Hospitals are rarely a single department entity. They usually span multiple specialties focusing on different treatment areas, such as pediatrics, neurosciences, gynecology, etc.

There are also various departments taking care of the day-to-day running of the hospital, such as maintenance, accounting, billing, operation theatre, and management. Each of these departments consists of many people carrying out various tasks, ranging in complexity from brain surgeries to fixing overhead lamps.

A single organization may have hospitals across multiple locations, making it difficult to manage them all. A hospital management system helps you manage the enormous complexities of efficiently managing the hospital sustainably.

Even though hospitals span several different areas, in the beginning, it usually involves only a few departments and just the primary number of people required to manage them all.

In such a case, a simple management system with the capacity to deal with relatively less data would work. But as a hospital starts growing, incorporating more specialties and treatment facilities, this system may not be able to deal with the massive flow of data.

A hospital management system could make this process much faster and easier.

As the number of departments and employees grows, the management system would also extend to accommodate the conditions created by the growth, thus aiding the development of the hospital instead of being a hindrance.

Scale up - The role of a cloud-based system

A cloud-based online system has many advantages compared to an offline system regarding scaling up. Instead of making changes in all systems in a hospital network, the differences would have to be made only by the software providers. They could easily be updated to add more departments and employees without reinstalling the updated version in all the systems in a hospital. And since the software and its interface remain the same, there is no need to allocate extra resources to train the users.

A cloud-based system would also be much more efficient in the case of hospitals in multiple locations. The data generated from all the hospitals run by the same organization could be integrated and analyzed to improve overall performance. As new sites come up, the software is updated, and the existing management network can seamlessly integrate without additional training.

This option would allow for better purchase decisions, as requirements for the entire chain of hospitals could be understood and remedied in bulk, thus helping make much better business transactions and improving efficiency for the whole network.

Resource management and reduction of wastage :

A sound hospital management system would also help prevent unwanted waste of resources. Efficient management of the various equipment and disposables inventory would cut short the resources otherwise wasted. In scaling up, there is usually an increased wastage of resources due to purchasing excess materials to prevent a shortage. With an efficient system, such wastages could easily be detected and avoided. This option could provide a smooth scale-up from a small hospital to an extensive network without excessive spending.

Scaling up - Understanding the data generated :

A common problem associated with the scaling up of any system is the overwhelming amount of data generated from the various subsystems. Every bit of data has to be analyzed and compiled in a manner that is easy to understand to make correct decisions at every corner. A scale-up could be a headache for a hospital with a large amount of data generated without an adequate system to manage the data.

An efficient hospital management system would make this entire process a cakewalk by managing the data generated in real time smoothly and quickly. In a sound hospital management system, all the data from the various departments regarding all the matters from procurement of materials, human resources, and energy requirements to billing, accounting, and inventory management is compiled and represented in a meaningful manner.

This leads to a quicker and easier decision-making process and, therefore, a more accessible, smoother, and efficient scale-up.

Management of the extra human resources required for scale-up :

The efficient running of a hospital requires that all the stakeholders play their roles, and to enable this; they should be able to manage their work quickly and intuitively. A sound hospital management system allows smooth work delegation and easy access to the information required for the task.

For example, it should allow a doctor to enter information regarding a patient and their treatment regime and enable the pharmacist to track the inventory quickly. With an efficient system, it would also be able to evaluate the work done by them. Such easy management of the entire workforce, without causing any hindrance to them, but help them with this, would enable the hospital to grow.

In short, a sound hospital management system would make it easier to scale up the hospital network by efficiently managing the resources, avoiding waste, creating an efficient workforce, and better data management. Such a system could provide hassle-free patient care, making everyone’s work much more manageable.

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Hospital Management System is used to take the data from the patients and then store it for later use. The main goal of the Hospital Management System is to accurately treat as well as decrease overtime pay.

There are various features included in the HMS. Some of the system functions include Registration, Patient checks, Report generation, and more. In this blog, let's check out the functional and non-functional requirements of the Hospital Management System in depth.

