Discover the best hospital software tools available in 2018 to boost efficiency, productivity and organisation.
Hospital software solutions are an essential part of any health facility. They incorporate all administrative aspects of running a medical practice, including features such as calendar and appointment booking, inventory management, visitor management, staff and HR management and accounting and billing. Hospital software solutions enable your practice to run efficiently and productively, saving staff time and improving reliability to best meet your patients’ needs.
Hospital software solutions for calendar and appointment booking
Digital calendars and appointment booking systems are essential for making appointments in any medical practice. Appointment slots may be just minutes in some practices and a single GP averages 41.5 patient contacts a day. Put this together and consider that you may have many medical practitioners split over several departments and the importance of ensuring that appointments are booked accurately, with everyone – patient, practitioners and reception staff – having the correct information to hand is clear. With calendar and appointment booking software solutions, receptionists can be sure to book patients in securely.
Medical appointments are prone to be cancelled or rescheduled at short notice, so any software solution needs to be able to deal with this quickly and efficiently, highlighting cancelled appointments so that these are readily available for last-minute bookings. Filling empty slots at short notice means that everyone’s time is used efficiently and patients can be seen faster. Other features include patient access to online booking so that they can pick times most convenient for them, and the ability for the system to send reminders or invites for patients to accept, which can be followed up by staff if not acknowledged. Missed appointments can be a real problem for many medical practices, so online booking, access to appointments at short notice and reminders can all help deal with this.
Calendars can do more than this. They can also sync treatment plans with a patient’s calendar. They can send patient reminders to take medication and request that patients confirm they have done so, and even remind patients to exercise and recommend meals as part of a lifestyle programme.
Calendars also make it easier for administrative staff to check the availability of beds and practitioners, to ensure that emergencies can be dealt with promptly and efficiently. They can also make it straightforward for doctors, nurses and other practitioners to book training sessions, conferences and other events.
Hospital software solutions for visitor and staff management
Hospitals and other medical practices may have hundreds of visitors a day or more, all needing to be checked in and their practitioner notified of their arrival via text, email or phone. Hospital software solutions enable patients to self-register at a kiosk or tablet and practitioners then receive automatic notifications. The check-in process can also allow patients to update their information, saving staff time in transferring information from handwritten forms and reducing error. Visitor badges can even be printed if required.
The number of visitors together with the high cost of and potential danger of equipment anfd medication in close proximity makes it imperative that healthcare settings have stringent security measures in place. As part of this certain areas should be closed to visitors and access closely monitored. Visitors should also be monitored themselves, though the high number of visitors and nature of healthcare settings mean that rigorous identification checks or similar measures are not typically carried out. Despite this, visitor management systems allow a level of monitoring that gives an additional layer of security to the setting, including the capability to check visitors against customisable watch lists. In the event of an emergency evacuation lists can be quickly generated and accessed from an internet enabled device.
Visitor management systems can track staff access to the premises in a similar way to how visitors are tracked, allowing different levels of access and monitoring and recording access.
Hospital software solutions for HR management
HR hospital software solutions enable medical practices to look after their employees, helping organisations to run efficiently, ensuring that staff are invested in with up-to-date training and monitoring performance. Crucially, HR software helps you to monitor staff training and can send alerts when certifications require renewal. HR software systems can even assist in certain training processes. Software solutions can simplify the process of performance management and monitoring, allowing feedback about staff from multiple sources and ensuring that important documents and certifications are kept securely on file. Important incidents can be tagged securely to staff files.
The VisiPoint visitor management system is the ideal hospital management solution. Contact one of our expert team today to find out more about how the system can improve efficiency in your healthcare setting.