Test before invest
Digital Applications for Patient Management
Although an application is a considerably more efficient option in patient management, many medical offices continue to use the physical notebook for registering patients, appointments, services offered, receipts, etc.
This happens either out of convenience (since any change from the comfort zone can bring an effort and a reason for stress, especially for medical staff and patients after a certain age), out of lack of information (they did not find the application that covers all their needs in work processes) or for financial reasons (they found an application, but do not consider it worth the money invested).
But those medical offices that took the step towards digitization, recognized that this step was very useful and advantageous, and all their fears in the past were unfounded. Therefore, the awareness of the use of computer applications in the management of medical activities, represents a mandatory stage in the digitalization process of medical institutions.
Although excel files or desktop applications, which are installed on your own computer, are a step forward, they are not the most advantageous solution. Patient data is stored in the digital environment, but that data remains locally, on the doctor’s own computer, and is not available to another doctor in the event of a new diagnosis.
The more information the doctor has access to from the patient’s medical history, the better the diagnosis can be made. Many times, important time is lost during the visit with a doctor-patient dialogue in which the patient recounts his medical history from memory. The patient is already in a state of stress due to the condition with which he presented himself to the doctor, and his medical memories are subjective, incomplete and often inaccurate, because often the patient does not have a solid foundation in the field of medicine.
The most advantageous option for both medical professionals and patients is for the patient’s medical history to be saved in the CLOUD, in the form of a single database, which can be accessed anytime and from anywhere. All consultations, medical letters, prescriptions, test results, are saved in this history, so that they can then be accessed to issue a diagnosis.
Our hub can provide you with a series of web services that can be integrated into any patient management application so that these applications benefit from the advantages of cloud storage of medical data.
Among the benefits of implementing these services in a medical application are:
Getting a good doctor’s appointment isn’t always easy. Most of the time, the visit itself consumes more time than the actual consultation. We often end up sitting in a room full of other patients waiting to enter the consultation.
Some medical offices offer the possibility of scheduling by phone, but even here there can be problems. The patient calls to set a certain time, finds that the doctor is not available. When the doctor is available, the patient cannot, and the conversation ends up being long until they finally find a suitable date and time.
The fast and efficient solution to this time-consuming process is given by online appointments. There is only one calendar implemented in the cloud, accessible anytime, anywhere. The patient enters this calendar, sees the doctor’s available hours and can make an appointment request in a convenient time slot. The doctor receives the request, approves/rejects it, and the patient automatically receives the answer via SMS, e-mail, or Whatsapp message. Everything is automatic, fast and visible, the calendar includes all the doctor’s appointments, regardless of the number of offices he collaborates with, so there is no risk of overlaps.
Even if not all patients know how to use the internet and prefer the classic method: the phone. The doctor will still not have to wait to get to the office to confirm the appointment, but can approve it directly from the phone, with the patient automatically receiving the confirmation message.
Fortunately, online appointments have greatly reduced the time spent on scheduling a doctor’s appointment. Moreover, the number of absences caused by the fact that the patient forgot the appointment was reduced. With the help of this service, the patient also receives an automatic reminder to remind him of the appointment and not to miss it again.
In clinics with a large volume of triage patients, such as a polyclinic that issues medical certificates for the driver’s license, there is a possibility that the triage nurses will not be able to cope with the hundreds of applicants. Each applicant must be registered in the register, manually, based on the data from the identity card, then the amount to be collected from each applicant must be calculated according to the requested services.
The process is painstaking, requires a lot of attention and can exhaust nurses while patients lose patience standing in endless queues and turn to other polyclinics where the waiting time is shorter. It is not a pleasant situation for either patients or nurses.
Problems created by a little carelessness can be easily eliminated by using shape recognition algorithms, with the help of which the patient’s identification data can be automatically read: name, surname, CNP, etc. The patient presents the identity card, it is scanned with the application on the mobile phone and the patient’s data is automatically identified and added to the database.
The nurse will not make any effort, but only checks the correctness of the data and ticks the services requested by the patient (Car Card, PortArma Card, Psychological Examination, etc.) from a list. The form is automatically printed with the patient’s data and, simultaneously, the checked services are sent to the cash register.
Thus, the registration and payment process goes much faster, without human errors. Each record listed is given a barcode unique to that record and that patient. When he returns to triage with the completed form, it is quickly scanned with the mobile phone to be identified and saved in the database automatically.
Thus, nothing is saved in the notebook, everything is automated, patients no longer stand in line and registration errors are eliminated. A single nurse can process over 100 patients a day, much faster and less error-free.
