As we promised, we bring expert opinion on the latest trends and happenings in the healthcare IT industry. First in the series, today we talk about five signs which indicate why your hospital should have a HMIS.
- Future Expansions
Economic slowdown or not, healthcare and education are two sectors that have to brace up for scaling up. With real estate costs beaten down and this is the time to expand and reach out to newer customer base. Expansions – multispecialty or single specialty, according to the market demand are the rule of the day. What makes your patient care more effective is the interlinking of all locations where files can be transferred electronically which is a safer means of communication than the physical movement.
- Controlling revenue leakages
Manually managed accounts are a bogey that needs to be disengaged. Manual entry can be manipulated, error prone and suffers from lead time variations. Lack of communication between different departments within your hospital can make it difficult to track patient’s payment record, and hence high customer waiting time. Manual process are inadequate to track SKU level inventory and be compliant with best drug management. Management of materials that goes into different department of hospitals poses a challenge, as information needs to be collated to validate the volume of inventory received against payment dispersed. Finance department is always burdened with chasing invoices and validating records with little time for efficiency improvement and control.
- Delayed ADT (Admission Discharge and Transfer)
Loosely automated system or primarily manual processes lead to delaying of successor operation. Patient discharge gets delayed due to missing files, incomplete billing or bills not consolidated, etc. Bed turnover time increases thus affecting revenes, customer waiting increases and customer satisfaction takes a dive.
- Streamlining medical records
Patient returns in manual system can be challenging. When a doctor attends a returning patient, who first visited before six months, doctor faces challenge in tracing the past records and using them to diagnose the patient now. Even if records exist, the writing could have faded, smears could have emerged marring the content, and the paper if aged end up in shambles. A better way of keeping track of all visits and medical history is EMR or Electronic Medical Records which bring the data asked at the touch of a finger.
- You are looking at the future
Last year, the healthcare industry watched in awe as the American government struggled to decrease the cost of their healthcare services to cut back on outflow of medical cases to Asia to avail the same standard of services for a better price. In fact, they succeeded to a certain extent. One major reason of that was the lack of synchronization and evident absence of IT infrastructure in Indian hospitals.
