A poor patient journey can adversely impact patient satisfaction, health outcomes and hospital revenue, but research shows it can be improved through various means – such as better bed management, timely information access, and reduced human error. How? By using effective hospital information systems.
By streamlining the patient journey, MasterCare supports high quality care, productive staff, and profitable hospitals.
Fast and smooth pre-admission processes
Gathering patient data pre-admission has traditionally been a time-intensive and laborious task for hospital staff. MasterCare’s Digital Front Door transforms this process into a quick and seamless digital interaction.
Patients click a link to complete all the essential documentation, including their demographic information, next of kin/emergency contact details, admission and referring details, and relevant medical history.
The solution also allows hospital staff to gather crucial financial data, such as the patient’s insurance status, compensation claim details and health fund eligibility.
Armed with this information, hospitals can create a fee estimate and calculate the probable gap payment.
By having this information upfront, hospitals can provide patients with the opportunity to give informed financial consent electronically – ahead of time and have one less thing to worry about on admission.
For hospitals and staff, the benefits include reduced cost-avoidance, less time spent on administrative tasks, minimising potential human error and streamlined patient admissions.
Seamless documentation and reporting
If there’s one thing that frustrates staff and patients alike, it’s task duplication. Needing to repeat or re-input information is a waste of time, energy and resources.
The Patient Administration System by MasterCare puts an end to needless replication. Once a patient is admitted, it automatically pre-populates fields with all the supplied information. Reporting and record-keeping can all be conducted in one place, facilitating speed and efficiency.
By providing easy access to digital data – a prerequisite for leveraging advanced technologies like artificial intelligence – it enables hospitals to uncover deeper insights and make smarter decisions.
It also assists staff to conduct a range of tasks from patient admission to discharge, such as:
• managing bed allocation and inquiries
• printing of patient wrist and ankle bands
• clinical handovers.
Tracking the surgical journey to optimise efficiency and safety
Private hospitals conduct two-thirds of elective surgeries in Australia, making them a key revenue stream for these hospitals.
MasterCare’s Patient Administration System enables the entire surgical journey to be tracked, helping clinical staff provide a safe and efficient patient experience.
For example, it captures:
• details of the patient and the procedure to help ensure the right person is undergoing the right operation
• which team members are involved in the procedure
• the times patients enter and exit the pre-surgical bay, operating theatre and recovery room
• important clinical data related to the surgery and recovery, such as any unusual bleeds or a longer than expected recovery time.
It also gathers data to help ensure hospitals can claim all costs relevant to the procedure, (such as prosthetics) and makes gaps easily visible, supporting optimal use of theatre time.
Easy record keeping and daily patient management
For day-to-day patient care, MasterCare’s Inpatient EMR allows staff to locate everything related to a patient’s episode of care in one place – including assessment forms, observation charts, progress notes, medication orders, allergy alerts and more.
With our patient journey board, staff can plan all the tasks that need to be done for each patient. The patient’s entire care team can access the board to see who is responsible for what, helping to optimise safety and care quality.
When it’s time for the patient to head home, staff can use the Inpatient EMR to rapidly generate a discharge summary based on stored information. As one of the few systems on My Health Record’s conformance register, they can then upload it directly to My Health Record.
Personalised post-discharge care
In the past, care after discharge typically required a nurse to call every patient. Not only is this a time-consuming endeavour, but not every patient wishes to be followed up by phone.
MasterCare’s Digital Front Door provides an opportunity to deliver a more personalised post-discharge patient experience. It enables patients to input their preference regarding nurse follow-up and provide feedback about their hospital experience.
Smooth patient journeys for profitable hospitals
While offering a seamless patient journey has merits in itself, it also has tangible benefits for the bottom line. The MasterCare suite can support private hospital productivity and profitability by:
• enhancing staff efficiency
• optimising bed and theatre utilisation
• increasing patient throughput while maintaining high standards of care
• increased accuracy and velocity of billing, facilitating rapid payment processing.
To find out more about how MasterCare can help your staff create streamlined patient journeys, book a demo of our hospital solution or contact our sales team.
