialty. For example, the needs of a diabetologist may vary from those of an orthopedic specialist and will require examination casesheets, prescription formats, medicines lists of the same nature. Apart from this, these clinic management software come with the necessary billing tools, patient data repositories and data security controls that can also be customised as per your requirements.

2. User Friendliness:
If the software isn’t user friendly, it adds a steep learning curve to something that should be fairly easy. Which is why the Clinic Management Software that you choose must be easy to use, quick to get started with, and simple to understand by even the less trained staff at the clinic.

A software offers a real quick start if has the following features:

– Requires Minimal Training sessions:
It should be as simple as you pay for the subscription and get started. An easy software ensures you begin using it without having to put your practice and services on hold until you and your staff are trained. 

– Intuitive Graphical Interface:
A visually rich and interactive representation of the medical conditions help you better evaluate patients and provide them with a better understanding of it.

– AI and Machine Learning capabilities: 
Now this is a highly valuable feature! If a software is able to identify meaningful patterns in your daily consultation and adapts to it to give you auto-suggestions for diagnosis and medications, your practice becomes much faster and efficient.

– Ability to generate financial reports:
Generates a monthly summary for expenses incurred and profits gained. Also keeps a file for staff salaries based on hierarchy, increments, bonuses or absences and helps manage inventory costs.

– Offers end-to-end Automation:
Specifically to reduce paperwork and thereby labor costs by automating most managerial practices.

Your vendor must also provide you a dedicated software account manager to help you automate all clinical processes and provide personalized assistance at every step. This is a sign of dedication to user friendliness.

3. Online and Offline Functionality:
With a cloud based system, clinics can leverage unlimited cloud storage for daily management of practice data and patient data. To add to this, having a hybrid model of Clinic Management Software ensures that your practice never stops even when there’s an internet outage. An automatic data sync feature must be included in the case of internet connectivity or downtime issues.

Stable internet may sometimes be finicky, and to avoid any hitches in running your practice, it’s best to be able to work offline and online as well. This is why a good practice management software helps you get work done even during an internet outage by allowing you to work offline and then syncing up your data automatically when the internet resumes.

4. Mobile Apps for Doctors as well as Patients:
Mobile applications of a clinic management software allow you to access and manage every aspect of your practice in a portable manner all on your smartphone or tablet device. This lets you work remotely and flexibly while making the day less tasking and allowing you to prioritize patients at your convenience with a single click.  

Everything you need can be taken care of through your mobile, such as: 

  • Patient appointments
  • Clinical workflows
  • Patient engagement and consultations
  • Prescription renewal or updation
  • Patient data management and security

All of these functionalities can be accessed remotely and digitally, even when you’re on-the-go or away from your clinic

5. Global Standard Data Security:
Of course, patient data security is a priority. Every Practice Management Software must adhere to the HIPAA healthcare compliance and must have end-to-end 256 bit data encryption on the cloud  with two factor authorization across devices that are trusted. This is to facilitate complete patient data security so that you can assure your patient data isn’t used maliciously. For this, software vendors allot secure, login IDs and unique passwords to select trusted staff. 

These facilities are now must-haves and are absolutely essential when adopting a digital software to manage and control your practice and provide patient reliability. 

Ultimately, a Practice Management Software is a transformative tool that will make your clinic leaps and bounds better for patient care and prepare it for the future of healthcare with digital solutions that are easy to use, cost effective, secure and unique to your requirements.

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Things to consider before opting for a Hospital Management System & the right questions to ask during the HIMS demo

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In a world driven by innovation and invention, foremost medical professionals often highlight the contribution of technology in the hospital industry and how it has resulted in providing an improved ROI. It has not just introduced modern methods to fastrack hospital operations but has also helped in evolving medical services by automating management processes. So if you are considering to invest in a Hospital Management System, you are on the perfect track. A Hospital Information Management System has set the foundation for hospitals to optimise tasks, enhance patient care, reduce turnaround time and improve business ROI.

But how do you identify the need for an HIMS for your Hospital? And more importantly, what should you consider before investing in this software? How do you differentiate between the right and wrong product for your hospital? 

