How to Develop a Hospital Management System

The best hospital management software is a set of services that helps to streamline the smooth work of all medical departments. Clinic software development should satisfy the needs of the healthcare facility, improve healthcare delivery to patients, and combine the corporate work of all medical specialists.

Let’s find out which services can be automated for each user group and how to build a proprietary hospital management software.

HOSPITAL SERVICES AUTOMATION BENEFITS

Nowadays patients want to get professional medical care as well as quality service. The following features of hospital patient management software among others can help to increase the level of customer service:

• Setting up the automatic processing of incoming calls from clients allowing the machine to address common questions without hospital staff involvement.
• Displaying the information about visiting hours and calendar slots available for doctors’ appointments on the clinic site enabling patients to choose their convenient time and book an appointment online.
• Sending SMS messages or voice reminders to patients about the appointment time and share other important information about their treatment.
• Automating the process of filling out medical records and speeding up the patient registration process.
• Sending the results of medical tests and examinations to the patients via email.
• Monitoring the patients’ satisfaction through easy-to-use feedback forms or NPS tracking.

The medical practice management system will help doctors to devote more time to patients, not documentation:

• All the necessary information about the patient is collected in one place and so any medical specialist within the clinic is able to access the full history of the disease and test results and, so, get more information to diagnose more accurately and prescribe the right treatment.
• Creating the database of document templates helps the doctors and nurses always provide a standardized medical protocol to the patient and quickly add information to the patient’s card, which optimizes the duration of an appointment without compromising the quality.
• Doctors are in full control over their schedule and can arrange the workload efficiently.

Medical practice management software allows hospital authorities to manage the profitability of the facility and get insights into streamlining internal processes of the clinic:

• Analyze doctors’ schedules and patients base and evaluate the distribution of the workload;
• Optimize hospital peak hours, reduce medical equipment downtime;
• Discover which medical directions generate revenue, and which should be closed or modified;
• Evaluate the visitors’ satisfaction and find new ways to enhance it;
• Control the finances and maintain profitability.

Let’s briefly overview the possibilities of automation for building a smart hospital in detail.

FEATURES OF THE HOSPITAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Basically, the medical practice management system consists of 3 layers:

1. 1. Automation modules. Modules are used in daily operations of the clinic: doctors work with the patient’s electronic health records and treatment plans; receptionists use the patients’ registration and finances management module; the clinical laboratory interacts with the module storing all examinations and test results of the patients, etc.

1. Catalogs and protocols knowledge base. All the internal medical protocols and process standards, as well as patients’ healthcare data – all the data that is required to enable the health care delivery and hospital administration.
2. Reports and dashboards. Administrative and medical reports and dashboards, that allow for analyzing the efficiency of the medical services provided and generate insights into improvement.

PATIENT REGISTRATION AND ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORDS (EHR)

One of the integral parts of any clinic management part is basically a CRM that automates all the use cases relevant to patients interacting with different kinds of medical specialists within the clinic. The system should store as much information as possible about the patient – everything from personal data, insurance, and financial details up to the family health history that could suggest a better treatment approach to the doctors.

To ensure an individual approach, this data could provide the basis to create unique offers, certain services bundling and discounts to match the needs and expectations of every patient and their families.

It is also a great option for the healthcare facilities to share the information about a patient that has consulted with different institutions: complaints, examination results, lab tests, treatment plans and outcomes, history of the disease, the current status, diagnosis, available for doctors across the facilities allows for a more profound understanding of the health status of the patient. Therefore, integrations with third-party databases give very feasible benefits for almost any medical facility.

BILLING AND PAYMENT PROCESSING

All provided services should be chosen at once and also the visitors’ payment amount should be automatically calculated in the program when making an appointment. It is supposed that the payment amount is already known when the patient applies for certain services at the reception.

The system should automatically track the debts or prepayments of the patients. The system feature of marking patients that have already paid for the services or those who have to pay can be added. At the patient’s request, it should be possible to print statements including a list of all services provided and the number of payments for the required period.

APPOINTMENT AND RECEPTION MANAGEMENT

The hospital scheduling software can divide the timeline into necessary periods for each doctor (for example, an average appointment duration can vary from 30 minutes to one hour depending on the doctor). This monitoring program can be easily customized for any type of specialist.

