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How to Make Hospital Management Software

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    Posted in Healthcare Software

    Last Updated | April 4, 2022

    Overview: Modules of Hospital Management Software

    The global hospital management software market, which was $25 billion in 2019, is projected to grow by more than 9% from 2020 to 2025.

    The drastic prevalence of chronic disease, especially diabetes, cancer, and renal disease, has escalated the number of patients in hospitals.

    As the number of patients increases, the related data and the need to store and maintain that data rises. The need for handling and effectively managing such large amounts of patients and their data are the key drivers of the growth of the hospital management software market.

    Hospital management software (HMS) manages major workflows of hospitals. Because it offers end-to-end support for all hospital departments, a large number of hospitals are ready to adopt it.

    Another reason why large hospitals are adopting the software is because of the flexibility it offers. It is able to perform a range of functions and is open to as many modules as hospitals need and want to add.

    Today, it is crucial for every hospital (including yours) to have management software with as many modules as possible to improve efficiency and handle the increasing number of patients effectively.

    To help you understand what sort of modules you need to consider for your hospital management software, we have jotted down a list of 12 essential modules. You need to learn what these modules are before you go about developing the software.

    But, first things first.

    Before we walk you through the list of modules, you must familiarize yourself with the basics of the software:

    How Does Hospital Management Software Work?

    Hospital management software manages the entire hospital and streamlines all the operations. It looks after medical, administrative, financial, legal, and compliance matters.

    Think of it as a computerized maintenance management system or CMMS software for healthcare that helps manage assets, track maintenance costs, and generate reports for HIPAA compliance audit costs.

    HMS manages all aspects of a hospital’s operations. From patient check-ins, appointments, and health records to insurance policies, billing, and emergency care, the hospital management software integrates everything.

    It also supports data sharing with other systems using standards.

    There are many standards available for exchanging data. If you want to go with international standards, you can use HL7 data integration and FHIR or any data integration solutions for healthcare.

    You are not going to use both simultaneously, right?

    You can choose one or the other. To learn about the difference, check out this comparison between HL7 vs FHIR standards.

    When you want to share data, particularly patient data, you have another option. You can use HL7 messages. They are a quick way to send ad hoc messages about patients’ admission or discharge from the hospital. To know more about HL7 messages examples click here.

    When you are looking for hospital management software, you must consider the software you choose is capable of:

    • Quickly retrieving patient information
    • Staff pre-scheduling
    • Perfectly managing accounting and billing
    • Tracking lab equipment
    • Managing inventory and a lot more.

    Best Features of Hospital Management Software

    Advanced hospital management software are built with a wide range of capabilities and features.

    They are integrated systems that automate most hospital operations and streamline management, bringing together clinicians, nurses, patients, and other medical staff with all the information and assets at any time.

    To function this way, hospital management software must feature capabilities including, but not limited to:

    Appointment Scheduling

    The first thing hospitals need to ensure is smooth patient onboarding which is possible with hassle-free appointments. This feature makes booking appointments quick and easy which makes it especially useful during emergencies.

    It also keeps physicians, radiologists, and patients available on the same page to allow them to fix appointments as per their availability.

    You must get this feature with both online and offline modes for your hospital so that you face no delays even when the internet has a glitch.

    Patient Management via Portal

    Using a white-labeled patient portal with an online mode can help you engage patients and gain access to their reports, appointments, and check-ups quickly. Thus, you must get a portal added to your software.

    But what happens when you need to share feedback with other practitioners? Well, this portal works for that too!

    It allows you to share feedback, access, and share patient information with other fellow mates easily.

    Lab Management

    Prior to technological advancements, transparency in pathology management was a far-fetched idea. The integrated lab management feature is an instance of that advanced technology.

    It takes care of all pathological requirements. It records and analyzes whatever process your clinic performs in terms of pathology, along with providing past and future reports.

    Through this portal, you can also track and monitor other processes such as medical, commercial, and special laboratory operations. Whether you have an inpatient or outpatient facility, you can use this portal to generate billing directly.

    When you are not sure about the authenticity of any report, the portal also has an updated list of authorized personnel responsible for checking the reports.

    How to Make Hospital Management Software with 12 Essential Modules?