The answer lies in the thorough analysis of the products available in the market, their benefits, feasibility with your setup and how they can be customised to your medical business needs. But before you take that leap of faith, here is a thought starter to focus on:

1. Identify your Hospital’s requirements
Subject to internal functioning, every hospital has different administrative problems to manage. An HMS can vary in its offerings based on the scale of your hospital and its varying functionalities. Your requirements can be estimated based on the size (bed count) of your hospital, number of staff, the services and the facilities that you offer (radiology, pathology, OPD consultation, etc.) and whether your hospital is a multispecialty or superspecialty based on various operating departments. 

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In a nutshell, your Hospital Management System will help you create a coherent network that brings all departments on a single digital platform and help streamline the entire hospital’s operational processes by automating them.

If you are not sure how to address this, start with asking:

  • What operational challenges are you currently facing?
  • Are all your processes manual? Is yes, how are they impacting your services?
  • How do you monitor your staff and keep a check on the transactions?
  • Why do you think automation can solve your challenges? 
  • What budget do you think you can comfortably invest in a software?
  • Why do you think this is the right time for you to invest in an HIMS?

2. List down your challenges in detail
Like any business, obstacles need to be dealt on different levels and different departments. Primarily by using an HIMS you can rectify management issues pertaining to all departments – in-patient, out-patient, operation theatre, nursing, insurance, NABH compliance, lab, asset, inventory, pharmacy, and more.

Identifying the loopholes can help you get customized solutions to address your business specific concerns.

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Evaluate and make a checklist of the must-have features based on the challenges you are facing. It could be lack of digitisation of documents or the need to revamp a lethargic Patient Care service or a better Finance management or even a secured accessibility of sensitive information. Here are some most preferred features:

  • Eliminating the need for paperwork.
  • Controlling equipment downtime with timely preventive maintenance checks.
  • Tracking quarterly/ bi-annually/ annual maintenance expenses.
  • Simplifying work-order management by working digitally (like on a computer or on mobile phones).
  • Ability to automate billing.
  • Calendar system for planning schedules of OT and Doctors.
  • Improving communication between various departments.

3. Questions you must ask about the product
On identifying the necessity for a Hospital Management Software, research for the best vendors, most suitable product and price plan as per your requirement. 

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Resolve your doubts by asking questions.

Here are some preliminary questions you must ask the shortlisted vendors:

  • Will they provide the HIMS Demo?
  • Which flexible pricing plan is recommended for me and why?
  • Can the plans be customised as per my requirements?
  • Can I upgrade my plans with business growth?
  • How complicated or time consuming is the installation procedure
  • What about the customer support system after on-boarding
  • How easy is it to use the software?
  • What are the available staff training programs the vendor can organize to learn the software effectively?

It’s imperative for any hospital administration to understand and know the best tools for its staff members and patients. While some organisations may need a higher degree of patient engagement; others may only require a few patient-centered features and the basic automation of redundant tasks.

Shortlisting an ideal HIMS vendor is indeed a difficult task. Ensuring that you are prepared is the key to making the right decision. Don’t forget to check the reviews and ratings of the vendors you evaluate. It will further ease out your selection process. 

In case you are new to all this, take expert advice and ensure that you invest in an HIS software which suits your requirements best.

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Why do Hospitals need a Document Management System?

The medical records department of a hospital is perhaps the most vital department in the system that keeps the hospital running as a well oiled machine. But in today’s day and age, having the hospital staff sift through cabinets and shelves full of folders of sensitive and highly confidential data can lead to multiple unwanted situations such as misfiling of patient information, error in retrieval of information, loss of productivity and mismanagement of time between tasks since most of the staff’s time will be spent looking for relevant data.
Today, with the evolution of digital healthcare technology solutions; Digital MRD, EHR and EMR have grown and gained popularity because of their ability to solve all the challenges listed above. The solution to run a Digital MRD comes in the form of a Document Management Software (DMS) and is perhaps the most sought after technology in hospitals today. So why should you get one for your hospital?