Hospital applications should allow patients to make appointments based on the availability of the needed rooms or medical equipment. If the patient cancels an appointment, the doctor should be notified and other patients could be notified about the new available slot.

The monitoring program should include reminders for the patients about regular checkups. It will help to control the patient’s health.

Registration also allows seeing the number of patients visiting each doctor in the hospital.

LABORATORY AND TEST MANAGEMENT

The clinic should be able to keep its own records as well as to form plans according to international standards. The hospital management system should store the results of all laboratory research in electronic form.

Clinic mobile management app can keep records for each doctor and make payrolls, depending on various factors. It can be number of appointments, number of referrals to other specialists of the clinic, revenue, etc.

INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

The hospital inventory management module helps to keep track of the materials flow, automatically calculate the goods in the warehouse, and manage procurements.

The clinic management app enables the automatic write-off of the needed materials during the procedures.

FINANCE AND ACCOUNTING

Financial accounting automation helps to allocate funding easily, accurately, and regularly for all hospital departments. These processes can be monitored by any authorized users.

The accounting module of a hospital management software creates a unified system by automation of the full cycle of the medical facility operations from the reception to the laboratory.

Also, mechanisms of forming any combined financial statements by departments, employees, or services should be provided.

INSURANCE SERVICES INTEGRATION

The insurance module can record and store the patients’ insurance details: policy number, the insurance company, information about policies. In this respect integration with third-party insurance, applications could be important and useful allowing the patients to manage their payments and policies.

TREATMENT PLANS MANAGEMENT

Software for hospital management can allow doctors to select a diagnosis according to the ICD (International Classification of Diseases) or develop their own treatment plans based on several protocols. When maintaining the management system of treatment protocols, the hospital program will advise on how to examine and treat a patient effectively based on an internal knowledge database of treatment outcomes.

Depending on the needs of the specific specialists, hospital management software can include the ability to compare the plans of medical examination and treatment, prescribed by a doctor with the plan in the treatment protocols against the outcomes for the patient.

REMOTE PATIENT MONITORING

The remote patient monitoring feature in the clinic management software can inform the doctor about medication intake frequency and contraindications, gather basic data about patients’ health conditions from the wearable devices, or urge patients to manually enter the details about their wellbeing.

TELEMEDICINE

The features enabling long-distance doctor visits and support offer a significant added value for the patients. The telehealth functionality allows for a more individual approach to treatment, a more complex understanding of the patient’s health conditions, and treatment outcome.

PHARMACY MANAGEMENT

In the hospital management system, it is necessary to monitor drug expiration dates in the stock. Also, the control module is needed, which helps to plan the delivery of medicines and products.

Hospital Management System Components
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REQUIREMENTS FOR HOSPITAL MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

Let’s look at the basic requirements to take into account when developing a proprietary hospital management solution:

1. Any employee of the clinic must be able to cope with the clinic management system.
2. The user interface must be robust, easy touse, convenient, and informative, and not allowing any misunderstandings with regard to the data being entered into the system.
3. There should be certain role-based access for each employee according to the authority and responsibilities. Hospital authority must be able to edit the access role and passwords of the employees. It will allow control of all confidential information.
4. Hospital software has to provide all the accurate, necessary, and relevant information at any time to the relevant specialist in the most convenient and secure format.
5. As we are talking about patients’ personal data, the maximum level of security and data protection must be provided in the system and the software should be built in compliance with HIPAA or similar standards of healthcare data security.
6. The architecture of the medical management software should allow for scalability and extending the functionality to improve the clinic process automation and health care delivery.

BOTTOM LINE

Software for medical institutions must fully meet the patient’s needs and improve employees’ productivity at the same time. The high-quality system significantly reduces medical paperwork, improves the quality and informational content of medical documents. The software also helps to reduce the influence of human factors, and the process automation minimizes forgetfulness and inattention of the staff when registering patients and providing the consulting services.

With all these issues in mind, we can see that the introduction of new technologies into the hospital infrastructure is a critical issue. If you are looking for more information about how to develop a hospital management system or want to build a custom IT solution for your business, contact our team at learn@cprime.com