    For complex healthcare workflow management, hospitals need software that contains all the essential modules. The number of modules varies in the software, so in most cases, you have the option to develop your software by adding the modules you need or subtracting the ones you do not need.

    For handling complex workflows, make sure your software has the following 12 essential modules:

    1. Patient Registration and Electronic Health Records (EHR)

    What’s the first thing patients do when they go to a hospital? Go through the registration process!

    Exactly.

    So, every hospital management system must have a patient registration module to make the process quick and easy. It is enough to add the functionality that provides quick options for patient registration. Using this module, receptionists can quickly add all necessary details about a patient into the system to enhance the patient experience with the hospital management.

    This information is then stored in the form of electronic health records (EHR) of that patient. Later, doctors and nurses can access these records to check details and add more information about a patient’s health, treatment, and medication.

    If you find your software is open to third-party EHR system integration, you can connect it with either of the top two EHR systems: Cerner or Epic. These EHRs come with their own set of features and work for different types of clinical facilities.

    Of course, you cannot go with both!

    Thus, by learning about Cerner Vs Epic pros and cons, you can easily distinguish between both EHRs and go with the one that includes the functions your hospital needs.

    1. Billing and Payment Processing

    Billing and payment processing is perhaps the most critical part of hospital management.

    Thus, it is just another essential module that you need to consider adding to your hospital management system. You must look for a billing module that offers fantastic reporting to manage cash flow and payment processing time speed.

    The module allows you to set up variable-rate plans, create bills, take payments, and issue printed bills and receipts.

    Once you get this module integrated with your systems, you will have:

    • Safe and secure billing and reporting
    • No loss of data and bills
    • Reports to track revenue and payer performance
    1. Appointment and Reception Management

    Hospitals serve hundreds of patients and their visitors regularly. Managing these patients and visitors through a paper-based system in the reception area is a tedious and insecure task.

    If your hospital staff takes long to book appointments and manage visitor check-ins, it results in long waiting hours and poor patient experience.

    Hospital management software with appointment and reception management modules is one way to manage this task efficiently. It replaces paper registers and semi-automated systems with a secure and paperless system that ensures operational productiveness and security.

    Advancement in this module enables a contactless visitor check-in experience. It captures information quickly and records every check-in along with visitor contact details.

    If you still use traditional appointment methods, you must know how it prevents patients from moving comfortably through their visits and revisits.

    This software module replaces those old appointment methods and enables patients to book appointments in advance.

    Not just that, the software also helps avoid overcrowding by allowing patients to make appointments through mobile phones and check themselves in upon their arrival in the hospital, without any interaction with the hospital staff (of course, the software will notify your staff as patients check-in.)

    1. Laboratory and Tests Management

    Laboratory and test management systems are usually integrated with other modules. They show lab test results of a particular patient and often reconcile them with their EHRs.

    The reports and results they generate can only be seen by authorized users (i.e. clinical staff).

    Most medical software development services offer this module within the hospital management software for overall better functionality.

    Some vendors may also provide lab module integration with medical diagnostic systems to record and maintain details of various types of diagnostic tests conducted for patients.

    The module also has the ability to email reports directly to patients and send them to doctors for quick review.

    These capabilities may vary with different vendors, so you must check with the vendor (you choose) to learn about any other functionalities the module may have.

    1. Inventory Management

    Tracking the amount of medication and the number of items in stock is essential to control the availability of medical materials.

    Your staff can use this feature to track the supplies before they run out and estimate the time for the next delivery. It also helps monitor the expiration date of medication.

    Having this program in the software will help you automatically track the requirement of materials during the procedures. It will maintain material flow and ensure supplies are always available in advance.

    1. Finance and Accounting

    Managing finances and accounting involves monitoring financial transactions, including accounts, costs, and taxes. The finance and accounting module can do it all for you.

    This module can also automate the calculation of the total price for hospital services and record patient payment history.

    At the same time, it can provide patients with a list of prices for different services before they make payment.

    The benefit you will get with this financial management module is the automatic analysis of the financial situation of the hospital and the reports to prepare a strategy to improve it.

    1. Insurance Services Integration

    To simplify insurance management, you can integrate the insurance module with the rest of the modules in the management system.