1. To Digitise your Hospital’s MRD – for increased efficiency in workflow and productivity:
Modern day document management systems make sure your hospital works smart using the cutting-edge AI and ML algorithms for managing patient records digitally. With the ability to pace-up document scanning, to automatically index patient information and to map the records into preset document types and categories, a DMS conveniently accelerates the record management process that enhances the overall efficiency with an advanced integrated Document management Software, the entire hospital’s departments can be interconnected to help manage all medical records and workflows end-to-end on a single digital platform. This makes it easier for medical personnels, from authorized doctors to nurses and paramedics, to search, locate, retrieve and view any patient documents or files instantly through the centralized patient data repository.
This digital integration eliminates the need of any other software that the medical staff may use to refer to a patient’s past history, and saves time which is otherwise spent in manual file transfers from one department to the other.

2. Security and Data Privacy:
Patient data is highly sensitive and is treated as crucially confidential material that cannot by any means leave the confines of the hospital or mishandled. This is why a DMS is designed to store the patient data in a secure in-house server where the data access is strictly governed by Rules Engines.

  • A Document Management Software allows staff to access, manage or edit these patient files only based on the authorizations provided to them by the management.
  • Most software also allows for the configuration of these rights at a group or individual level for the staff in the hospital. This means that rights can be defined easily based on the categories of the staff members.

Another level of security is added based on the document tracking and monitoring technology which is available to you in the form of an activity log. This way, your hospital never loses track of its digitized MRD. With the activity log, you can digitally monitor who accessed, edited, changed or retrieved a document along with its time details. This makes every staff member accountable for their actions on any document.

3. Medical Coding compliance:
It looks almost impossible to control the chaos and bring order for documents management within a hospital. Add to all of it the strict medical compliances that govern the medical records upkeep. The solution to a lot of these lies in a document management software. Most of today’s document management software have in-built features that help you manage these effortlessly. The in-built features for patient history retention and disposition, file discard policies, audit-trails, strict role-based security controls help you stay in adherence with various complex HIPAA laws and others medical codings compliance like

  • ICD – International Classification of Diseases
  • ICHI – International Classification of Health Interventions
  • CPT – Current Procedural Terminology
  • MLC – Medico Legal Cases

4. To reduce Scope of errors & misplaced documents:
Misplacing files, misidentifying patients, misinformation about patient conditions among staff can cause catastrophic failures in a hospital. These errors can be minimized or completely eliminated with the implementation of a Document Management Software. Cabinets full of patient documents  make it tedious to look for and record patient information. It also leads to the reckless misplacing of patient documentation. File identification errors can have serious consequences in the realm of treatments. If a patient is misidentified or misdiagnosed, the doctors responsible for the treatment could be held liable in the court of law and the hospital would incur severe legal repercussions for the same.

To avoid the entire fiasco of misinformation and legal trouble, the digitization of these documents now allow hospitals to securely scan and log all of the patient information using the unique patient ID. The information pertaining to a particular patient is appended to the right Id automatically with distinct episode-wise or visit-wise classifications.

4.1 To Create Smart Searchable Documents:
The smart document search features further helps staff to locate the required files instantly across all document types. While doctors can request any file digitally and receive permission to access it on the portal itself, in the cases where physical files are needed, the transfer of the same is also logged in the system along with the time details. This eliminates possibilities of file misplacement.

5. To Generate Readily Available Data for ClinicalResearch:
When you have the hold of a patient’s entire medical history, and are constantly updating their information on the database as per their treatment, the hospital is bound to come up on volumes and volumes of important information that can seemingly help in clinical research. A DMS allows you to extract various reports based on the types of medical conditions reported in the hospital, treatment provided, medicines prescribed, no. of patients cured, and more. All this is available at a click without any manual efforts required for reports preparation. This system gives the hospital an auto-generated analysis of the medical data collected over a period of time, in the form of Medical information system reports or in the form of graphical representations.
In other words, the health trends of patients across a certain amount of time can provide valuable information to research in coming up with effective ways to deliver advanced healthcare.

With functionality and accessibility to patient data being secured on integrated networks, there is also the space for mHealth – mobile health. With many vendors adopting various new methods to safeguard and manage patient information, it will be very interesting to see where further developments are made in the space of document management in hospitals.

