Author: Attune Technologies

Use these simple, cost effective marketing tips for your hospital to make it the preferred choice for patients.

Hospital marketing is challenging to say the least. You can’t really inspire people to come visit a hospital. You know they won’t. However, you need to increase your patient base to do justice to all the investments you have made on your hospital and subtly marketing your brand is the key. We share with you some tips that will help you create a brand awareness with minimum investments.

8 Subtle Marketing Tips to Create Awareness about Your Hospital Brand.

1. Get A Responsive Website

The first thing most potential patients will try to do is go through your website (until and unless it is an emergency and your hospital happens to be the nearest) and find out as much about your hospital as possible, online. So don’t just build a website that displays information about your hospital and your team, but focus on giving patients useful health information to take better care of themselves and their family. Good idea would be to talk about preventive care.

2. Use Social Media Well

The world is on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and the likes are the virtual places where you can reach to create brand awareness with potential customers as well as attract good talent. Appearing on social news feeds often will go a long way in keeping you in the mind of the users. Interesting posts keep people interested. And people remember useful tips and their source.

3. Don’t Underestimate the Power of SEO

You know your potential consumer is going to hit Google, right? When your potential patient searches for best healthcare practice you want your hospital’s website to pop up on the first page. That is what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) does. Get your web developer and content editor to focus on SEO keywords. Hire a SEO consultant, you do not need a full time employee on your payroll for this.

4. Stress on Internal Marketing too

That’s right. Every employee of your hospital is your spokesperson. Get your HR Head to make the employee experience at your hospital great and get them talking good things about their hospital.

5. Give Patient a Chance to Say Wow

Branding is not what you tell your customers, it’s what they tell each other about you. Enhance patient care, and they are sure to remember it for a long time. Give them care and attention and they will speak for you. Get your Operations Head to work towards giving the patient an exceptional experience. Nothing works better than Word of Mouth.

6. Shoot Emails

Emails are effective. Get your IT team to maintain a subscriber email list and share helpful informative emails based on the patient’s illness. It tells your patients that you care for them even after they leave your hospital. Maintaining communication with useful, helpful and high value information is key to building a good hospital brand.

7. Showcase

Get your good work out there as testimonials, videos, patient stories etc. Post on your website, post and re-post on social media, show it on the LCDs in the hospital waiting areas. Talk about break through treatments in interviews, conferences and public forums.

8. Automate your operations

The patient and the family is already stressed when they are in a hospital. Make their experience simple and easy by using a reliable Hospital Information System (HIS). This will make a world of a difference in the experience right from registration to patient discharge. Another pain point for patients is the way hospitals manage health insurance claims and settlement. Using a robust revenue cycle management solution (RCM) would play an important role in taking the stress out of hospital insurance claims management.

Show your patients and the society in general that you care about their health and well-being and you really do not want them to reach a stage where they have to go to a hospital.

Simple things you can do right now to eliminate prescription errors.

As practicing doctors, you may be aware that medical errors are extremely common in hospitals and clinical practices. These errors could either occur during the writing of the prescriptions or due to unintentional and inaccurate medical decisions, ultimately harming the patients.

A few years ago, the Supreme Court of India ruled against a large hospital,passing a verdict with the highest penalty till date on them. One of the points that was held against the hospital was a prescription error caused by the treating doctor.The ruling held the hospital management responsible for the error, basically communicating that what a doctor does to the patient in hospital premises is responsibility of the hospital.

The point of bringing up this incident is basically to bring to light a couple of important points:

• Prescription errors can be extremely damaging to both hospital and patients
• The management of a hospital is also held responsible if it happens in their premises

Faults in dose determination, omitted transcription, poor handwriting & misinterpretation are common sources of prescription errors, and they occur more commonly than you think.

Here are 4 process changes you can do immediately to contain prescription errors right away.

1. Include Drug Allergies and Reactions in Pre-Assessment

Pre-Assessment is the first documented point of interaction between a doctor and a patient. Make sure both your OPD assessment sheets as well as the IPD pre-assessment sheets have a section on drug allergies and reactions.

Make it a mandatory SOP that residents should obtain this information from the patients/attendants and ensure this is logged in the patients’electronic medical record

2. Include Medication Sheet as an IPD Record

Assess your IPD record sheets and include Medication Sheet as a mandatory part of IPD records. A Medication Sheet is a log dedicated to drugs – prescription, administration, monitoring and documentation. Make sure that the Medication Sheet has a prominent field for mentioning drug allergies and reactions and make it mandatory to fill up this information. The sheet should contain drug name, dose, frequency, special instructions, drug administration confirmation and reactions to drugs.

However, using an electronic information management system can completely eliminate the chance of an error at this stage. A central log for medicines on the hospital or practice management system will give the doctor a complete picture of the drug history including the current medication and allergies or reactions. This will help the doctor foresee some drug interactions and a possible prescription error can be prevented.

3. Maintain an updated High Risk Medication List

Get a high risk medication list made by your Pharmaco-Theraphatic Committee and make sure that it is updated from time to time. Make this list available to all your doctors and at all nursing stations. Also ensure this is easily accessible in your practice management system.

