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.
