Table of Contents
Key Highlights:
- Hospitals currently contend with personnel shortages, financial challenges, and proper patient safety.
- Digital transformation for hospitals is challenging due to the myriad stakeholders involved, reluctance to move on from antiquated systems, and the perceived resource drain for onboarding.
- Custom software offers short- and long-term solutions for hospitals by integrating technology, streamlining administrative processes, and making communication and file sharing between stakeholders easier.
- Antiquated processes like paper-based systems and reliance on staff to execute recurring tasks that AI and automation can perform prevent the healthcare industry from improving worldwide.
The complexities of healthcare often prevent medical professionals from providing the best care possible to patients. Electronic health records and various forms of hospital software offer solutions for doctors, nurses, and other staff to dedicate more time to patient care and solve efficiency problems.
The right software will also resolve medical institutions’ profitability and scaling challenges. Proper medical software creates bandwidth for medical professionals, reduces stress, and speeds up the progress of medical advancements.
In particular, the high-pressure environment of hospitals may benefit the most from the right hospital management software. First, let’s delve into the everyday challenges hospitals face that the right software can resolve.
Common Challenges Hospitals Currently Face
According to the American College of Healthcare Executives, in 2021 the following were listed as the top issues confronting hospitals:
- Personnel shortages
- Financial challenges
- Patient safety and quality
Registered nurses, technicians, and therapists were listed in the survey as the hospital staff in the most significant demand. By integrating the right software, a hospital can reduce the time and effort required by the current team for tasks like data entry, filing patient records, and equipment requests. With more bandwidth, the urgency to hire additional staff is reduced.
Increasing costs for staff and supplies, reducing operating costs, and Medicaid reimbursements were listed as the top financial challenges. Streamlining these processes with vertical applications reduces costs by eliminating unnecessary and redundant programs.
Reimbursement for medications, improving the culture of quality, and the care process were listed as the top concern for patient safety. Integrating a single platform into the daily activities of all personnel results in faster communication, more organization, and frees up time for staff to accomplish more.
Modernized hospital software can solve more problems than many hospital administrators may realize. Let’s review why hospitals have slowly transitioned to a complete digital system for administrative processes.
The Challenge of Hospital Digital Transformation
Despite how long ago electronic health records and hospital management systems were developed, many hospitals have slowly adopted these technologies. Legacy models and paper-based systems prefer to maintain the existing infrastructure.
However, those antiquated systems cannot meet staffing demands, modern equipment, or the growing population. They only add to the costs of managing a hospital and slow the advancement of patient care.
One of the most significant challenges to digitizing healthcare is all of the stakeholders involved, such as:
- Hospitals
- General practices
- Private practices
- Insurance companies
- Therapists
- Pharmacies
- Drug developers
- Researchers
- Vendors
- Patients
The depth of the healthcare network means that sometimes the most practical solution for hospitals is custom software. At Asahi Technologies, we take the time to learn the specific challenges a particular hospital faces, present a software solution, and then build it.
An off-the-shelf software system may suffice in many instances for hospitals. But some challenges may still need to be solved by an existing universal software product. In those instances, custom software solutions can be built and integrated into existing administrative systems.
Developing, training, and integrating custom software for an actively running hospital can be seamless and make all the difference in the short- and long term.
Let’s review how custom software can solve administrative problems for hospitals.
Features and Benefits of Hospital Management Software
Hospitals are busy and fast-moving work environments with a special responsibility—delivering life-saving health and medical services to the general public through a network of community health resources. Hospital practice management tools are used to enhance clinical efficiency, provide data-driven decision-making, and lower the cost of medical care.
Hospital software needs to be flexible to meet changing needs. The healthcare industry is constantly changing due to innovations, regulatory compliance obligations, and a demanding work environment known for leading to staff burnout if not managed correctly.
Here are the main features and benefits to look for in hospital software:
- Digital Patient Engagement Tools: Custom web and mobile applications to engage patient-consumers where they are using digital communications tools.
- Medical Practice Management Solutions: A custom medical software to enhance clinical medical services.
- Medical CRM Software: A custom digital health product to optimize the revenue cycle with more robust data analysis.
- Telehealth Applications: Virtual care applications that deliver remote medical services and access to patient health records.
- Patient Portals: A custom web-based medical health app that connects your patients to their community health network.
- Diagnostic Imaging Support: A custom health technology solution designed to enhance the capture, transfer, and sharing of diagnostic medical images.
How Custom Hospital Software Improves Administration and Patient Care
The software integrates technologies such as blockchain, IoT, AI, robotics, and APIs that can streamline processes, protect data, and reduce the need for additional staff. Combined, these technologies can improve the healthcare industry tremendously.
Recently, a world-renowned children’s hospital worked with us to solve one specific problem involving equipment inspection. It’s a great example of how hospital software can create efficiencies, remove human error, and speed up processes.
Custom Software For Boston Children’s Hospital
Administrators at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) faced a challenge with equipment auditing—the main challenge being they were still using a paper filing system. Asahi Technologies suggested the development of custom software for digitizing hospital equipment auditing.
