To take advantage of new technologies, many cities in parts of the world are being redesigned to become “smart” to create a secure, connected, and tech-enabled ecosystem for the citizens. Typically, these cities include future-ready smart hospitals. Such hospitals leverage new technologies and redesign their strategies to improve the patient experience, as well as care outcomes, and reduce costs. The technologies are used not only to improve care delivery within the hospital itself but also to automate the hospital’s manual processes.
A hospital information management system gives struggling hospitals/ healthcare providers the data, tools, and collective understanding needed to improve human health. Digital healthcare solutions, specifically developed for a purpose, transform how people access healthcare services and communicate with providers.
This blog analyzes the factors encouraging the development of HIMS, defines the core characteristics, and discusses trends driving the adoption of HIMS at large.
What is a Hospital Information Management System?
Hospitals handle a huge amount of data every year, not in billions, but in trillions, due to a platonic shift in healthcare management, coming from electronic health records, claims and billing activities, product and disease registries, and other sources. Now, due to this sheer amount of real-world data (RWD), technology is important in leveraging its immense potential to achieve better clinical trials and research and improve health outcomes.
This huge amount of healthcare data is also critical to errors, the burden for providers, and disjointed healthcare operations. According to research, inaccurate patient identification and patient matching issues—which lead to repeated medical care due to duplicate records—cost hospitals an average of $1,950 per patient per stay and more than $800 per ED visit.
In such cases, hospitals can leverage computer-based systems to manage processes and operations. This system is known as the hospital information management system (HIMS) or hospital management system.
A hospital management system as an all-in-one solution enables medical staff to collect, store, retrieve, and share patient and hospital functional data across the hospital, increasing the overall interoperability across medical and non-medical hospital functions.
HMS builds a connected ecosystem for the entire hospital to view and process the hospital data with physicians, labs, technicians, nurses, and other medical staff to obtain the desired data and make the right decisions quickly.
Why Does a Hospital Need a Management System?
Technological enablement, digitization, and automation affect industries today in profound ways. Healthcare delivery is no exception.
Populations around the world are getting older, and their treatment needs are becoming more complex, and so are the care delivery strategies. The paradigm of healthcare delivery is changing, and the changes will likely accelerate in the years ahead. Against this backdrop, hospitals—traditional healthcare centers—seek to redefine themselves into a decentralized ecosystem of 360-degree care delivery.
Another reason that calls for the need for hospital management systems is a staff deficit– predicted to be some 18 million workers worldwide by 2030. This alarming reason has put hospitals under huge pressure with the shift from health treatment to health management and is leaving hospitals struggling to keep up. Energy costs are rising, there is continual pressure to decarbonize, and patients – are now accustomed to managing their lives in a digital, app-based environment.
Hospitals that perform well in one aspect of management practice (say talent management, for example) also scored well in the other areas (operational management, performance monitoring, and target setting).
This increases the demand for a centralized, all-in-one platform for managing all data related to all departments of healthcare.
- Clinical Management
- Financial Management
- Laboratory Management
- Inpatient Management
- Outpatient Management
- Operation theater Management
- Materials Management
- Nursing Management
- Pharmaceutical Management
- Radiology Management
- Pathology lab etc.
Trends Driving Adoption of HIMS
Quest For Clinical Outcomes And Quality
Shocking as it may sound, diagnostic and treatment errors are very common in healthcare, so much so that 5% of outpatient diagnoses are incorrect in the US, research revealed.
In recent years, these errors have increased to a level that diagnostic errors contribute to about ten percent of patient deaths while approximately 20 percent of orthopedic surgeons conduct a wrong site surgery at some point in their career.
As we traverse the complex landscape of the healthcare industry, the quest for clinical outcomes and quality stands are driving the widespread adoption of a technical breakthrough or Health Information Management Systems (HIMS) in general that reduce the constant human errors in medical history.
Rising Healthcare Costs And Uneven Resource Utilization
Healthcare costs are rising annually at an unforeseen rate. At the same time, the lesser-known fact is the increase in the wasted healthcare resources due to misconduct or mismanagement of resource allocation. In the United States alone, over US $210 billion is wasted annually on prolonged or unnecessary medical services.
Even in other parts of the world, the situation is as critical as it gets. Health system evaluations conducted in Tajikistan and Romania in 2021 identified unnecessary and unnecessarily prolonged hospitalizations in children and pregnant women, along with the misuse of antibiotics and prescription of multiple unnecessary and invasive drugs.
Such observations go unnoticed, often, but instances of wasting healthcare resources such as abuse of ambulance services by patients with non-severe conditions, routine separation of newborns from their mothers just after birth, and delayed start of and lack of support for breastfeeding hoards the healthcare service supply and increase the demand in the long run, resulting in increased healthcare costs.
