In order to provide competitive services, healthcare enterprises need to allocate and co-ordinate resources. These resources would include equipment, healthcare commodities and teams of care providers. The facility would need to maintain an effective reporting system for each of these resources. Such reports provide the tools to support key decisions in running the hospital.
Technology provides greater speed and accuracy in the decision making process. Healthcare enterprises could benefit from this by adopting an effective HMIS (Health Management Information System). This goes a great way in solving major operation inefficiencies that affect most healthcare facilities. We list some of these problems below and the solutions offered by hospital management systems:
- Poorly-managed patient flow
Poor management of work flow in a health facility leads to overcrowding, delay in service delivery and increased length of stay. A hospital system allows you to optimize the queue management by easing patient registration. This also allows for increased efficiency in queue management and clinical workflow.
- Longer length of stays/delayed discharges
Lack of a hospital software implies that all tasks have to be done manually. Due to human error, patient records are susceptible to loss through misplacement or mix up with other records. Additionally, delayed discharges increase the risk of hospital acquired infections. Such issues result to a bad rapport for a health facility. A hospital software allows automation of records and smoothens discharge processes.
- High readmission rates
Overcrowding in a facility and delayed discharges cause a tendency in admitting the same patients. The right software allows you to track patients and through reports in the clinical module, one can notice the level of readmission and attend to it.
- Duplication and incomplete records
Other than mixed up patient files, sometimes the records for some patients are done by different people resulting into duplicates. At other times, one personnel will assume a different person filled the records resulting to no records or incomplete records. A hospital information system allows the various users assigned the specific roles to attend to records and ensure they are complete.
- Negligence
Stemming from the aforementioned inefficiencies, a health facility operations are likely to be hampered resulting to unethical behavior or medical errors that could be avoided through automation of tasks. These errors and misconduct lead to legal action that costs a facility.
By investing in the right HMIS (hospital management information system), problems like the ones mentioned above can be avoided or strategically managed to enable growth of a facility.