Functional Requirements:

There are a lot of software requirements specifications included in the functional requirements of the Hospital Management System, which contains various processes, namely Registration, Check, Report Generation, and Database.

Registration Process of SRS (Software Requirements Specification)

● Adding Patients: The Hospital Management enables the staff at the front desk to include new patients in the system.

● Assigning an ID to the patients: The HMS enables the staff at the front desk to provide a unique ID for each patient and then add them to the record sheet of the patient. The patients can utilize the ID throughout their hospital stay.

Check Out of SRS:

● Deleting Patient ID: The staff in the administration section of the ward can delete the patient ID from the system when the patient checks out from the hospital.

● Adding to the beds available list: The Staff in the administration section of the ward can put the bed empty in the list of beds available.

Report Generation of SRS:

● Information of the Patient: The Hospital Management System generates a report on every patient regarding various information like the patient's name, Phone number, bed number, the doctor's name whom it assigns, ward name, and more.

● Availability of the Bed: The Hospital Management system also helps in generating reports on the availability of beds regarding information like bed numbers unoccupied or occupied, ward name, and more.

Database of SRS:

● Mandatory Patient Information: Every patient has some necessary data like phone number, first and last name, personal health number, postal code, country, address, city, 'patient's ID number, etc.

● Updating information of the Patient: The hospital management system enables users to update the information of the patient as described in the mandatory information included.

Non Functional Requirements

There are a lot of software requirements specifications included in the non-functional requirements of the Hospital Management System, which contains various processes, namely Security, Performance, Maintainability, and Reliability.

Security:

● Patient Identification: The system needs the patient to recognize herself or himself using the phone.

● Logon ID: Any users who make use of the system need to hold a Logon ID and password.

● Modifications: Any modifications like insert, delete, update, etc. for the database can be synchronized quickly and executed only by the ward administrator.

● Front Desk Staff Rights: The staff at the front desk can view any data in the Hospital Management system, and add new patient records to the HMS but they don't have any rights to alter any data in it.

● Administrator rights: The administrator can view as well as alter any information in the Hospital Management Software.

Performance:

● Response Time: The system provides acknowledgment in just one second once the 'patient's information is checked.

● Capacity: The system needs to support at least 1000 people at once.

● User-Interface: The user interface acknowledges within five seconds.

● Conformity: The system needs to ensure that the guidelines of the Microsoft accessibilities are followed.

Maintainability:

● Back-Up: The system offers efficiency for data backup.

● Errors: The system will track every mistake as well as keep a log of it.

Reliability:

● Availability: The system is available all the time.

Hope you got a clear idea of the functional and non-functional requirements and the features required by the hospital. Any other queries on the topic are welcome.

The Functional and Nonfunction...

Hospital Management System is used to take the dat.....

What is an integrated hospital management system? How could it help the hospitals?

There are multiple departments in hospitals that carry out numerous activities daily. There is a lot of communication that takes place and information to share between departments which are crucial and need to be stored in a system with a good user interface. Hospitals use heterogeneous management systems like appointment scheduling software, telemedicine software, diagnostic software, EHR software, billing software, and more. It's a tedious task to maintain all this software and make a single report from various collections. Now, this requires a huge team! But what if a single management system could replace these heterogeneous systems efficiently?

An integrated hospital management system is one such system. Like any other hospital management system, it does not just store information but also connects all the departments under a single interface. It supports the various departments of a hospital such as a laboratory, clinic, and pharmacy in a single interface, making it easy for the departments to interact and share patient information.

Interoperability is the constant chain in any hospital as on average, a patient visiting a hospital engages at least with two departments. Well, taking the chain of interoperability digital with an integrated hospital management system will help the hospital attain efficiency in its core aspects. Here are a few points on how this helps the patients and the hospital.

