How ERP software revolutionized the healthcare system

These technology-driven systems help with patient care and make it affordable. They have led a new wave of of growth to our health care system. Hospitals now see a high business growth opportunity in them. Consequently, the adoption of ERP Systems in Health Care has grown over the last decade. It jumped to 38.4 percent of the hospitals in the US, according to the HIMSS Analytics Logic Platform. This is a significant growth as compared to the 18.8 percent adoption rate only a decade ago.

The total budget for hospitals in 2020 is $1,112,207,387,000, a big part of which we spend on growth and improvement. In the last decade, hospitals have focused on implementing clinical ad financial solutions to provide value-based care services. Hospitals chose to adopt solutions like EMR and EHR Systems for clinical solutions and patient billing systems for financial solutions. This decade, implementation of ERP Systems in Health Care is taking place to improve health care business management.

Benefits Offered with the Inclusion of ERP Systems in Health Care

Without a doubt, ERP Systems are the solutions hospitals needed for so long. Along with business benefits, ERP systems have a wide range of other benefits that help hospitals maximize care and business prospects. A list of a few benefits are given below.

Registration and Appointments

Health Care professionals and administrative staff are both under the burden of the sheer amount of paperwork and manual entries they have to perform with daily patients. With ERP, the staff registers the patient online once. Furthermore, they make a specification for the patient’s mode of payment, invoices, alert medium (SMS or Email). This information is liable to change upon further notice.

Whenever a patient needs to visit the hospital an appointment is set with the type of appointment specified beforehand. The assistance staff assigns appointment slots to each practitioner. This ensures that each practitioner only handles the number of patients they can easily fit in their schedule. Depending upon the urgency, an appointment can also be prioritized. The system automatically alerts doctors of clinical appointments for surgical procedures both minor and major.

Better Patient Care

With an ERP system integrated, hospitals can offer better patient care. Keeping track of patient demographics becomes easier. Once a patient visits a hospital, the health care staff centers everything from their personal information, relation, medical history and risk factors into the system. From then on, all further visits make access to their data just a search away. The design of a separate patient portal helps the patients keep track of their treatment and history throughout.

Inpatients need consistent monitoring and checkups to ensure that they recover soon. The nursing staff and clinical staff have to keep track of the patient’s data and consistently update it every so often. With the introduction of ERP Systems in Health Care, the staff handles inpatients with ease. Patient admission, transfer, procedures, and treatment can all be kept track of. Upon recovery or transfer i.e. when the doctor decides to discharge a patient, the generation of invoices becomes hassle-free.

The administrative and health care staff has much to benefit from these systems as they can now focus on the patient more rather than following elaborate hospital protocols to complete records and paperwork.

Ease to Practitioners

Indeed, practitioners are a valuable asset to every hospital. They gain the trust of their administration and patients through their hard work and dedication. They are the most under stress because they have hundreds of patients to diagnose, surgeries to perform, and lives to save. Atop of that a part of duty is fulfilling necessary paperwork per patient to ensure a better treatment in the longer run.

With the introduction of ERP Systems, hospitals have made the lives of medical practitioners a lot easier. The ERP System offers practitioners a portal with the main dashboard that shows the list of patient appointments, encounters, etc. If the doctor can easily open each patient profile in the appointment list to view the patient’s data.

The data includes the referring physician for the patients, the appointment type, the payment module, and the patient consultation and visiting charges. Apart from that, they can also view their daily schedule and the clinical procedures that they have to perform in the upcoming days.

Integration of all Service Units into One

Each hospital has multiple units for operational functionality. To manage each unit hospitals use multiple systems, one per unit which in turn causes a lot of data generation that makes way for data repetition and errors.

With the introduction of ERP Systems, a single infrastructure system design covers the whole facility. It assigns each sub-unit a module for appointment booking and Inpatient Occupancy. A Hierarchical tree of all the sub-units makes groups and organizes service units under a single system. The system books and assigns each service unit, per patient preference, according to respective rates.

Laboratory Management

A laboratory is a backbone for disease diagnosis and patient recovery. Patients come and go through multitudes of tests daily and the lab staff gathers patient samples for example blood sugar tests, biopsies, etc. Often inefficient and outdated systems result in data loss in laboratories. With delayed updates sometimes samples from patients go to waste because of these inefficiencies.