These statistics make it clear that the concept of hospitals as significant sites of care delivery needs fundamental transformation to improve the quality of care. A centralized hospital management system and other new technologies can improve treatment precision and decrease the probability of error.
“Retailization” of Healthcare Delivery
The traditional hospitals that provide all services to all people are disappearing rapidly.
Hospitals are becoming just one component of larger, interdependent ecosystems, bound out other super specialty facilities, such as primary care providers, clinics, pharmacies, and rehabilitation centers.
In response to the pressure to provide a more consumer-friendly experience and cut costs simultaneously, types of care are shifted out of hospitals. For instance, urgent care centers and retail clinics have seen massive growth in the last decade, with an increase of CAGR of 7% and 20%, respectively, with an average of 400-500 new centers now opening each year. The appeal to consumers is multi-faceted. These urgent care centers and clinics are money savers but tend to misplace the data collected due to no or less strategic approach to care delivery. The rising trend of urgent centers calls for the HIMS adoption to streamline operations.
Advantages of a Hospital Information Management System
Hospital information management systems do not attempt to deliver all services under one roof; rather, they manage a narrower set of high-value hospital data-related services within a broader ecosystem of entities, many of which have not traditionally been associated with healthcare delivery.
Here are all the advantages of adopting an HMS and empowering your healthcare teams and hospital operations to drive elevated patient care with our hospital management system.
- Improved Patient Care: A well-connected interoperable HIMS gives you easy access to complete and up-to-date patient information and enables better clinical decision-making for the providers. When the hospital has every operational and nonoperational aspect connected, patient outcomes improve drastically.
- Efficiency and Productivity: According to a study, doctors spend 49.2% of their time doing paperwork that wastes patients’ time. While paperwork is unavoidable at hospitals, HIMS makes them digital and enhances efficiency. Hospital Information Management Systems simplify the monotonous paperwork done by the providers and the hospital staff by capturing essential information electronically. This digital process reduces errors, enhances data accuracy, and increases the overall productivity of the hospital staff.
- Data Security: After the Ukraine-Russia war, the quest for healthcare data security was raised as the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in Russia is warning the healthcare industry to be extra vigilant against cyber threats to protect crucial information. Cybercriminals saw a treasure trove of personal and medical information in healthcare providers’ data that could be exploited for malicious or monetary gain. A well-secured HIMS ensures data privacy and confidentiality, adhering to industry regulations like HIPAA and GDPR.
- Interdepartmental Integration: HIMS prevents data silos and data leakages outside the hospital as integration of multiple departmental data fosters seamless communication and collaboration across the healthcare facility. Hospital information management software provides all the necessary interdepartmental integrations that you may need, especially the central billing solution, which helps hospitals supervise and direct all the incoming and outgoing transactions within each department with a few clicks.
Other than this, here are all the potential benefits of HIMS that can benefit hospitals at large
-
- Time-saving Technology
- Improved Efficiency by avoiding human errors
- Reduces scope for Error
- Data security and correct data retrieval made possible
- Cost-effective and easily manageable
- Easy access to patient data with correct patient history
- Improved patient care made possible
- Easy monitoring of supplies in inventory
- Reduces the work of documentation
- Better Audit controls and policy compliance.
The Anatomy of a Hospital Information Management System
HIMS is a patient-centric tool to simplify hospital management across different functions. Hospital information management systems build an integrated, interconnected ecosystem that can even include government data platforms, population health agencies, and payers, as well as other providers. HIMS even ensures data sharing among all entities so patients receive high-quality healthcare efficiently and conveniently.
Here are the modules of an interconnected Hospital Information Management System
Patient Management
HIMS comes with a patient management module that lets hospitals capture and manage patients’ crucial medical information with detailed medical histories and demographic profiles to handle insurance details, reimbursements, medicine prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments. Through patient management, hospitals can redefine healthcare administration, placing patients at the center of a seamlessly integrated and secure healthcare experience.
HIMS is a great tool to improve patient experiences, care, and financial outcomes with a 360-degree end-to-end patient portal that comes enabled with secure messaging, facilitating a direct channel between patients and healthcare providers and letting them manage their appointment scheduling, bills, and payments.
Appointment Scheduling
Simplifying and handling appointment booking is one of the major concerns of hospitals, especially with multispeciality health facilities. HIMS ensures optimal resource management and slot optimization for a streamlined patient flow by efficiently managing waitlists to maximize clinic capacity with convenient appointment rescheduling options to ensure every time slot is utilized to its fullest potential.
Electronic Health Records
Electronic health records accelerate healthcare innovation and are considered a breakthrough in hospital digital transformation. EHR-enabled HIMS provides a holistic view of patient health and medical history, letting providers achieve better health outcomes. EHRs foster interoperability and health information exchange, let hospitals achieve data readiness, and use ultra-high-quality data that can drive improvements throughout the care continuum.