The single platform significantly simplified the equipment auditing process for BCH and inspectors. They can now work offline, see key metrics in easy-to-read formats, receive timely notifications, execute work with mobile devices, and more.
Improving Patient Care with Custom Software
Custom software for hospitals solves administrative problems and improves patient care. In the BCH example, the software also eliminated human error, improving patient satisfaction.
The value of the efficiencies created by software must be considered. For patients accustomed to long wait times with their doctors, diagnostic facilities, and insurers, the time saved means everything to them. Hospitals can target treatments faster by reducing stress, ensuring all equipment functions correctly, eliminating mistakes, and putting their patients’ well-being above all else.
Current Trends Driving Innovation in Custom Hospital Software Development
Innovation drives digital transformation at the world’s most successful healthcare, medical, pharmaceutical, and life science enterprises.
Here are the top innovation trends driving custom hospital software development:
- The Rise of Citizen Development: Low-code and no-code software is significantly impacting the healthcare industry as technical, medical, and business leaders work together on solutions.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) Use Cases to Improve Medical Decision Making: At the forefront of innovation, automation is transforming possibility, and AI/ML is making all that possible.
- Leveraging AR/VR to Drive Better Medical Outcomes: Augmented reality is being implemented in every area of healthcare service delivery in both patient and provider-facing tools.
- Business Intelligence and Big Data Transform Healthcare Business Development: Healthcare is finally focused on truly improving services by looking deeper at the supply chain dynamic and quality nuances of medical operations management.
- Chatbots Extend the Digital Front Door: In the year of ChatGPT, its clear chatbots are leaving a massive mark on the healthcare industry.
- The Future Cloud Computing: As laggards still struggle to realize the potential of the cloud, market leaders are already thinking about going serverless altogether.
- The Internet of Things (IoT) Delivers Connected Care: More and more touchpoints are coming online daily, connecting community health networks and expanding care.
- Patient-Generated Health Data (PGHD) Improves Clinical Efficiency: As patient-centered care takes off, patients provide data that help them enjoy healthier lives.
- Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) is Transforming the Healthcare Industry: RPM is offering the perfect solution to building on the meteoric success of virtual and telehealth services.
Conclusion
As more healthcare institutions, like hospitals, have software developed to streamline administrative responsibilities and improve patient care, the entire healthcare industry will benefit.
Medical professionals can only take full advantage of other technological advancements like AI, blockchain, IoT, and robotics if they move on from paper-based processes and utilize systems that can connect these innovations.
Over time, integrations will allow the software to communicate with medical practices worldwide, and the medical industry will become fully optimized. Only then will logistics, equipment maintenance, and poor time management continue to result in delayed treatments, undue stress, and customer service bottlenecks.
Many of the medical problems people face start with visits to the emergency room. The right hospital software can create the data transfer process for general practices, specialists, and insurance carriers, solving inefficiency in the medical industry.
Stay ahead of the game with our helpful resources
How Hospital Information Systems Improve Efficiency & Cost
Hospital information systems (HIS) connect the different clinical departments, administrative functions, core workflows, data, and best practices driving digital success at forward looking healthcare enterprises. The implementation of hospital information systems delivers measurable benefits to improve patient care, healthcare operations efficiencies, reduce costs, promote data security, streamline communication, and fuel more effective data-driven decision-making. Build a custom HIS solution to invigorate your organization’s digital acceleration.
How Remote Patient Monitoring can Improve Healthcare Access
Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is the use of medical devices, healthcare practice management software, hardware integrations, and new categories such as wearables and smart homes hooked into the medical internet of things (MIOT). RPM builds quicker feedback loops between patients and providers, reducing the need for time-consuming and expensive emergency services. As remote patient monitoring tool usage increases, the cost of care drops, and patients receive more efficient and timely medical services.
How patient portals can improve communication in Healthcare
Key Highlights Patient portals for healthcare improve communication to create a more potent therapeutic alliance between patients and their community health resources. Streamline clinical workflows, contain costs, and unlock enterprise value by delivering custom patient portals. Empower more efficient and effective communication between different stakeholders connected to the community health matrix with patient engagement tools. Health is wealth, and time may be the most valuable commodity. No one wants to waste time or be left waiting when health is in jeopardy. That’s where digital patient portals come in. In recent years, few pieces of the digital health ecosystem have transformed
Features and Benefits of Hospital Management Software
Hospital management software handles all the different aspects of managing services at a hospital. A modern HMS system is at the forefront of efforts to identify areas of improvement, measure the success of interventions, and deliver the insights needed to truly innovate and optimize performance. The right hospital management software tools provide your executive decision makers with the business intelligence needed to unlock new business opportunities and profitability while simultaneously trimming the fat and reducing wastage at every step in your value chain.
Sindhu
Client Success Manager
Sindhu is a tenacious and impassioned digital product and project manager specializing in driving client success across complex healthcare technology implementations and integrations. She is a certified Agile Scrum Master and holds advanced degrees in computer science and software engineering. Her philosophy is that “work is where the heart is” and believes the key to success is creating a solid, supportive, and cohesive team.