    For this integration to take place, medical device integration companies can help you connect the module with a third party that offers insurance services.

    The insurance module can help you record and store insurance details for every patient. These details include insurance policy numbers, the insurance company, and relevant information about policies.

    Since this information will be stored in the hospital management software, your staff could easily check insurance policies for patients.

    By giving access to patients, you can also allow patients to manage their own payments and policies.

    1. Treatment Plans Management

    Treatment plans management allows doctors to select a treatment plan (from standard plans) or develop their own plan based on several protocols.

    The hospital management software, with this module, can advise you on how to examine and treat patients effectively by developing the right treatment plans.

    When you get this program integrated with your HMS, make sure it has the ability to compare medical examination and treatment plans prescribed by doctors against the potential outcomes for the patient.

    This way, you can ensure the plan you develop will bring desired outcomes.

    1. Remote Patient Monitoring

    Clinicians need a way to interact with patients remotely to monitor their medication intake when they cannot come in.

    Therefore, the remote patient monitoring module is important to be integrated with the hospital management software. The remote monitoring module helps doctors in many ways:

    • Informs about medication contraindications
    • Gathers basic information about patients’ health conditions from their wearable devices
    • Helps connect with patients and learn about their well-being wherever they are.
    1. Telemedicine

    Telemedicine is similar to remote patient monitoring, but telemedicine software for healthcare providers is a more advanced system. It enables comprehensive care delivery through electronic media.

    With this module in your hospital system, your practice can offer services to long-distance patients and provide them a significant added value.

    Telemedicine software vendors charge separately for telemedicine startup costs. So, you must communicate to the vendor about how much you will need to invest to get the module in your management software.

    Nevertheless, if you invest in the module now, you will yield long-term ROI (return on investment).

    With the telemedicine module, you can connect to patients more directly, understand their health problems on a more personal level, and thus develop more accurate treatment plans.

    This will help you improve the patient experience with your hospital to give them the reason to turn to you whenever their health declines. It is also possible that they spread a word of mouth to promote your telemedicine services.

    1. Emergency Care Module

    Perhaps, for a hospital, there cannot be a more essential solution than an emergency care module.

    When patients are brought in an emergency, there is never much time to be spent on gathering their data.

    To deal with such emergencies, this module is a great help. It provides detailed pre-configured sections to fill out information relevant to emergency patients, which includes:

    • Pulse
    • Blood Pressure
    • CB Glucose
    • O2 Saturation %

    It also has detailed sections to add information about: the method of arrival, place of incident, estimated date and time and mechanism of injury, and much more.

    This module can help your clinical staff quickly enter data, and clinicians view and use the data for legal purposes.

    1. Pharmacy Management

    One last module you need to add to your software is pharmacy management. In the HMS, it is essential to have this program to monitor the expiration dates of medicine in the stock.

    Also, this program should have a control module that helps to plan and manage the delivery of drugs and products. It can keep the pharmacy integrated with your hospital, and you can manage your drug and medication internally without connecting to an external pharmacy.

    What are the Requirements for Hospital Management Software?

    To make hospital management software serve the best interest, you need to decide what functions you want the software to handle.

    It is obvious that your needs will differ from other healthcare facilities, so you must develop your own list of requirements and what you expect in your software. Then, you can communicate the requirements to the software vendor.

    In addition to your list, consider adding a few more requirements such as:

    Staff Management

    Of course, the requirements list for the hospital management system is incomplete without a staff management feature.

    Having this capability in the system helps organize employees around work and monitor several processes in the hospital.

    Check-ins and Check-out

    Make sure the software you get developed for your hospital has a portal where patients and hospital staff can handle their check-ins and check-outs.

    Treatment Management

    Treatment management helps clinicians manage information about patients to carry out treatments in time.

    You must look for the software that provides treatment management along with options for:

    • Maintaining a treatment plan
    • Managing analysis and prescriptions
    • Storing data and monitoring patient medical history

    5 Key Benefits of Making Hospital Management Software

    There are many perks of having hospital management software. It is an integrated system that keeps every hospital management process streamlined. From registering patients to billing and providing them with remote care- the software has a separate module for each process.