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Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital Enhances its MRD Productivity by 150% using Rescribe Document Management Software


CHALLENGES

From Warehoused Papers to Digital records
The inclination towards creating 100% paperless clinical records grew rapidly when Deenanath Mangeshkar realised its MRD processes had slowed down heavily due to increasing issues with its existing document management solution. Some of their major areas of concern were – 

  • Increased time to retrieve clinical records for doctor’s use
  • Manual and error prone process of indexing clinical records 
  • Cumbersome process for records search and filtration needed for clinical research
  • Low software up-time and unreliable support 
  • Data corruption and loss of clinical data due to technical malfunctions

The hospital needed a new software with strong technology support and new age application to clear off daily issues arising due to slow file processing. It needed more automated processes, and advanced ways to eliminate physical barcode printing and data corruption.

The management at Deenanath Mangeshkar started a evaluation process and short-listed a few potential vendors. Mr. Tushar Kanade – Manager Systems at Deenanath Mangeshkar Pune, says “the hospital had previous experience with solutions that did not grow with the hospital’s need and so this time they scored prospects against criteria that included an upgraded path”.

SOLUTIONS

High Volume Data Migration – 10+ Years of Data Migrated to Rescribe DocuPHI
Rescribe DocuPHI’s technology experts made the transition phase for the hospital management a smooth process. The easy and  quick migration of 10+ years of patient data from old system to Rescribe included-

  • Patient demographic information mapped to existing patient document
  • Large scale conversion of .TIF format files to PDF format documents
  • 100% patient data and document migrated with existing document type to Rescribe
  • 2.4 TB volume of patient data, which is nearly 9.3 Lakhs patients’ data, migrated

Better Integrations – For a Unified Data Repository
Rescribe Docuphi’s flexible integration with Deenanath Mangeshkar’s internal HIS expedited the transfer of patient information to/from these systems, and made the file access for consultants/billing/auditors/accountants/medi-claim less time consuming. Nearly 99% reduction in TAT for scanned files availability provided ease in execution of clinical workflows and also helped MRD personnel in pandemic situation of COVID-19 to manage their work digitally.

High Accuracy, Increased Precision and Productivity
No advanced training, expertise or special skill sets are needed to benefit from Rescribe’s cutting-edge technology which is designed from our years of specialised experience. Not just Rescribe’s latest technology but also its easy-to-use interface helped Deenanath Manageshkar to deploy even the less skilled staff to deliver outstanding numbers of processed files everyday. With this task made easier than ever before, Deenanath’s staff now processes –

  • more than 200+ IPD files daily
  • 150+ OPD files daily
  • nearly 300+ patient details files daily

Driving Productivity – Barcode Digitisation, More Cost Savings
Rescribe helped Deenanath completely discard the traditional high-cost approach of identifying and classifying documents using printed barcodes. With Rescribe’s software generated digital barcodes the hospital is now able to save several thousands that it earlier spent every year only on printing barcodes. These digital barcodes are used as document identifiers to automatically separate one document from another and index both appropriately. This proved to be a much faster way, that added extra efficiency to the hospital’s new paperless work structure.

Smart Automation – True Value Added
The power of the Rescribe platform enabled Deenanath Mangeshkar’s MRD workflows to be automated by intelligently indexing data with minimal human intervention. With Rescribe’s smart automations, any MRD user can now easily index files from any available workstation in the MRD department, unlike its previous software. To make the document management process more effective, it implemented the functionality that automatically identifies any corrupt file and moves it to the exception folder, thereby, completely eliminating the obstruction generated due to corrupt data. 

Improved Security and Accountability of Sensitive Patient Information
Deenanath Mangeshkar is now also able to track every file-activity history end-to-end in Rescribe’s DMS. The system holds records of user-wise activity on files, duration of file views against every user, no. of times files are accessed, file access rights against medical staff, and more. Manual errors are also now easily traceable at any stage of MRD file processing at single click.

With Rescribe’s support and commitment to excellence, Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital is now able to focus on its core competencies to deliver greater satisfaction and high standard care to its patients.

