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.

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Billing software is one of the essential software used in the healthcare industry. It is also called the medical practitioner's lifeline. Therefore, you must choose the right hospital billing software that offers a fantastic reporting system to manage the cash flow as well as the payment time speed.

The new hospital billing software helps to manage both insurance needs as well as patient payment reliably which is not included in other software.

Uses of Hospital Billing Software in HMS:

Each part of the Hospital Management System is integrated and automated effortlessly, and it also provides the opportunity to move forth and back from different data and reports.

There is no loss of bills and data.
Secure and safe reporting system.
There is a financial dashboard that tracks the practice's health efficiently.

The web-based practice management is used for managing and collecting the bill from any place efficiently, you can use and maintain this software in every area where it suits you best.

Automated Data backup is enabled.
You can view your daily schedule from anywhere.

You can easily understand the financial practice health of the practitioners, and the report makes it easy and efficient. The user features are used for deciding the right information to share.

The software offers Enabled visualizations in the form of figures and graphs.
You can track revenue, payer performance, and related ones.
You can easily customize and display them in the Excel format.
The software can deliver a report on a daily or monthly basis as per the requirements.

What are the Types of Billing in HMS?

Various departments use billing in the Hospital Management system to improve the billing facilities in the hospitals. Some of them include

Registration and Consulting Billing
Pharmacy Billing
Laboratory Billing
In-Patient Billing

Registration and consulting Billing:

Hospital billing software prebooks appointments for the patients they provided in advance for both follow-up patients as well as new patients.
Hospital billing software generates bills for the certified lab and radiology services.

Pharmacy Billing:

Our pharmacy billing software deals with providing the retail sales of medical supervision to OPD patients, and customers and also helps with the issue of medicines to the hospital inpatients. Our pharmacy billing software has the following features.

Able to offer an extensive collection of available drugs for clinicians.
Able to sort out the alternative drugs for the drugs that are not available.
The software aids in interfacing with a database of drugs.
Our software pops up the drug allergy alerts easily.
The billing software interfaced for dispatch along with the pneumatic tube.

Laboratory Billing Software:

The laboratory billing software helps to disseminate and record the information of the different performed tests. Here are some of the salient features of our laboratory billing software.

Test setup and do the services.
Excels different tests and diagnostic packages.
Offers the resulting process from the sample collection process, recheck process, and fetch from analyzer data.
The software does the recheck with the Sample Collections.
Our billing software offers the status update of the labs after a clear analysis.
The software works as per the NABL standards.
The software comes with a dashboard for TAT, authorization, progress works, tests, and parameters.

In-patient Billing Software:

The software takes care of the patients who are allocated in the ward bed after registration, and this deals with complete services and treatment offered to the patients while they stay in the hospital.

The features of our in-patient billing software include:

The software is capable of taking place the conversion from OP to IP.
The software takes care of the patients by allocating the beds, offers consultation for intern departments, tracks patients in the hospitals, and deals with bed transfers.
The software maintains the patient billing sheets.
The software comes with a dashboard for discharge summaries, patient access, billing audits, activities, and much more.

Track Profit and Loss Statements Easily:

The Hospital Management system products come with tally integrations, and therefore you can easily track and manage the expenses. The billing software in the Hospital Management system also monitors both the profit and loss statements so that you can quickly identify what lags in your Hospital information management.

Things to know about Hospital ...

Billing software is one of the essential software .....

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.

Scalable Hospital Management S...

Hospitals are rarely a single department ent.....

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.....

Our present modern information system makes use of computers for the execution, each of them connected through an optimized network. Healthcare is the most critical aspect of our society, and many health care providers face challenges to offer practical and active services to patients.

Considering a multispeciality hospital, many people enter and exit the hospital in a day and maintaining their records safely is tedious. To reduce this type of burdens and to manage the financial, hospital administration and clinical aspects, Hospital management system came into existence.

Apart from that automating your hospital's processes and implementing them cannot be done too easily, you need an efficient hospital management system to take care of everything that is happening around the labs and hospitals.

If you are ready to implement or go with the hospital management system, make sure you follow these things before making it useful in your hospitals or labs.

Processing Speed & Results
Cost Effective
Reduction in Errors
Data Security & Retrieving Ability
Improved Patient Care
Quality & Compliance

Processing Speed and Results:

Hospital management system follows the standard operating procedures, and there are no chances for deviation to happen in any of the effective HMS systems. With the implementation of HMS in your labs or hospitals, you will be able to treat patients with a better way and accessing their real-time reports and other information regarding the patients, and their past clinical data and more can be done quickly and lead to best patient outcomes. Hospital management system makes employees work more accessible and improve the speed of the complete processes for better results.

Cost Effective:

HMS information system helps to track and control finances, reduce leakages as well as reduce manual work and therefore there is no requirement of the higher human workforce.

Hospital management system helps to cut down the manual work done by humans in the hospitals especially for the peoples who take care of the record and documentations safely. Hospital management system helps in reducing the human resources costs as most of the work is automated.

Cut down the cost related to storage and other associated requirements. If your hospital is entirely HMS implemented, then your hospital will go paper-free one, it's enough if you maintain the mandatory documents and other related ones in your hospital to comply with the regulation standards.

Reduction in Errors:

Hospital management system will help in reducing different types of errors that made through interventions like missing billing, operational failure, clinical errors, cost leakages, missing appointments and much more.

Every process on the hospital management system are automated, and there are plenty of tasks provided to the software to perform without the human intervention as well as accurately, this reduces the error significantly.

For example, An IPD patient final bill amount can be easily generated if your hospital enabled of Hospital management system as his reports and other samples bill are already billed and safe under the Patients unique Hospital ID, and therefore the billing executive needs to generate from the system and provide the statement to the patients.

If your hospital is not HMS enabled then you need to go with manual entries which involves too many human errors, so preferring HMS will make your billing section easier, faster, accurate and more transparent.

Data Security and Retrieving Ability:

In a Hospital management system, they are one of the cloud-based software where everything gets interlinked, and therefore there are no chances for breaches to occur as they have high data security.

Evidence-based medicine requires the retrieving ability as well as data ability mandatorily, and this easily achieved through a Hospital management system. If you have Hospital management system on your hospital, then you can easily access the operational, clinical and financial data of your hospitals.

Improved Patient Care:

Enhanced work efficiency and improved patient data access mean faster and better clinical decisions. A clinician orders the solution to implement once he gets the diagnostic report on his hand, so its necessary to have speedier support for receiving the reports rapidly. All departments in the hospitals are interconnected and integrated with this automation, and this enhances the patient care quality as well as the hospital turnovers.

Quality and Compliance:

Every hospital should send a report of birth, and death occurred, their reasons and related solutions to the NABH accreditation monthly. Its difficult to arrange them manually so preferring the best HMS helps you to send the reports faster and at the right time frame.

Every report is monitored and managed in the Hospital Management System carefully and efficiently for accurate results.

Everyone prefers HMS for their hospitals for coordinated and rapid care, reduced costs, reduced waiting time and readmission, enhanced patient safety, and clinical care.

Any other essential benefits of implementing a hospital management system in your clinics? Let us know through the comment section below.

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