Patients part:
1. Appointment: Make appointment booking hassle-free by letting your patients book appointments online via the website/mobile app.
2. On the dot: Share electronic patient records with departments or patients themselves in no time.
3. Reduce no-shows: Send SMS or email reminders to your patients, reminding them of their upcoming appointments.
4. Personalized: Send health tips or diet plans to your patients based on their health conditions.
Hospitals part:
1. One for all: An integrated hospital management system will eradicate the need for different systems as it combines all the department modules.
2. Performance Report: Generate weekly, monthly, or yearly performance reports of the hospital in a snap of fingers (No! You don't need a team to do this.)
3. Reference: Makes it easy to manage and estimate referral payments to clinics and outsourced laboratory tests.
4. Marketing: Conduct medical camps remotely with the help of offline camp management modules and let your patients know through email.

Thus, integration is crucial between all the departments of the hospital owing to interoperability. Integration between the departments will take their communication on a digital pathway, making the hospital's workflow seamless and easy. Here are the various areas of integration regarding a hospital.

Hospital-Laboratory: Have you ever had a phase where the laboratory used different software from that of the hospital? If yes, then you must know how time-consuming each process with the laboratory could get. However, an integrated hospital management system will allow you to share patient health records and required tests with the laboratory. Likewise, the laboratory can send you the patient's electronic test results in no time. This eliminates paperwork and other possible manual work.

Hospital-Pharmacy: How different is a hospital’s pharmacy from a standalone pharmacy? A pharmacy integrated with a hospital can get patients' e-prescriptions from doctors and provide timely medications to the in-patients. Further, the pharmacy can even take care of the supplements that are to be provided to the OT department. This integration allows the doctor to know about the availability of medicine in the pharmacy or its alternative before prescribing it to the patients.

Hospital-Clinic: Well, parent hospitals do have multi-location clinics, and these clinics can be integrated with the hospital in a single interface, cases that need prior attention are often shifted to the hospital and this lets the hospital learn about the patient's history quickly through the health records. An integrated hospital management system allows the hospital to overlook the functioning of its multi-location clinics by just switching between the identities of the organization.

Centralized Data vs Distributed Data: (Point of discussion)

Centralized Data or Distributed Data, you have got data to handle. Data needs to be taken care of efficiently for the smooth everyday functioning of the hospital. But which is the better way to do so?

When every department is integrated into a single software, the data is centralized. Thus a patient ID once created is just carried forward by every department, whereas in the dominance of heterogeneous software, a patient has to get themselves registered, with every department attended.

Organizing data and generating revenue or performance reports is very easy when the data is centralized. Most of the integrated patient management systems have the feature of an analytic dashboard which lets the management create weekly, monthly, or yearly performance reports of the hospital. When the data is distributed, it takes a lot of time to collect and organize them. This process is quite a lengthy one and requires a huge team at work.

Cost-wise advantage: Software has different types of pricing patterns, which may be budget-friendly or not. Like subscription-based, a percent of your revenue is based on the number of patients visiting. Having different software is going to charge you in different ways and might end up very expensive too. On the other side, when just a single piece of software is in use by all the departments, you are charged by a standard pattern. This gives you the advantage of forecasting the cost you might have to endure and if it's budget-friendly

Patient Experience: Patient satisfaction is a goal that any hospital wishes to achieve. It is the key to the productivity of the hospital. Perhaps, it creates the goodwill of the hospital. But how can software keep you far from achieving this?

Turnaround time: No hospital wishes to increase a patient's turnaround time, Neither do you. But this might be happening unintentionally by the use of different software by departments. For instance, A patient has to manually take all the health records to the laboratory and get themselves registered for a test. On receiving the test results, the patient will again have to take the results to the doctor, themself. This whole process is time-consuming for the patients, and such issues can be solved by using a single software.

Technical Issues: Diving into a scenario where a hospital maintains a separate billing software. Owing to a few technical issues the software turned faulty, which caused chaos at the reception. Problems like these are Stressful for the patients and are more likely to affect the reputation of the hospital. Such scenarios could be avoided with a cloud-based Hospital Management System where the cloud has a backup cloud to ensure such nightmares don't come true.

