Any kind of error in the healthcare industry can cost someone their life. It is overwhelming to see the patients and their family members struggling to do all things right to ensure patients’ well-being. It will be rather unfair if accidental error from the hospital management complicates a patient’s life or adds trouble to their family members. To ease out some complexity in a patient’s life and improve management of the hospital, Healthcare portal development is your solution. To understand how this customer portal can turn out to be beneficial for the healthcare industry, keep reading.
Data Centralization
There is no second thought about how much data goes behind one patient. From patients booking the appointment to their last visit to the hospital, there is a lot of information that goes between these. It gets challenging when you have to find specific information about the patients from the data of thousands of patients, especially when it comes to answering patients’ questions on calls and emails and sharing reports and other documents.
To manage all these patient details and to make them easily accessible to patients and support staff, a customer portal is a solution. With a portal, patients can access their reports, status of ongoing treatment, medicine data, pathology reports, radiology reports, etc. Thus, they do not need to call or visit the hospital in person to find these reports. This helps the patients while filing for insurance as the portal will have all the entries in sequential order.
The healthcare staff will have a 360-degree view of the doctor’s schedule, number of appointments, number of scheduled operations, patient medical history, payment details, discharge process, and so on. Based on these details, the admin staff can prepare NDAs, patients and guardians permits before operations, etc., and the nursing staff can pre-prepare the operation theaters and stock medical equipment and medicines that are required.
All these processes get sorted when all the details about the patient and doctors are available in one place, eliminating chances of misinterpretation.
Streamlined Workflow
As we discussed above, the portals help us centralize the data. To manage the data in future, it is important to have a streamlined process. Let’s start from first. Hundreds of patients call the hospital to book an appointment. The reception staff has to manually book the appointments. This process is not only time consuming but also an invitation to errors that the staff might overbook the appointments or book the appointment for a doctor that is not available for the day.
Such errors can create a huge impact on patient satisfaction and hospital/clinic image. Thus, the patient portal is a perfect solution to solve all these issues and streamline the workflow. Here is how the healthcare portal will help patients and hospitals:
- Online Appointment Booking: The patients can book appointments by filtering the parameters like date, doctor’s availability, first visit or a follow-up, emergency, etc.
- Easy Login: The portal allows quick login for new or existing patients. It will generate a profile where patients can see all their details.
- Schedule Management for Doctors: The doctors can log in and see the date, time, and a number of appointments scheduled for the day. Also, it will show the separate list for surgeries and the follow-ups after that.
- Laboratory Management: The details regarding pathology lab, radiology lab, Operation theaters, clean rooms, blood bank, etc. can be managed on the portal itself.
Promotes Telemedicine
There are patients who are waiting in queue to collect reports or to visit doctors for small issues that actually do not require in-person visits. We can use a patient portal to reduce the number of patient visits that actually do not require in-person appointments.
On portals, we can add the option of telemedicine, meaning we can book an appointment for an audio or video call with the doctor. Thus, this way, the hospital would not be crowded, and the doctor can take more appointments for the people that are actually sick and require immediate attention. Also, the lab reports can be uploaded online so that patients or their family members do not have to run to the lab to collect reports; they can view them on the portal itself.
Reduces Errors
Generally, the appointments are booked on calls where patients verbally explain their issues to the receptionist, and they, according to their understanding, book the appointments. It is highly possible that the staff misinterpreted the patient. Such situations can turn out to be critical if the patient is going through something that requires immediate attention.
If you have the same thing in the written form, then it will eliminate the miscommunication factor, and the action can be taken depending on the urgency.
Improves Finance Management
Like all the other processes, even finances can be managed and cleared on portals. All the payment details will be visible to the patient. They can clear the bills by making digital payments. Also, all the bills and total amount will be available on the portal so that it is easier for patients during the insurance recovery, if any.
For hospitals, it gets better to handle online transactions as they will not have to deal with the cash that requires regular visits to banks for depositing cash. This helps the accounting staff in clearing the accounts daily hassle-free.
Provides Hassle-free Customer Experience
The purpose behind leveraging the portal is to improve customer experience and simplify the workflow of the healthcare industry. The portal helps in transparency, personalized services to patients, and the ability to have clear communication with negligible errors or misinterpretations. Thus, such a customer-focused view helps in improving engagement and satisfaction.
Once you have your portal active, the patients or their family members do not need to call the hospitals every time for information. They can easily log in and have a clear view of all the details related to the respective patient. The additional features like sending personalized messages and reminders about the appointment, follow-ups, and checkups can add more to the customer experience.
Conclusion
CRM customer portal can modify the way the data is managed in the healthcare industry. The data centralization will give patients and your staff members all the required details in one place. To reduce the time gone behind, calls for appointments can now be utilized for other important tasks. Storing the data digitally reduces the chances of human errors and verbal miscommunications and improves finance management.
The features like telemedicine reduce trips to hospitals which means no more overcrowded hospitals. Thus, all these features combined help the healthcare industry to provide hassle-free and the best customer experience to the ones already struggling.
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