What About MedicaGate?

Hospitals spend close to 25% of their revenue on medicines and consumables. This inventory is spread across the hospital in various wards, OT and in pharmacies. Unless these stock movements are tracked and stocks verified regularly, there is a high possibility of loss, either intentionally or unintentionally. MedicaGate provides solutions for close tracking of inventory through many controls. For example, items marked as billable cannot be 'consumed' without any bill. There is facility to track indents for various departments to see which department is asking what consumables at what frequency. Controls can be put in such a way that items are issued only against indents. There is an option to track expiry date of medicines so that unused medicines can be returned well before their expiry dates. Stock verification at regular intervals is another important function.Tracking of stock adjustments by analyzing breakages and missing items is another way to ensure that these do not go out of hand.

MedicaGate also provides an option for automated calculation of all payments to be made to consulting doctors or referral doctors. We support payment calculations based on very complex rules. For example, we can calculate payments to doctors based on category of patient, specialty of doctor, type of service provided, whether insurance patient or not etc.. The amount can be fixed or calculated as a percentage after deducting some fixed amount. There is also a facility to make adjustments, if any, after the calculations are done. There is a similar facility available to calculate the payments to be made to outhouses for tests sent to them as well.

Long term success and growth comes from standardized operations and processes that reduce dependency on knowledge and expertise of specific set of employees. By implementing a product like MedicaGate, large hospitals can bring standardization in their systems. As hospitals across the world evolve and bring in new standards, hospitals can be confident that MedicaGatewill bring those standards to their operations also.

MedicaGate provides many tools to analyze the performance of hospitals. Though there is a lot of data available in MedicaGate, unless it is made available for easy analysis, it won't serve any purpose. MedicaGateprovides two easy ways to achieve the data analysis. One is through the use of Report Builder. Our Report Builder feature does not require any knowledge of databases and table fields. The user can simply select the type of report he wants (whether tabular details report, summary totals report or trend report), date range, pick the fields for reporting, pick the grouping, sorting criteria and then apply filters (like for example report of only revenue from Neurosurgery department). Another option for data analysis is through the use of Business Intelligence tools. Today there are excellent visualization tools available to display the data of a hospital. MedicaGatehas partnered with many BI (Business Intelligence) vendors to provide graphically rich analysis facility.

For many large hospitals, the revenue from insurance and government or corporate sponsored health schemes is becoming a big portion of their revenue. Unless the data is maintained well and presented well, receiving payments from these entities is not easy and it takes time. MedicaGate provides many facilities to track the insurance cases. First, it makes sure all the insurance information is collected properly. There is a facility for automatic calculation of co-pay and deductibles based on the insurance company. Each bill item can be split into patient co-pay amount and sponsor amount. MedicaGate also comes with the facility to create claims for specific patients by combining all the bills related to that specific treatment and then combine the claims of one insurance company into a claim batch. Using our Report Builder for claims data, hospital can track the pending dues easily. There is an additional facility to import insurance receipts in Excel files and reconcile easily with the pending insurance claims

A major challenge many medium size hospitals & clinics face is in growth, as they face many issues in retaining employees. People usually join small hospitals and then they move to bigger hospitals after a few years’ experience & understanding of the systems. The only way to keep operations independent of employees is to have a good operations system in place.MedicaGatehelps in this through implementation of best practices, found insome of the best hospitals. There are many controls and reporting facilities in place that will alert the management. For example, rates are standardized and are not left for individual to decide. Once the hospital puts in good processes and systems, everyone can focus on better patient care and improving patient satisfaction. That is what leads to growth. Expanding to new centers or opening additional departments becomes easy once the systems are in place. Training of new people at new centers becomes easy as processes are standardized.

One of the common concerns of many hospital managers is on the availability of good Hospital Management System and how fast they can recover data, in case of any system failure. We know that all electronic systems can fail at some point or the other. It is not about the failure, but how fast can a Hospital Management Systemrecover from failure that matters. With the remote support capability built intoMedicaGate, our systems are easily recoverable from failures. We advise hospitals on appropriate backup and recovery measures so that they can recover from any issues easily with minimal loss of time and data.

The main goal of hospitals across the world is to move the patient data into electronic form. Today except for hospitals, most of the data, in banks, retail, schools or government, has been converted to electronic form. It improves speed as there is no physical movement of paper; it improves accountability as there is a trace of when, which action is completed and when the next action is due, and improves data analysis. With the shortage of space in hospitals in developing countries, it makes it inevitable to move all patient data to electronic form sooner or later. The biggest challenge faced by hospitals in moving to EMR (Electronic Medical Records) is to make doctors and nurses use computers to enter data. In most cases, doctors and nurses feel it takes more time to enter data in computers compared to paper. MedicaGatehas done a lot of work to address this issue. Our system is supported through Tablets and Smart Phones that makes data entry easier compared to entering through keyboards. We have also worked hard to reduce the number of key strokes needed to enter data. Another facility we provide is easy customization of clinical forms to meet the doctor’s needs. This will ensure that the doctors need not change the forms they are using for many years even if they move to electronic form.