Choosing a Hospital Management Software for Nursing Homes
October 6, 2020Nursing homes, long-term care facilities, and assisted living centers are meant for patients who have day-to-day care for a chronic illness or disability. Typically, nursing homes cater to senior citizens. In the US alone, 88% of nursing homes residents are 65 years old or above.
Given the pressure of maintaining high care standards at these facilities, a comprehensive Hospital Software for Nursing Homes is recommendable. The big question is, how to tell which software product will be the best fit? In order to understand this clearly, let’s study the challenges and requirements faced by Nursing Homes.
Key Challenges At a Nursing Home or Long Term Care Centre
There are about 15,600 nursing homes in the US, with about 1.66 million beds. That’s roughly 102 beds per nursing home. Given that nursing homes operate round the clock, there are significant challenges in terms of managing staff, patient health, accountability and marketing.
Following is a detailed account of challenges faced by Nursing homes.
- Funding and Revenue
As Health Affairs reports, the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements for Nursing Homes and Long Term Care Centres isn’t very stable. The Medicare program doesn’t cover long term care or assisted living whereas the Medicaid program only covers residents pertaining to poor economic conditions.
This presents several revenue challenges for nursing homes, and calls for cost-cutting and frugal usage of resources.
Therefore, as a Nursing Home manager or facility expert, you should look for a reasonably priced software which comes with smart resource management. Timely delivery of supplies, proper accounting and prompt revenue collection features provided by software products can make your Nursing Home cost-effective.
- Staff Management
Nursing homes have struggled with high staff turnover for a long time. A study shows that the Nurse Aide (NA) turnover in US nursing homes can be close to 100% which is a management nightmare given the average number of patients each nursing home receives.
If your nursing home has to operate with unstable and limited staffing, you need proactive staff management always on your tips.
The staff shifts, payroll and duty assignment should be managed with extreme precision.
Hence, you should look for Staff Management modules in the Hospital management software you’re going to employ. There should be provision for staff profiles, patient-to-staff allotment and abilities to track staff attendance.
- Compliance and Resident Safety
A Skilled Nursing Facility (SNF) requires to meet a number of compliances and government authorizations in order to offer services locally. Some of these are 42 CFR Part 483, Subpart B, and Life Safety Code Survey from the local mayor.
Compliance requirements can only be met if the whole nursing home follows the given guidelines adeptly.
In order to keep the processes aligned and safety standards always met, a Hospital Software for Nursing Homes can play a central role. Many software products provide features like incident reporting, compliance alerts and trend analysis. These features would help the managers in a nursing home to make timely amends, and ensure that compliance standards are enforceable.
- Visitor Management
Visitors are an everyday part of Nursing Homes. On average, a Long Term Care Centre receives much more visitors than general hospitals and clinics. Therefore, the need for a secure and trackable visitor management system is apparent.
Software solutions can make visitor management easy to track and manage. Therefore, it should be an integral part of the software suite you will be adopting for your nursing home.
It should provide cross-platform compatibility for mobile devices and portable computers for instant updates across the board.
SoftClinic Hospital Management Software
SoftClinic Software offers a number of readily adaptable features for Nursing Homes for meeting daily challenges. It’s HIPAA compliant and comes at a competitive market price, offering cost-effective clinical management for Nursing Homes of all sizes. With a sound track record in 40 countries, SoftClinic HMS Software is vetted by professional clinicians.
Key Features of SoftClinic Hospital Software for Nursing Homes
- Generate Prescriptions in less than 60 seconds.
- Easy to use patient visit details (OPD/IPD) modules.
- Prescription in regional language.
- Family wise patient records management
- Various Predefined Certificates.
- Detailed demographic and clinical data analysis.
Conclusion
While searching for the most productive Nursing Home management software, you should look for features that target your needs proficiently. For most Nursing Homes, the primary needs are Patient Management, Cutting costs and increasing the staff’s operational efficiency.
The prevalent solutions on the market provide for most of these features, but choosing the best one will require a strategic decision. SoftClinic is a viable option when it comes to meeting the technological, economical and functional needs for most Nursing Homes.
Remember to demo the software and compare pricing before settling on one.