When compared to other industries, the healthcare sector is improving, with the help of advanced technologies like the Hospital Management System (HMS). The current medical care computerization is being hampered due to a lack of a perfect interface between computers and medical care providers.

The two main issues that are commonly faced during implementation of an HMS are as follows

1. HMS implementation begins but the users start facing issues by the end

This is generally due to the inflexibility of the HMS software, a weak administrative will, and an inexperienced team for implementation.

2. HMS implementation gets completed, but only a single part of the functionality gets implemented

This is due to non-user-friendly software or unplanned and unconfigured executions.

Pre-Implementation Assessment:

All hospital administrators who implement the HMS software in their hospitals will be apprehensive that the process may end in a partial or complete failure and measures should be taken early in order to prevent such an event from happening. The software should be well assessed before being purchased by the hospital.

Software Assessment:

Choosing the right kind of software is one of the crucial and primary steps for getting the best results.

Earlier, all HMS Software had a single development cycle starting with a single hospital being computerized by a local developer for a single hospital. However, this type of HMS development is outdated. In such cases, there is a risk of the vendor providing software that was customized for a different hospital. Implementing them may cause various issues, and it may cost more in the long run. It's better to purchase the software from a firm, that specializes in hospital management software than getting any software company to design software for your hospital.

It's better to choose software that is easy to upgrade, scalable, and not hardware intensive. Cloud-based online software is better than offline software in these aspects. The providers could also easily fix any errors or bugs in the case of online software.

Another aspect to be considered is to check if the customization of the software is done primarily through programming code or by using master tables during implementation. Hospitals may require some form of alteration to the purchased software, so as to better suit their needs, and in the case of master tables, such changes may easily be made by the hospital itself. In the case of online software, this may not matter much, as maintenance and support are provided by the software provider.

Vendor Assessment:

Only a few vendors of international or national repute can be trusted easily. A drawback with a large vendor is that they don’t always accommodate the requirements of small hospitals. In the case of small vendors, the hospital administrators may have to do thorough research to see if they are trustworthy.

An important aspect to be known is whether the current implementation team will be available during the entire implementation cycle. Checking the attrition rate of the software company, and discussions with other hospital administrators may give you an idea about this.

Visits to Hospitals with Hospital Management Systems:

A well-planned visit to hospitals where the software has been implemented will give you insights on the performance of the software, the support provided by the vendor, and if the vendor has achieved all the goals that were initially planned. To get a good picture, it's better to visit hospitals like your own, in terms of capacity, number of specialties, and number of departments, as well as hospitals that have implemented the software that you are considering. This will give you an idea, not only about the trustworthiness of the vendor but also about how well the software will be suited to your hospital.

Discussions with hospital administrators who have previously implemented the software in their hospitals will also give you good insights on the possible difficulties you may face during the implementation process, and on how to overcome them.

Getting your Hospital ready:

Problems may arise in HMS implementation, due to issues within the hospital. The lack of a systematic and uniform workflow within all the departments in the hospital may make the implementation process difficult. Information regarding the various equipment used, tests performed, schedules of doctors in different departments, etc must be readily available so that it can easily be imported into the system.

An important aspect is the cooperation of the various end-users, that is, the hospital employees. They have to provide enough awareness of the usefulness and importance of implementing the HMS software. The implementation may put additional stress on the employees until they get used to the system, and this may hamper the efforts of the hospital administration.

HMS implementation begins with a pre-implementation phase, in which software is chosen and the hospital prepares for the change, followed by the implementation phase and the post-implementation phase, in which the final kinks are ironed out. The whole process could be made smooth with a thorough pre-implementation phase.

Choosing software that is well suited to your hospital, having clearly defined workflows, and complete information about the working of the hospital will help you to easily implement the HMS in your hospital. Having a good team, and ensuring the cooperation of the hospital employees would help the hospital achieve its goals with the HMS.

Introduction

In the city of Mumbai, Bhaktivedanta Hospital has already made an eminent growth since 1998. Now Bhaktivedanta hospital is known for its Multi Specialities in various fields such as pediatrics, orthopedics, ENT, psychiatry, and much more with a gross of more than 1500 happy patients leaving each day.

Overview:

The main reason why Bhaktivedanta approached MocDoc Healthcare Solution was to overcome the problems they faced in the appointment and scheduling of patients. MocDoc HMS provided them with the exact solutions that eventually solved all their problems. The following will list out the problems Bhaktivedanta faced and how MocDoc provided helpful solutions to overcome their problems.

Appointment Scheduling

Bhaktivedanta Hospital was using offline software to book appointments which caused them problems in appointments and scheduling, Adding to it they were still following the traditional practice of pen-paper which at times led to incorrect patient details.

MocDoc approached them with a solution by making Bhaktivedanta Hospital’s appointment scheduling effortless. We provided them with a “White labeled application” which was exclusively provided to the hospital to reduce workload and it made them produce good results in terms of managing patients and their appointments at the hospital. Our “Anytime Anywhere” accessing concept helped them to achieve excellence.

Interdepartmental Communications

Bhaktivedanta Hospital had plenty of departments operating it so the departments in the hospital were in need of proper communication between them and also the information needed to be carried out without leading to any miscommunications.

That’s where MocDoc helped Bhaktivedanta by providing a feature known as “Timeline View” which indeed helped the hospital to keep track of patient flows inside the hospital, and also helped the doctors to follow up on the patients based on their treatment. This made communication clear and patient details were tracked down easily without any misinterpretation.

Booking for VIPs & Emergency Patients

Managing VIPs around the city seemed difficult for Bhaktivedanta Hospital. This led to a situation where the hospital and the patients found a hard time Communicating. They were also facing a few difficulties in appointing and scheduling emergency patients.