Billing and Insurance
HIMS provides a centralized billing process for the entire hospital and streamlines every facet of the billing process, from patient registration and insurance verification to meticulous charge capture and fee schedule management.
A hospital under CMS Medicare and Medicaid programs may have different set rules for certain types of charges and auto-generated patient bills. For example
- The charge for a senior citizen may be subsidized.
- You may have fixed charges for individuals coming in an emergency.
- Fixed rates for follow-ups and first-time consultations.
- Fixed charges for different doctors
HIMS billing and insurance module automates this and simplifies the revenue cycle to navigate financial transactions effortlessly.
Pharmacy Management
Pharmacy management can be a time-consuming manual process, including a hefty amount of paperwork. However, HIMS lets hospital staff keep a tap on hospital stock with precision, ensuring that medications are dispensed accurately and promptly. Through a centralized pharmacy management module, HIMS helps hospitals easily navigate a comprehensive drug database, empowering the clerical staff teams with quick access to vital pharmaceutical information at their fingertips.
Lab & Radiology Info System
HIMS provides reliable radiology reporting with teleradiology support and simplifies the lab information to attain diagnosis accuracy with image viewing and review capabilities. From specimen collection to sample tracking, HIMS ensures the integrity and traceability of every test.
Advanced modules of lab and radiology info system HIMS works beyond diagnosis and automates appointment scheduling and efficient order and workflow management with real-time access to critical information.
Electronic Prescription
Generate electronic prescriptions and manage renewal and refill processes, providing convenience for prescribers and patients.
With a commitment to secure and accurate care practices, intelligent drug interaction and allergy detection functionality mitigate risks and ensure optimal medication choices.
Inventory Manager
Enhance traceability, availability, and security of the hospital’s inventory with barcode and RFID Tracking, providing a digital footprint for every item in your inventory. Our system helps with expiry date management to prevent the use of expired items, promoting patient safety and regulatory compliance by conducting efficient stocktaking for reduced discrepancies and inventory control.
Human Resources
The human resource system is built to prioritize the growth and proficiency of hospital staff management, ensuring a harmonious and efficient operation. With an integrated planning & implementation process, easily align your human resources strategy with organizational goals.
Reporting and Analytics
HIMS lets you control your hospital data with highly interoperable clinical analytics dashboards, providing actionable insights at a glance. With data collection & integration capabilities enabled by interactive dashboards, HIMS collects data from various sources, ensuring a comprehensive and unified view of the hospital’s data.
Waste Management
Every year, hospitals produce a lot of medical waste that goes unnoticed and creates a carbon footprint. HIMS, in that care, promotes responsible disposal practices with simplified and automated waste collection processes, optimizing efficiency and minimizing environmental impact. With streamlined transportation logistics for seamless waste disposal within the HIMS, the waste management module ensures safe and compliant storage practices.
Blood Bank and Bed Management
Advanced HIMS modules also include blood bank and bed management, which streamlines the blood bank operations and bed availability, discharge, and patient stay duration status to manage the patient flow within your facility. Within the HIMS itself, hospital staff can track and manage blood donations and access room & ward information, facilitate patient care planning, ensuring that beds are reserved and prepared for incoming patients.
Operation Theater Management
With operation theater modules, hospitals can enhance surgical care with real-time monitoring at every step of the surgical workflow to minimize surgical care delays. HIMS allows the surgical team to coordinate and access patient records effortlessly, ensuring comprehensive and accurate information for informed decision-making.
Telehealth
Telehealth has become imperative to promote safe interactions for healthcare delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even two years into the new normal, both patients and providers are more willing to use technology for virtual medical visits. Through the telehealth module, HIMS extends care beyond hospitals with secure and compliant virtual care.
How Does The Future With HIMS Look Like?
Hospitals of the future will look very different from the hospitals of today and the past with an interoperable network of patient data. While the requirements of data interoperability, scalability, productivity, and flexibility will be paramount, HIMS would build a solid foundation for capturing, storing, securing, and analyzing data and drive strategies to improve overall hospital operations.
To build smart and interconnect healthcare ecosystems, it’s important to establish a series of supporting mechanisms to ensure effective information dissemination and strategies to ensure different stakeholders’ alignment. These ecosystems cannot exist in the absence of a sophisticated IT system capable of letting all entities share information. Successive Digital encourages hospitals to invest in exponential technologies with the help of the right HIMS tools.
With over 20+ different modules and modifications available, our HIMS is used by leading chains of hospitals in India for automating their clerical tasks and improving patient outcomes, helping them save time for care delivery by 80%. For complete details on Successive Digital’s HIMS tools and solution suite, book a demo with our experts.
