Modern healthcare providers leverage multiple digital solutions honed to streamline and facilitate their routine and ensure the topmost level of medical services their patients receive. However, as standalone software products, these solutions often fail to fully achieve their goal of providing maximum satisfaction for both clinical institutions and their patients. All healthcare organization’s needs can be covered by building a hospital management system.
This article will explain the essence of a hospital management system (HMS), highlight its benefits for all categories of users, identify the main requirements and cost of developing hospital management software, and outline a foolproof algorithm of how to make a hospital management system software.
What is a Hospital Management Information System?
Regular shop floor activities of healthcare institutions embrace numerous workflows, including patient care and management, laboratory tests, accounting and billing, bed management, personnel management, and more. Besides, clinics deal with tons of different data that require processing, analyzing, and presenting as reports. When they develop a hospital management system, they bring all these proceedings under one virtual roof and create a digital hub that allows clinical staff to perform all necessary operations quickly and efficiently by automating a fair share of them, access and exchange relevant information seamlessly, and enhance collaboration across the organization.
What perks do health industry stakeholders get when medical facilities build a hospital management system?
The advantages of Hospital Management Software
Doctors, patients, and hospitals are the major parties involved in the healthcare process. How does the development of hospital management software improve their day-to-day activities?
Doctors. There are two significant aspects of their routine that HMS revolutionizes.
Schedules and appointments. The system allows physicians to automate and manage patient visit schedules, minimize missed appointments, and regulate patient flows. As a result, the workload distribution is optimized, preventing personnel burnout and boosting workforce productivity and efficiency.
Telemedicine. This is an excellent tool for providing remote care. Doctors can consult patients no matter where both parties are and hold virtual meetings with their colleagues to discuss diagnoses and share medical data.
Patients. What assets do they get from being connected to the HMS of their healthcare facility?
Medical history. The collection of files related to their medical case is always at their fingertips, including test results, records about visits to various specialists, past surgeries, prescriptions, allergies, medical insurance details, and other documentation.
Secure personal data. Patients can be sure their personal information is kept safe and no unauthorized people will tamper with it.
Hospitals. When they create hospital management software, healthcare facilities enjoy the following boons.
Operational efficiency. Across-the-board automation of hospital workflows allows clinics to better manage their personnel, patients, resources, and inventory, increase workforce productivity, reduce red tape, and cut healthcare costs, thus improving brand reputation and fostering loyalty among clientele.
Data security and regulatory compliance. Adhering to numerous legal regulations in this domain (HIPAA, GDPR, CPPA, etc.) is a major challenge for medical institutions. A well-crafted HMS enables them to track their compliance constantly and ensure rock-solid data protection.
Statistics. Thanks to hospital management software, all relevant statistics concerning the facility, staff, and patients are always within easy reach of the clinic’s management and rank-and-file personnel.
Given these (and plenty of other) weighty benefits, it is no wonder that the healthcare management solution development niche manifests a sharp spike, with the market expected to top $50 billion next year. Evidently, your medical organization can’t do without such a solution if it wants to stay ahead of the technological curve and obtain a competitive edge over its rivals. But how to create hospital management software that will satisfy your requirements?
How to develop a Hospital Management System: A roadmap to follow
As a seasoned healthcare SaaS application development company, Dworkz’s qualified and certified team has devised an 8-step algorithm that we adhere to when developing hospital management software from scratch.
Step 1. Conducting market research
Before embarking on an HMS development project, our engineers conduct extensive research on the niche, studying issues related to the operation of healthcare facilities, understanding their needs, identifying pain points, and analyzing competition in the sector.
Step 2. Dealing with development challenges
There are some issues concerning medical solution development that should be prioritized during the SDLC, namely HIPAA compliance, clinical decision support, usability and user adoption, and product scalability. Besides, there are some common software development aspects (system architecture, user-centered design, the choice of development methodology, the selection of data integration strategy, and others) that our developers tackle at this phase.
Step 3. Opting for the right HMS type
This is the responsibility of the system’s future users. They should choose among several categories, steering by the functions they expect the software to perform.
Subject-based systems are honed to convert all patients’ dossiers into digital format within Electronic Health Records (EHR) or Electronic Medical Records (EMR).
Task-based systems help the managerial staff assign tasks to appropriate personnel members and supervise their execution.
Operational and tactical systems classify medical data and make it available to specific departments and individuals according to their user statuses.
Administrative systems handle data related to patient-doctor interactions (medical history, treatment plans, prescriptions, etc.).
Financial and billing systems. From here, all treatment records are directed to the patients’ insurance agencies, thus accelerating the billing routine.
Step 4. Determining functionality roster
This stage is greatly conditioned by the HMS’s type and is also under total customer control. They identify the features they want to have in the future solution (patient/doctor registration, EHR, appointments and scheduling, inventory management, billing and payments, pharmacy management, reports, you name it).