Flexible Meeting: With all the changes the recent time has brought, Telemedicine has become a need. Patients now prefer the telemedicine facility for smaller health issues so that long and discomfort travels can be avoided. Hospitals should adapt themselves to this method of patient appointment and make sure that their software supports telemedicine. This makes things easy for patients who are old or who reside far from the hospital. And also helps the hospital in obtaining patient satisfaction.

Ease for doctors and workers inside the hospital:

Integrating every department of the hospital will ease down a lot of work for the doctors and other workers of the hospital.

Generating analytical reports with the help of a dashboard.
Reduce manual paperwork by sharing electronic health records.
Effective marketing Via email and SMS.

The right software will increase the efficiency and productivity of the hospital. Hope you found this blog on the Integrated Hospital management system insightful.

Why use an integrated hospital...

What is an integrated hospital management syste.....

One of the first things that come into our mind before we decide to purchase something, is the cost. Whether it be a Netflix subscription or a new bike, or a business-related purchase, the price plays an important role. While acquiring Hospital Management Software also, pricing is an important factor to be considered. Hospital management software being much more complex than a movie ticket or an automobile, the costs that are involved in it are also a bit more complicated. We have previously discussed the various advantages of using hospital management software. Here let’s break down the costs involved in implementing it.

How the price is determined - The Number of Beds

Cost of a hospital management system mainly depends on the number of beds in the hospital. As a rule of thumb, we can say that the price goes up as the number of beds increase.

So generally as a hospital grows and develops, a need for a system with higher capacity comes up. This in gives you two options; either get high capacity, a non-upgradable system or get a system with the capacity you require, but which can be upgraded for better features. The latter is preferable, as in the former you end up paying for features you may not require currently.

Online or Offline System

Whether the system is online or offline brings up different kinds of expenditures.

Generally for an offline software, the firm that provides the system will simply install the software for a one time fee. The hospital will have to acquire servers by itself and manage its own data, install the cables, network its systems, and generally, have to deal much more into the hardware aspect than online software. In such cases, extra costs other than the cost of the software itself will come up. Also, a dedicated team for managing the system will be required for general maintenance.

Online systems generally simplify these functions, as the firm providing the system will be dealing with software aspect, as well as most of the hardware aspects(such as servers, etc. Computer systems and other hardware will have to be purchased by the hospital as required). In this case, the system exists like a subscription service, where for an annual or monthly fee, the firm providing the system will maintain and manage the servers and the system. There’s much less hardware to be acquired from other sources. A simple PC connected to the internet can easily access the system. The human resources required from the hospital for maintaining the system is much less.

So in general Online Systems are more cost-effective, especially in the long run.

Implementation Cost

Implementation cost is another aspect to be considered while implementing a hospital management system. If an existing software has to be replaced by new software, the data from the old system will have to be imported into the new system. The cost involved in this, as mentioned above, will depend on the amount of data, calculated as number of beds. If the hospital has been storing all the information in paper format, resources may be needed to enter this data to the system. Implementation costs also involve setting up access for various doctors and departments.

The implementation also requires providing training for various employees, which will be different for different departments. It is important to ensure that the training is included in the implementation cost while choosing the system.

Other Factors

A good hospital management system would offer all the features that are generally required. The software can differ in their level of sophistication, from simple accounting software to software that provides updates patients using an app or SMS. The price can vary according to the level of sophistication. Most software firms offering hospital management software are willing to provide additional features, but this usually comes at an additional price, depending on the resources required

Simple software is easily available for a lower cost, but as the functionalities required increases, the price also naturally increases.

Another factor that may bring up extra cost is the technical support provided by the companies. All though most online systems get support throughout the subscription period, in the case of offline systems, enquiries have to be made to know if the additional cost may be incurred for support.

As mentioned in previous blogs, the possibility of upgrades has to be considered. Online systems cost less for upgrades, as the hospital expands, and for better features. Considering this, online systems may turn out to be cost-effective in the long run.

