A front desk operator is a patient’s first and last point of contact with a hospital or health center. This is the individual who is responsible for the nature of a patient’s first impression of your institution. Since the saying goes ‘the first impression is the best impression’, it is very important to keep your front desk operator satisfied and smiling to welcome and bid farewell to your patients.
While it may not look like much, the above said job role can become quite overwhelming depending on the number of incoming patients, the frequency of call queries, etc. Hospital management systems (HMS), an integral component of modern-day healthcare, provide front desk operators with the tools they need to make their jobs easier, while also ensuring that the patient registration process is smooth and efficient.
In this blog post, we will look at how an HMS can improve your hospital's front desk operations.
Inquiry
Providing details about the hospital and its procedures is a responsibility that front desk operators face daily. They would also be required to provide estimates, information about the offerings of your clinic/hospital, insurance coverage, and the availability of beds, rooms, doctors, therapists, and operation theaters. With the information available in the HMS database, new recruitments and trainees find it easier to answer the questions that patients fire at them.
Patient Registration
Patient registration is a lengthy process including collection of patient demographics, documents for ID proof, previous health records, and insurance details, entering them into the system, issuing patient ID or card, etc. These tasks have to be carried with no scope for error.
An HMS considerably reduces the scope for error and stores all the information on a single patient together. The database also adds the test reports, diagnoses, and doctors’ prescriptions to the existing data on the patient. By integrating the HMS with the hospital's electronic medical record (EMR) system, it becomes possible to create a single patient file by linking the HMS database with information from other systems in the hospital. This way, the next time the patient visits the hospital, there is no need for the front desk operator to collect and enter all the information a second time.
An HMS can also track the check-in and check-out details of patients, thereby helping calculate hospital room charges for patients who have been admitted for more than a day.
Appointment Scheduling
The front desk operator is in charge of direct or on-call appointments. This task requires access to live updates on the status and availability of all doctors, staff, wards, beds, rooms, and operation theatres in the hospital. An HMS tracks the real-time status of these across the different departments of the hospital, enabling the front desk operator to easily inform the patient when and where a particular doctor would be available.
An integrated and digitalized database is one of the more attractive features of the HMS. It prevents the staff from having to plod through thick registers and check-in details of doctors.
Billing
Hospital billing is a complicated process with a high scope for error since the expenses of a single patient have to be collected from the different departments of the hospital and computed. In most hospitals, this responsibility falls on the shoulders of the front desk operator. With an HMS, the expenses of the patient are entered into the database as soon as they come into effect, and the responsibility of the front desk operator gets reduced to merely receiving the payment.
The work experience of your front desk operator can be improved even further with Insta’s cloud-based hospital management system which can be accessed on any system, anytime, anywhere. If you are in Dubai or Adu Dhabi, with Insta’s entry into the list of NABIDH and Malaffi connected EMRs, we’ll now be able to integrate the medical records of your patients with their records from other hospitals and clinics.
The front desk operator has to maintain good patient communication, show empathy towards ailing and recovering patients who show up at any time of the day, and have all the necessary information at hand. An overworked and unhappy employee cannot complete these responsibilities satisfactorily.
Insta can reduce the workload of your front desk operator by sending automated messages to the rest of the hospital and offering a database with dependable information. This way, your staff is kept content to take care of your patients. Want to know more? Book now for a free demo!