Automation of laboratory processes using ERP systems ensures the accuracy of results and better diagnosis. Laboratory Management module makes the collection of lab test samples and templates even more effective. With the help of this module, the staff enters data as soon as they receive a  sample and tests it. The timely analysis streamlines the path for better testing of each sample.

This avoids deterioration of the quality of samples and with the timely approval from each concerned pathologist, treatments begin quickly. The system sends over lab results as soon as testing is complete, then each pathologist prints the results and continues treatment.

Pathologists can request different types of tests including Single, grouped, compound, and descriptive. The ERP System assigns a separate financial module to the laboratory. It can categorize item names and their respective rates.

Laboratory management through the use of ERP Systems in Health Care has ensured accurate results and timely diagnosis. If we look at the last decade, laboratory management is one of the sections that companies ignore. But now, companies are paying more attention to the inclusion of ERP.

Pharmacy

Pharmacies, whether they be within a hospital or separate retail stores, need a proper system to function. They have every task a regular business has: Inventory Management, Point of Sales profile, Purchase, Accounts, and Selling. As in any other business, previously pharmacies used separate systems for each module. But with the introduction of ERP Systems in Health Care, tasks are streamlining in pharmacies as well.

Inventory Management

A complete inventory management module within the ERP system you purchase ensures that you can maintain an inventory of all medicines and supplies. With automation features like auto reordering, stock alerts based on expiry dates, and when products finish manual work that may cause loss decreases. It maintains a record of batch numbers, expiration dates, and reorder levels.

POS Profile

The management of vendors for purchase is also made easy. With the creation of a POS profile with the ERP System, the added pressure of logging in multiple systems is decreased.

Accounts Module

An Accounts Module gives you the benefit of keeping an eye on your business. With so many daily customers, keeping track of the accounts on a daily basis gets very tiring. The automated Accounts module gives you exact estimations of revenue and expenses on your preferred timeline may they be on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.

Sale of Medicines

Selling medicines and supplies to customers via the sales module provides ease of service. Prescriptions can be double-checked using the system which is attached to the practitioner and medical specialist modules who consistently update patient records.

Trends of ERP Systems in Health Care Digitization of Data for Security

Hospital is a source of very high-value data. Patient profiles hold valuable data for individuals that many prefer to keep it confidential. With the introduction of ERP Systems in Health Care, all the data from medical records to insurance forms are stored in one place. This data is securely shared with the relevant authorities as a threat to the data or its mishandling can pose a serious risk to the reputation of your business.

Role-based access is assigned through the system making only authoritative parties a witness to the patient’s data. User management is done so that confidential data is only accessible to the people who have the rights. Modern security measures are taken in the system to endure that the data is completely safe. Mandates are signed between the software company and your organization to protect important assets, medical records, and keep sensitive information confidential.

Integration of ERP System in Health Care, Also Turns it to the Cloud

With the advent of ERP systems, we have experienced a revolution in health care. Just like every other enterprise, health care is moving towards cloud-based ERP Systems. Even though the change has begun but according to Gartner’s Market Research, it is a “slow transition” as it is reported that only 5 percent of the Heath Care departments using ERP are using cloud-based ERP.

With the use of cloud-based ERP Systems like Oracle, SAP, and others, people are getting increasingly frustrated because they are fairly new to the market. People in the business have an eye to the future and are willing to invest and shift from their on-premise ERP systems.

Conclusion

Nowadays there are numerous ERP Systems in Healthcare that are developed and updated each year. It has caused a surge of growth in analytics that doesn’t just tell you what happened but also tells you what is happening and what will happen may you be a healthcare professional or a business owner. An ERP System is your answer to an innovative and easy to use system but, most importantly it fulfills your requirements for quality-driven, research-oriented patient care and hospital management.

With many software development companies coming up with their version of ERP for Healthcare Industry the choice is definitely a tough one. At Novateus we can help you go through our ERP System and help you understand what benefits it can offer for your business. We hope we’ve been able to help you understand how an ERP System in Heath Care is a revolutionary solution. If you have any further questions feel free to leave a comment.