Hospital Information Systems - Customized to Meet all the Management Needs of a Hospital
Hospital Management systems: Every medical hospital has a hospital management system in place to ensure the smooth functioning and operation of all its administrative and health care duties. Hospital management infrastructures are umbrella terms embracing all aspects of health care and surgical responsibilities, medical human resource training, recruitment and development, hospital financial systems and hospital technology. A medical hospital management infrastructure is vast and requires expertise to run it. Thus, many hospitals employ professional management consultants to conduct research and accordingly implement and maintain the management program. It is imperative that the hospital medical administrative staff also be involved in the intimate handling of the management system to ensure customized health care service.
Hospital Information Systems (HIS): Hospital information systems, HIS, form a major component of medical management systems. This is an era of automation and even hospital management needs to be computerized. Introduced in the 1960s, these systems are also known as clinical management systems or the CIS. HIS involves all aspects of hospital function including financial and administrative management, patient and health care responsibilities and staff billing and infrastructure including equipment maintenance.
Hospital Information technology: A main component of HIS is hospital information technology and hospital management software programs. These two arms of HIS are also referred to as integrated hospital information processing systems (IHIPS). Hospital information technology and hospital management software programs are synonymous aiming to meet all demands and needs of medical staff, surgical teams and patients. The two systems ensure that all billing, tracking, patient care, bed management, pharmacy, counseling and recruitment as well as rotation of surgical teams is on schedule. The presence of automation and software as the mainframe of a hospital administration means that all information has to be processed onto two or three hard disks. In case of any malfunction or crash, the data is still available in another disk. Usually, hospitals keep two to three 'mirror' disks - one in the archives and one under the scrutiny of management personnel. Remote data backup as well as control processing and tracking automated systems ensure the smooth non-stop functioning of these systems.
Financial Management: No hospital can function for one day without proper automated financial management systems in place. The common aspects of FIS include:
» Payroll of hospital staff: Payroll software ensures that employee records including designation, job functions, complaints, holidays and on-duty performance tracking sheets are fed into the main frame computer. Similarly promotions, dismissals, recruitment and training sheets are also maintained.
» Patient accounting: Hospital billing software programs track patient records including medical records, inpatient and outpatient charges. Hospital billing software programs also ensure tracking of patient and bed care management facilities along with pharmacy and infrastructure maintenance charges.
Radiology Information Systems: A radiology information system (RIS) is a computer system that assists radiology services for storing, manipulating and retrieving of information.
» Scheduling: Patient appointments for inpatients and outpatients are scheduled when an order is received. Functions for scheduling the various available radiology staff with the allocated time slots are handled by the radiology information system.