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Speeding up Healthcare – How the implementation of HIS can increase operational efficiency at your hospital

Healthcare informatics today, plays an important role in improving the quality of patient care. After all, healthcare has one goal – “Improving quality of care, while reducing overall cost.” The cost for the patients as well as the healthcare providers.
The approach of healthcare is now more proactive than reactive to ease patient care. This requires hospitals to consider an overhaul of their existing approach and technologize their operations to squeeze out as much junk from their routine processes as possible, to improve care delivery. To achieve this, it is crucial to consider automation using a powerful  Hospital Information Management Software.

1. Automate your workflows for reduced manual work:
The  implementation of a Hospital Management System gives you a unified look at all of your hospital’s operations by forming a cohesive network with automated workflows across all departments. This automation significantly reduces manual work to enhance your staff efficiency with:

  •  Real time updates and improved decision making:
    Staff can access hospital and patient information in real time and therefore it helps them follow all the standard operating procedures without any delay and without constant to and fro. With real time updates available at the click of a button, it is also easier for the management to keep a close watch on all functions and identify any pitfalls at the earliest.
  • Decreased human error:
    Since the smallest of clinical errors can be debilitating for a hospital’s credibility, automation using an HIMS can help perform the menial yet the crucial tasks with highest possible accuracy. It also keeps the errors in billing or inventory log keeping at bay.
  • Easy appointment booking processes:
    It provides online appointment facilities to patients seeking treatment and maintains a digital record of the same in the hospital database, instantly.

2. Easy access to records with specific authorizations:
Data security and data retrievability go hand-in-hand and their importance is ever increasing. For all the staff members directly involved in patient treatment, the availability of records and the ability to easily obtain them is crucial. Which is why HIMS use either a server or a cloud based approach for storing and retrieving data digitally. Either approach allows for fast access to records. Most HIMS offer an extra layer of security that allows only authorized medical professionals to access records with their relevant credentials. All of this, within a couple of clicks, across all integrated devices in the hospital.

3. Decreased patient admission and discharge times for desired profitability:
Patient discharge processes are usually a bottleneck for every hospital. Delayed and lengthy patient discharges reduces the bed availability and hampers new admission processes. It is one of the biggest factors affecting wait-time for in-patients admissions.

A Hospital Information Management Software generates a unique admission ID for each patient which facilitates easy data management of all admitted patients. With all the entries done on a single digital portal, it allows to keep separate digital records of all patient details about their admissions, treating doctors, surgery, medicines consumed, bed/room alloted, insurance policies used, transfers and more.

All these details readily available, help generate the discharge summary within a few minutes with zero hassles of collecting data from different departments manually. It drastically reduces the discharge time leading to more bed availability for other patients.
These functionalities put together, not only increase patient satisfaction, but also help improve profitability of a hospital.

4. Faster and error-free Patient Billing:
An HIMS gives your hospital a central billing solution to control all cash transactions, electronic payments, department transfers and multi-point medical billing activities of your hospital.

Since all of a patient’s information is available in one single view, such as digital monitoring of patient information, clinical history, history of medication, medical staff treating a patient, respective cost-sheets for payments and billing, it becomes easier for the hospital receptionists to automatically generate patient bills for any department depending on the request put in by staff.

The pre-configured master data such as rate-cards and the predefined rules for night charges, emergency charges, senior citizen charges, and insurance further eases the finance management. It also helps the hospitals to track every transactional activity and ensure that all payments, refunds or credits notes are timely attended to.

5. Better Decision Making with Improved Personnel Info tracking:
Operational effectiveness is not only a key factor in delivering fast paced healthcare to patients, but it is also responsible for better decision making for hospitals.

An advanced HIMS is usually designed in a way that it automatically tracks all user activities with no additional effort. This helps understand the performance of each staff member and take corrective measures wherever required to improve the internal management processes.

Other important information like staff salaries, staff attendance, substitutes, list of on-call and permanent doctors, leaves, bonuses, increments, perks, etc can also be maintained digitally giving the manager better control over the workforce management. This rules out the possibilities of any discrepancies and inconsistencies that may arise with managing all this on papers.

The implementation of an HIMS provides a complete 360° control over a hospital. Along with providing the much-needed relief to consultants from paperwork, it also makes the hospital’s internal management processes smoother, faster and more profitable. If your hospital is looking to speed up the process, look no further than a state of the art Hospital Information Management Software.

 

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