    On the whole, this piece of technology is of great significance in medical facilities where it manages all processes, allowing facilities to go paperless.

    No matter what specialty hospital you run, you are sure to yield these five key benefits from the software.

    1. Access to Electronic Health Records On-the-go

    The HMS system maintains documents and health data online; thus, it gives easy access to electronic health records (EHR) anytime and streamlines most hospital operations.

    1. Fast Reimbursement Processing

    With the integrated billing, payment, finance, and accounting modules, the software manages reimbursements electronically. It reduces paperwork and allows your staff to easily search through patient EHRs and other digital reports to find remittances, insurance information, and claim advice. This way, the software makes it easy to process the reimbursement for the patients.

    1. Fix and Reduce Mistakes

    Since hospital management software are an integrated system, they also have the modules to perform insurance and billing processes. With such modules up and running, your staff only needs to update patient billing information regularly, and the software itself corrects and updates the mistakes in the data.

    1. Save Time for Staff

    This software is designed to increase efficiency in medical practices and improve processes that are part of their everyday operations. It is responsible to perform several tasks related to collecting information and verifying documents. This way, it performs many of the tasks that otherwise medical staff needs to handle. It saves them enough time to focus on more complex tasks.

    1. Strategic Development

    For hospitals, it is challenging to see the long-term progress and navigate the administrative workflow without setting up a proper management system.

    Being a centralized location for handling processes, this software helps manage and direct the business processes of the entire hospital.

    The system is also pretty helpful for implementing strategic decisions to boost the efficiency and profits of the business.

    The Bottom Line

    With the potential to meet patients’ needs and boost the efficiency of clinical staff, hospital management software are capable of handling a large number of patients and their data.

    They are high-quality, effective solutions that reduce paperwork and improve the quality and informational content of medical documents.

    That’s why they are becoming so popular.

    If you are somewhere in the middle of making a decision on whether to adopt this software or not, this is high time you come to a decision.

    You must make the most of this emerging technology to automate your clinical administrative operations.

    It will help you minimize waiting times when registering patients and improve the overall patient experience with your services.

    FAQs:

    How much does hospital management software cost?

    The cost of hospital management software presents a fairly dramatic range starting from $15,000 to $70,000. This cost range depends on the size of the hospital, the number of beds it has, the departments, and much more.

    For small practices, it costs less.

    Since a hospital grows, and the number of beds increases, it needs a software system that is upgradable. Such software has a high capacity, and thus its cost is higher than a non-upgradable one.

    How do you make hospital management software?

    To make a hospital management software, three things need to be in place:

    Modules

    The software consists of modules. There are lots of modules used in daily clinical operations. A hospital can add modules based on its staff needs such as:

    • Doctors work with electronic health records of patients (here EHRs are modules)
    • Receptionists use finance management and patient registration modules.
    • Clinical laboratories interact with the modules that store patient examination and test results, and so on.

    Catalogs and Protocols

    Hospital management software requires all the essential data, such as internal clinical protocols and standards that enable it to manage care delivery and hospital administration.

    Reports and Dashboards

    The management software must have an interactive healthcare UX design with administrative and medical dashboards and reports. These reports allow hospitals to analyze the efficiency of the services they provide and get insight into the areas of improvement.

    Do Cerner, Allscripts, and Epic offer HIPAA-compliant services?

    It is critical for every medical software dealing with patient personal data to comply with HIPAA law.

    However, not all healthcare app development services provide HIPAA compliance software development.

    Cerner, Allscripts, and Epic are some of the top EHR software providers. Compliance for them is as essential as for any other software.

    Let’s learn which of these EHR software makes sure to stay HIPAA compliant:

    Cerner

    Cerner HL7 integration takes the help of a third-party healthcare compliance company to stay HIPAA compliant. It also helps healthcare practices to meet HIPAA compliance standards.

    Allscripts EHR Integration

    A few years ago, Allscripts did not comply with HIPAA. After the HIPAA violation, it has had to propose a massive amount for settlement to resolve the allegations. Its compliance with HIPAA is still a question.

    Epic

    Epic EHR integration health care is HIPAA compliant. Regardless of whether clinicians use Epic EHR software on desktop, mobile, or web browsers, it keeps the data secure.

     

     

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