IT solutions for SME hospitals

Kishore Shinde

In the current healthcare setup in India, small and medium-sized hospitals face tremendous challenges in optimising their operations. Tighter and more intricate regulations, insurance reimbursement necessities, ongoing staff shortages, rising HR costs etc. affect operations and the bottom line of the hospital. With limited resources, these hospitals are particularly challenged to optimise their operations for improving revenue cycle management and reimbursements. The operational efficiency can be improved by implementing IT solutions in the hospitals.

Small and medium-sized hospitals face a number of challenges in competing with the quality of larger hospitals. Providing similar facilities with the same infrastructure and without increasing cost is one of the major challenges. Smaller budgets have typically made it difficult for them to afford certain technologies and some areas have limited technology resources too.

Common challenges faced by the smaller hospitals are: maintaining medical records; maintaining MLC & TPA records for future references (not-to-do); experiences and learnings of the hospital gets lost if not introduced in the system; non-uniform discharge summary causing crucial data to go missing; track patient outstanding; insurance claims and payment; missing automated discharge summary; incorrect/less/high billing to patient; malpractices in concessions; correct payments to the visiting doctors for hospital image management; creating a one page review of hospital health and duplication of work due to entry in Tally etc.

Solutions provided by Rx Office HMS to these problems are: RxOffice HMS is well-equipped to keep track of old patients and avoids repetition of work. It also maintains error free OPD/IPD billing process within a reduced amount of time and fewer manual interventions. Discharge summary is prepared when the patient gets discharged, which in turn saves the time of the staff and patients. RxOffice HMS also generates a report termed ‘Day Summary’, where the user is able to view the hospital activities of the day in a single window. This has proved to be a time saver for the administrators. it also helps to create a one page review of hospital health. The tally integration utility manages the accounts department’s work by transferring the daily entries or date wise activities directly into Tally thereby avoiding duplication of work. Rx Office HMS also generates the patient outstanding report on a daily basis. Presently, both Dr Godbole’s Heart Care Hospital and Dr Milind Patil’s Revival Bone & Joint Hospital can track the patient outstanding in a single click and the patients are easily updated on their due payments. The concession report help the hospitals to keep track of the concession given to each patient. Similarly, the services charges report gives details of the services provided by the doctor within a specific period as well as keeps track of the deduction of TDS if the limit is reached. This will ensure correct payments to the visiting doctor.

Thus, RxOffice HMS can resolve most of the challenges faced by small and medium-sized hospitals