Medical software is an integral part of healthcare just like medical services. Starting with electronic health records and ending with e-prescribing, medical professionals can take advantage of a number of healthcare software solutions. An important thing for healthcare providers is not to get lost amid so many options. Our today’s article will hopefully give you some guidelines for software selection process.
Software to implement daily activities of healthcare services providers
Medical software for the daily workflow of medical facilities brings a measurable business impact both for professionals and patients. First of all, we talk here about a need for smooth health data exchange, ensuring data privacy and confidentiality, and overall efficient management of health records. How long does it take to learn your patient’s medical history? Thus, EHR systems will enable a safe environment for patients’ data, messaging, e-prescriptions, and effective appointment management. According to some research, repeated medical care because of wrong patient identification with a duplicate medical record may cost up to $1,950 per inpatient stay and more than $800 per emergency department visit. Respectively, EHR software tends to ensure medical professionals with cost-efficiency, elimination of human errors, and advanced productivity.
Speaking of the other side of the coin, effective requirements for medical software should also cover functions for staff and equipment scheduling, inventory management, and financial reporting, as well as payroll and timesheets management.
Software to improve patient loyalty
Growing patient numbers are what each healthcare provider aims at. It means that healthcare businesses need to retain their patients and ensure high patient satisfaction rates. Access to online appointment scheduling and own medical history, timely receipt of notifications and lab results, the possibility of patient-physician messaging are must-haves for medical software, such as patient portals. For example, a HIPAA and PHI-compliant patient portal for hospitals in Canada, Australia and some other countries provides a high usability level from both desktop and mobile devices with zero security breaches identified by a dedicated subcontractor. Each category of users is assigned a range of functions. Thus, patients have access to their medical history while tenants are super admins and designate roles for other groups. What is so appreciated is that the software is scalable to cover millions of users at a time. In turn, satisfied patients can improve your patients’ lifetime value.
Software to streamline medical billing/payment workflows
Wrong estimates of costs, poor staff efficiency, untimely payment collections are challenges almost for every healthcare provider. Bills are the last point of communication between patients and medical facilities and poor experience in this situation may affect both patient satisfaction and revenue generation. Technology might be at the forefront to resolve them. Effective payment processing platforms should handle online invoices and payments, payment notifications, appeals and claims submission for patients. At the same time, medical facilities’ staff should be able to manage bills processing, ensure different payment methods, handle delayed payments from patients. An important requirement for medical billing/payment software is to have capabilities for an accounting system that tracks claim history, denial payments, and transactions in line with regulations in place.
Adventist Healthcare, U.S.-based healthcare provider, integrated a medical billing platform that also hosts patient test results, messages from care teams, low- or no-cost virtual care, scheduling and payment. “I really want to make sure that patient satisfaction is something where they are happy with us and much more likely to come back, and billing is a component of that”, said Tim Reiner,Senior Vice President of Revenue Management. As a follow-up to the solution integration, the healthcare provider saw 84 % of its payment generated by the patient self-services.
Security issue
The crux with medical software is always its security and data protection capabilities. HIPAA and GDPR compliance, user access control, verification and data encryption functions are at the forefront of technology in the healthcare industry. Understanding cybersecurity risks and threats is paramount to leverage the benefits of medical software both for medical professionals and patients.
Conclusion
Technology empowers and transforms healthcare organizations to the better. Amid dozens of medical software solutions, it’s important to correlate the goals of your healthcare organization and requirements to efficient software to identify functionality that fits the best for your medical practice.