That’s where MocDoc stepped in and offered a solution by providing restricted access to VIP appointments at the hospital, where the staff will be responsible for booking appointments for vips and emergency patients without any delays or difficulties. So through this we also ensure the privacy of the patients arriving at the hospital and also the waiting time of the patients was drastically reduced.

Managing the Queue

Bhaktivedanta Hospital was facing difficulties with its queue management. For instance, there was a lot of confusion in deciding if the patients having appointments or if patients holding tokens should be given preference since the hospital was following the call and token system. So the hospital faced some issues in managing Queues.

After implementing MocDoc HMS software each and every appointment was perfectly scheduled in order. These appointments are viewed by the staff who is in charge of the appointment section. Also, we provided additional features which made them classify patients based on their needs, this reduced the workload drastically.

Payment Processing System

Since Bhaktivedanta had offline software for appointment scheduling, processing payments online was not possible also Bhaktivedanta followed Manual procedures for appointment scheduling and payment processing. This was difficult for Bhaktivedanta to keep track of information about patients and payment details.

MocDoc helped Bhaktivedanta by providing a payment gateway for the patients through which they were able to make payments and Bhaktivedanta found it easy to manage patients' transaction details. Even MocDoc allowed the patients to make multiple appointments and at the same time maintain privacy in the transaction.

Benefits :

• Appointments are made easier by patients from anywhere

• Human-Error is completely removed

• Payments were made much easier and more secure by patients

• Problems with the administration were completely restored by MocDoc

• MIS Reports for OP Management and hospital Management were implemented to track doctors and patients.

• Both patients and the Hospital gained satisfaction in using MocDoc HMS

Result:

By using MocDoc HMS Bhaktivedanta Hospital has improved its appointment and scheduling operations. We also helped them resolve their minor and major problems among patients with the help of our trained team. Thus in a world full of competition, MocDoc always pursues to attain Customer satisfaction.

The famous Kaiser Permanente installed the nation's significant and all-inclusive EHR (Electronic Health Record) before a decade. The decision was taken together by the medical groups and the health plans, implementing it was extortionate as well as arduous because of the larger size of the Organization.

Motivating and training staffs and physicians, many lives are saved with the combination of an integrated medical care delivery system and data analytics.

Few clinicians have the right to access the All-inclusive Electronic Health Record which indulges every medical information of the patient and also lets you know about the potential medical errors and care gaps before it go viral across the globe.

Integrating them was tedious as well as expensive, but this is the right way to maximize the care provided to the patients around. Here are a few lessons popped out below regarding the experience in the EHR for the investments as well as for other health systems.

Make the EHR All-Inclusive:

The next step in EHR is to hire individual preferences for separate specialties to get benefits with the physician acceptance. For example, every clinician made use of the document to identify the patient's problem apart from analyzing a single body diagram. Each specialty has its description; as a result, the primary care clinicians reviewed and submitted two separate set of their analysis.

When considering the EHR, they derive the entire information provided, and all patients get benefited through the information sharing across different specialties rather than going through the complete documentation. The complete EHR incorporates with the patient's totality and then communicates their entire information to all clinicians who take care of them, unlike the other office-based stand-alone systems.

If all clinicians receive the same data, they can easily find out the problems and rectify them regardless of if they work in any specialty departments.

Acquire Clinicians Onboard:

Most of the large multispecialty hospital medical groups are paid only on an annual basis, and this is one of the biggest challenges every clinician face with the EHR adoption. At present, most EHRs designed to code and bill instead of the clinical practices, this makes the clinicians slow down and also results in fewer patients care.

The experience was completely different, and the clinicians received data from the EHR cumbersome, which helped the physicians to identify the advantages and disadvantages of the patients. They can easily have access to studies apart from searching for the best radiologic studies.

The clinicians found difficulties regarding the added time that requires to study the new system, so the plan got changed and focussed on reducing the schedule by half during the phase of implementation. By doing so, many of the physicians found many advantages which lead to exposure.

Build Trust:

Physicians need to trust their leaders for the successful operation change, and this leads the process to gain the physician trust.

Keep in mind the other Employees who use EHR system.

Medical assistants use EHR more on their work, they do not need more documentation, and they can make use of the system to check out the clinical benefits.

When a patient visits the hospital, they make use of the EHR system to look for the preventive care gaps and address them correctly. For example, if a lady was overdue for a blood cancer screening, they call the GYN/OB for scheduling an appointment, this makes them recognize the medical assistant and the contribution they made.

Offering Ongoing Technical Support 24./7

If people use new technology, they need instant help if they got any queries on using them. To perform the instant support, there is on-site and immediate technical assistance to the users, and this is the right thing to make use of the EHR system while preparing for any training classes or other live settings.

In the starting weeks of performing live in any medical center or other specific departments, clinicians who already implemented the system application successfully in any different location can act as a consulting expert and make them available to the clinician's colleagues. It also incorporated additional IT staffs so that providing consultative support for the users are done efficiently and immediately following the implementations.  

EHR implementation should be a capital program, and you invest more and also achieve the ROI (Return on Investment) at the right time. Once after the execution, the EHR system allows clinicians to treat their patients in hospitals, offices, emergency departments, and other areas faster than the past.

The comprehensiveness of the EHR data helps in facilitating the total work of data analytics, best practice evolutions and the effort put for implementing the EHR system allows patients to avoid many complications from various deadly chronic diseases.

Make sure you follow the above things if you are ready to implement Electronic Health records in your hospital.

To know more about MocDoc HMS Click Here

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.