Step 5. UI/UX design
Here, our specialists pinpoint user roles (administrators, doctors, lab staff, nurses, patients), consider different scenarios of utilizing the system, and consider future users’ level of digital expertise. Armed with this information and relying on SaaS UX best practices (prioritizing usability, intuitive navigation, and no-frills minimalistic UI), they map out user journeys and then create a prototype containing essential interface elements.
Step 6. Choosing the development approach
How do you make hospital management software a part of your digital ecosystem? There are two basic ways. You can either buy a boxed HMS solution or commission a bespoke product from an IT outsourcing company. In the first case, you can quickly onboard a cost-efficient garden-variety solution. In contrast, the second option lets you choose the type, functionalities, scalability opportunities, and other customizable product characteristics, avoiding regular licensing payments that may amount to a significant sum down the line.
Step 7. Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
An MVP, as the first functional version of the product with its core functionalities, is geared toward testing its safety, effectiveness, and feasibility. It is submitted for pilot usage by the trial audience, after which the project team fine-tunes the solution, using the collected feedback as guidelines.
Step 8. Delivering a full-fledged solution
At this final stage, we deploy the finished product in the working environment. As a responsible vendor, we stay with our customers as long as necessary to ensure the personnel can use the system properly, monitor the HMS’s performance, introduce minor corrections, and respond to user queries related to software operation.
To maximize the value of a hospital management system, you should understand your expectations concerning its scope and operational characteristics.
Zooming in on the major requirements for an HMS
What does the best-in-class hospital management system look like?
It is intuitive and easy to use, allowing all clinic employees to handle it effortlessly without a steep learning curve.
Its UI is plain, uncluttered, and straightforward.
It enables the administration to establish role-based access to the system in accordance with workforce members’ responsibilities.
The information it contains is updated in real-time and is secure from unauthorized handling.
It is HIPAA-compliant.
Its flexible architecture can be upscaled with the growth of the user audience or expansion of the hospital’s service roster.
A comprehensive feature list deserves special mention. It can contain a variety of functionalities that the healthcare facility needs in its shop-floor procedures, but the must-have features are as follows:
Electronic health records. EHR is a consolidated data storage that allows hospital personnel to access medical histories, lab test results, vaccination records, medications, and other details, forming a 360-degree view of patients.
Patient management. It should be synchronized with EHR to streamline and facilitate patient onboarding and discharging routines, handle remote counseling, and automate communication between patients and doctors via reminders, alerts, and follow-ups that positively impact customer engagement and treatment outcomes.
Appointment scheduling. The integrated calendar feature enables people to select a specialist for consultation, find a convenient appointment slot, and book a visit. After this, patients receive an approval notification.
Billing and financial management. With this functionality in place, hospitals can easily manage expense tracking, billing, budget planning, tax calculations, and other financial operations.
Reporting and analytics. This capability is geared towards assessing personnel efficiency, performance gap identification, strategic planning, and improvement of medical service quality by providing decision-makers with data-driven insights concerning various aspects of a hospital’s functioning.
When you have finalized the feature scope, it is time to settle the question of cost.
How much does it cost to build a Hospital Management System?
There is no one-size-fits-all yardstick to determine the budget you will have to allocate for a bespoke HMS. Its size is conditioned by several factors, among which:
Project scope (the number and complexity of features the solution will contain)
Necessary integrations (third-party resources and platforms your system will communicate to)
Tech stack (the more advanced technologies—AI, IoT, BI, Big Data—you fill your product with, the bigger the price tag is)
Team size (more specialists involved in creating the software spells greater expenditures)
Engagement model (dedicated team, time and material, or fixed price have their pros and cons money-wise)
Project completion urgency (the sooner you need the solution, the more you will have to pay for it)
Considering all these factors, developing a high-quality custom hospital management system is a significant investment, typically ranging from $70,000 to $180,000. However, to ensure you get the best value for your money, it’s crucial to partner with a reputable and experienced IT vendor for your HMS project.
Consider Dworkz your trusted partner
We have been present in the software development outsourcing market for two decades, during which we have crafted numerous healthcare products, allowing our specialists to acquire an in-depth understanding of the industry’s nuts and bolts. We not only create top-notch solutions powered by cutting-edge technologies but also conduct their post-deployment support and maintenance, ensuring smooth functioning and exclusive user experience.
Contact us to elevate the operation of your healthcare facility to a new level.
Final thoughts
A hospital management system serves as a digital hub that helps medical organizations streamline and facilitate numerous workflows within the healthcare pipeline. When equipped with the necessary features (EHR, appointment scheduling, patient management, billing, reporting and analytics, and more), it can boost operational efficiency and ensure the speed and quality of services the facility provides. To create a first-class HMS, you should follow a well-thought-out development strategy and enlist a vetted outsourcer to implement the project.