Doctors can consult this list in case of any doubt about the risky nature of any drug and the possible reactions or interactions it will have within the body. Till the list is developed, get your doctors to use www.epocrates.com to counter check any drug that they are doubtful of prescribing.

4. Track Medication Errors

Make tracking medication errors, on a monthly basis, compulsory. When the management starts taking medication errors seriously and investigating them, the prescribing errors will automatically start coming down. Medical audit around prescriptions will also help. Emphasize the importance of medical audit around prescriptions among your doctors.

Using electronic medical record system and automating your practice with an intelligent information management solution will not only make your operations more efficient, they will also reduce prescription related errors and other human errors dramatically.

Start implementing these and watch your system transform. To know more about how you could reduce prescription errors in your practice, click here.

Things you can implement right away to eliminate the bottlenecks in your discharge process and improve revenues.

We understand that as the CXO of a leading hospital,offering enhanced patient care while maximizing revenues, cutting costs and achieving operational efficiency are some your top priorities.

One of the primary factors that affect the operational efficiency is the delays that occur in the patient discharge process. The average time taken to discharge patients in most hospitals isin the order of 5-6 hours. While the delays seem inevitable at the time of discharge, they are a direct result of poor bed management, lack of proper coordination between the medical staff and lack of efficient planning from the time of patient admission.

The good news is that it can be changed. An efficient hospital discharge system can be as fast as a hotel check out with the right tools.

Here we list 6 process changes you can implement right away to eliminate delays in discharge and admit new patients faster.

1. Efficient billing system

Make sure your discharge process is designed such that consumables and procedures are charged at the time of consumption itself. This will ensure correct and transparent billing without confusion at the time of discharge. Having a centralized billing system between the various departments and facilities will allow easy real-time billing, making this process much easier. Most importantly, your billing department can provide details about interim pending amount at any point that the patient wants to know. Interim bill payments will also ensure that the patient does not ask for a discount at the point of final payment, expediting the discharge process.

2. Electronic charts and medical records

One big reason for delays in patient discharges is the discharge summary completion. Usually, junior doctors fill the discharge summary at the last minute, after the consultant has confirmed patient discharge. Updating the patient file on a regular basis will ensure that the complete information from the time patient is admitted is recorded, allowing faster discharge summary dictation. One way to automate this step is to maintain central electronic patient charts and adopt an efficient EMR system. This will allow the medical staff to update observations, medication, treatment plans etc. directly to the chart making the discharge summary process much easier.

3. Discharge planning during admission

Emphasize on a care plan – even if your clinical team says there may be uncertainty due to variations and a tentative discharge date cannot be put down. A care plan is the planned blueprint of a patient’s medical care that also predicts the expected outcome and tentative discharge date. Things may go a bit out of plan at times, but still everyone in the system is ready for a discharge, which ensures that the time taken is minimal.

4. Improve care coordination

The discharge process is lengthy and requires clearance from several departments once the consultant approves the patient for discharge. This is usually the longest step in the process and on an average takes well over 2 hours. Instead of running from pillar to post getting approval, one way to ensure all teams process discharge fast is to automate. Having an effective hospital information system will connect the various departments in the hospital on a central platform, making the communication between the different departments seamless. When the consultant triggers the discharge, the concerned departments will be notified right away, and can give clearance at the earliest time. This will slash the delays and make it possible to prepare the final bill in a matter of minutes.

5. Better bed management

There is usually a lot of confusion surrounding bed management in hospitals. A new patient who needs to be admitted has to typically wait for hours sometimes before being assigned a bed in the in-patient ward. One way to tackle this problem is to establish a central management system that triggers bed cleaning notice during discharge itself. This way, there is no delay between a patient leaving the hospital and a new patient being admitted. Further, having a centralized bed management system provides a quick snapshot on which beds are available making room and bed assignments to new patients more efficient.

6. Ensure Discharge Medication Reaches the Ward ASAP

Another step in the discharge process that may cause delays is getting discharge medication from the pharmacy. Confirming the discharge in advance and establishing automated inventory management systems in place ensures the excess medication return and discharge medication issue to the wards can be completed well ahead of time, easing out a major bend in the discharge process.

BONUS POINT: Deploy a robust insurance claims management process

Processing insurance claims is often a major area of time delay, and therefore patient dissatisfaction, at hospitals. What many people don’t realise is that the process for insurance claims and patient discharge actually starts right from the time the patient arrives at the hospital. Improving efficiency at each step in this activity by using a hospital insurance claims management solution can go a long way in avoiding delays and ensuring a fast, hassle-free patient discharge.

Patient discharge from the hospital involves both medical and non-medical teams working in tandem to ensure smooth operation. Even minor glitches can result in a very dissatisfied patient in spite of the top notch patient care at the hospital. These tweaks in your discharge process can work wonders for your patient satisfaction and make the operation seamless.

By implementing the above changes in the process and automating a large part of the hospital systems, it is possible to eliminate delays and bring down the entire discharge process to a bare minimum. The exit is as important as the entry.