Overall, the costs involved could be divided into implementation costs and maintenance cost, both of which are dependant on the number of beds. For an offline software, an annual or monthly software subscription fee have to be considered, which may or may not cover the implementation and maintenance cost.

The economic benefits of getting an offline software and investing on servers and hardware and that of getting an online software and paying an annual subscription fee have to be compared, which could differ for different hospitals. The Hospital Management Software being a long term investment, saving up by getting a software with fewer features, may cost you a lot more with frequent expensive upgrades required as the hospital grows. Additional costs that may arise in the form of support, server maintenance, extra features, possible upgrades have to be looked into while making a decision.

The Hospital Management Software being a long term investment, saving up by getting the software with fewer features may cost you a lot more with frequent expensive upgrades required as the hospital grows.

How to Invest in a Hospital Ma...

One of the first things that come into our mind be.....

When you decide to implement a hospital management system in your hospital, the next step is to decide which system you want to use. Even though researching on the internet and going through the product catalogs of many software providers may tell you what to look for and what features are offered by different companies, it may not give you a complete picture. This is where an HMS product demonstration will be useful. Most companies provide free hospital management systems demos to prospective clients. A free demonstration of the software is an excellent way of knowing what exactly you will be getting when you finally purchase the software. It is like taking a test drive before you buy a car, and like a test drive, you need to know how to best know the software during the demo.

Understand your hospital

For getting a good hospital management software demo, the first step is to get a complete understanding of your hospital. Since you have already decided to get an HMS, you must have done most of your homework. But you need to know what features you will need when you implement the HMS. For HMS to achieve its full potential, the system should meet the requirements of all the users from the hospital administrator, to the lab technicians. To ensure this, discussions will have to be held with the users to get their input. The benefits of these discussions are two-fold. The requirements of different departments will be different and you will be able to know what everyone wants. The other benefit is that the employees of the hospital may have previous experience in using different kinds of HMS, and you will get a lot of insights into the advantages and drawbacks of different systems. And this information will come in handy while getting the demonstration.

Having a thorough understanding of the workflow is also very important. Usually, different department heads will have their ways of managing their departments. This is important both while getting a hospital software demo, as well as when you are implementing the system. Most HMS systems are customized around the workflow in a hospital, and company representatives will need to get a fair idea to provide you with a good solution. So it’s better to have all the answers ready when you’re getting the HMS demo. This will also help you when you implement an HMS system in your hospital

Online demo

Software providers sometimes provide demos on their websites, and this is a way for you to know the software before a face-to-face demo. You can use these online demos to learn the general features of the HMS system. Once you have gone through this demo, you will know what questions you have to ask the company representative. Online demos are free and the least time-consuming way to evaluate software, even though they may not be complete.

Questions you should ask

Once you have talked to other hospitals that have implemented HMS or if you’re already using an HMS, you are probably aware of the general features all the HMS systems have. So before the demo, you need to keep in mind the problems at your hospital you’re trying to solve, and the features you’ll need to use this. The problems could be the ones faced by doctors or patients, such as difficulty in scheduling appointments, or they could be business problems, such as low returns or pilferage from the pharmacy.

A hospital management system demo usually takes around 45 minutes and starts with an introduction to the software company. After this, the company representative may ask you about the problems you are facing. Most companies are willing to customize their software for your needs, and you have to make the best use of this. Once you have explained the difficulties your hospital is facing, the representatives will probably explain some of the features they have that can solve these issues. During the demo, if you’re already aware of the general features, it is better to focus on these key features to make a good decision.

There are no set rules on how a demo is conducted, so ask all the questions you have regarding the software. The point of getting a demo is not to make a decision then and there, but to understand all the features of the software. It’s also vital that all the stakeholders understand the software before making a decision, so have representatives from all the departments for the demo. Before deciding on a system, get demos from multiple companies, compare the software, and then decide.

To learn more about HMS systems and get a demo, visit Mocdoc Hospital Information Management System

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