In addition, each doctor who fills in, for example, the Car Registration Card, no longer has to save it in his own register. The patient already exists in the unique database, the doctor just fills in the result of the consultation. Moreover, this result is not written from scratch, the doctor can select an answer from several possible ones, already existing in the database.
Automatic completion of patient data by scanning and identifying data from the identity card, is a mandatory task in clinics that process a large number of patients daily. The waiting time is reduced, the queues are reduced, the stress is reduced.
There are elderly people, for whom going to the doctor is a huge effort, there are small children who do not have the patience to wait in line at the doctor, or they are too tired from the disease to withstand a long and tiring journey to the doctor.
Today, the Internet, which has entered the homes of all Romanians, allows them to be interconnected through audio-video communication channels, which perfectly emulates the face-to-face interaction of people. Space is no longer a barrier, through these communication channels we can talk to anyone as if we were in the same room.
And these audio-video channels lend themselves perfectly to medical consultations that do not require specialized medical instruments. The patient does not have to install anything on his phone, he just has to access a link specific to the medical institution where the doctor works.
When the patient needs a consultation, he accesses the link and the doctor on duty of the hospital is automatically called. The doctor answers the call and at that moment an audio-video communication channel opens between the doctor and the patient.
The consultation follows through the online dialogue with the patient, during which the doctor can access the patient’s medical history saved in a unique database, can write prescriptions, medical letters, can view files with results of various analyses, so that, to make an accurate picture of the patient’s condition.
The entire conversation is recorded, it is translated into text format, so that it can then be easily accessed during other consultations. Searching the patient’s medical history for certain keywords is much faster than listening to dozens of hours of audio consultation.
Through all these analysis tools, an online consultation can prove to be more efficient than a face-to-face consultation, where the doctor does not have access to the entire medical history of the patient. And these results can now be obtained much more easily, without leaving the beneficial comfort of the atmosphere at home.
We are in a dental office, with several doctors who provide dental services to patients. A dental treatment usually includes several appointments, with several services, each with certain specific labor and material costs.
The patient does not pay after each visit, he pays cumulatively for several services performed. That’s why the doctor must permanently remember which services he performed, which were collected, what remaining payment is left.
Issuing the tax receipt at the cash register is again a problem. There are hundreds of services provided by the clinic, all of which must be registered with a specific code in the cash register. And the assistant must constantly consult the notebook that keeps track of the codes that must be entered at the cash register when a certain service is collected.
And this operation represents an important source of errors, very often it happens that the amount in the house does not correspond to the theoretical amount collected. And this mismatch leads to suspicions and unpleasant dialogues.
The problem is solved simply and quickly by using cloud services for the management of medical clinics. All the services offered by the clinic are saved in the cloud database, and after each appointment, the doctor checks off the services provided from the predefined list.
The amount owed by the patient is automatically calculated, the ticked services are sent to the cash register, which issues the correct receipt, without the nurse’s intervention. Code typing errors are eliminated, the cashing operation is much faster and correct.
The patient can pay only partially, the rest of the payment is automatically saved, discounts and offers can be defined.
In addition, the application calculates the salary of the doctor who collaborates with the clinic and provides medical services. According to the agreement, the doctor receives a percentage of the price of the work performed. The application permanently calculates the amount related to a doctor, saves in the database the payments made to that doctor, so that, at any moment, a complete analysis of the doctor-clinic collaboration can be made.
The unique, cloud-type databases, which contain the patient’s medical history, populated within the various consultations carried out by different doctors over the years, represent a valuable support in the diagnosis of the patient. It is much more advantageous for the doctor to sweep through the history recorded automatically in digital format over the years, than to tell the patient in a fragmented and incoherent way from the subjective memory.
And yet, not every doctor can access a patient’s medical data. These data are the property of the patient and they can only be accessed with his consent. It is not enough for the doctor to have an account in the database, that doctor must obtain the consent of that patient to access the data.
The patient comes face-to-face to the doctor for a consultation, or has an online appointment with that doctor from a distance. He wants that doctor to give him a diagnosis based on the results of medical tests saved in his medical history.
The doctor agrees to consult him, but cannot access the analysis results, even if they are saved in the same database. In this context, the doctor sends in the system a request for access to the medical data of the respective patient.
The patient, who has just requested a doctor’s consultation, receives via SMS/Whatsapp a unique code issued by the application. Send this code to the doctor, the doctor enters it into the system and automatically, his access request is approved.
From this moment, the web page where the doctor only saw the patient’s name, is populated with all the information from the patient’s medical history: consultations, prescriptions, medical letters, analysis results, etc.
Through this mechanism, the patient can request a consultation from any available doctor, providing him with all the data necessary for the diagnosis, without the patient having to go through all the bureaucracy related to a visit to a medical clinic.
Digitalization Solutions
