Epidemics have long been a perennial threat to human populations, spreading quickly and covering vast parts of the population with illness or death. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the devastating effects that widespread outbreaks can cause on healthcare systems, economies, and societies at large. Towards this end, hospitals and health institutes globally are actively looking for better ways to manage resources, track patients, and minimize the transmission of infectious diseases. Among such practices was the implementation of Hospital Management Software (HMS), through which health care operation cannot be streamlined and patient care also could not be developed to prevent the diseases from staying efficiently.
This article discusses how epidemics affect healthcare systems and how hospital management software is used in the management and containment of infectious diseases.
The Nature of Epidemics
Epidemics are widespread diseases in a short period, within a specific geographical location or society. They are usually very infectious and hard for health systems to handle. The epidemics recorded recently include H1N1 flu, Ebola, and most currently, COVID-19, which has been so intense and overwhelming the whole healthcare infrastructure of the world, hence leaving it with the urgent need for technological solutions that will also improve efficient care provision.
Challenges Presented by Epidemics
Resource Management: Epidemics lead hospitals to shortages of essential resources like equipment, PPEs, and even healthcare staff. It then becomes very crucial to manage such sources resourcefully in order to avoid complete depletion and ensure there is proper care for each patient. During an epidemic, several patients are admitted in a short period. A hospital needs to keep multiple patient histories together while keeping the data safe and secure, including the progress of test reports and treatments and recovery status.
Coordination among Departments: Because the contagion of epidemics, effective communication and coordination among departments within a hospital like emergency, laboratories, and isolation wards is important. Anything less than that would result in a delay of treatment to the patient, putting the safety of the patient at risk.
Minimize Contact: In a highly contagious outbreak, contact between patients and healthcare providers should be as little as possible. Under traditional methods, managing patient records and care delivery are often done face-to-face, which increases the cross-transmission risk.
How HMS Can Help
Hospital Management Software is conceived to maximize the flow of hospital operations, better resources management, and improve effectiveness in the care of a patient. Some functions it carries are scheduling an appointment, billing, inventory management, and electronic medical records. Therefore, in the time of epidemics, HMS would play a vital role in addressing many of the challenges that this sector faces.
1. Real-time Patient Data and Tracking
Centralization of patient data is one of the major advantages of HMS. Patient symptoms, treatments, and progress during an epidemic must be monitored in real time by healthcare providers. With HMS, health professionals can access the information instantly-whether from the hospital or otherwise-so that decision-making can be prompt and care to patients can be timely.
In keeping track of how the patients infected move in the hospital, the system can prevent eventual cross-contamination of such patients between different wards. For example, when a COVID-19 patient needs to be transferred to the ICU, HMS will ensure that the transfer is made with minimal risk of exposure to other patients and staff members.
2. Optimal Resource Use
HMS can automate inventory management, so essential resources like ventilators, drugs, and personal protective equipment, among others, are available at the right time. It can track in real-time the consumptions of such supplies and monitor future depletions. This is important as it will prevent resource draining and ensure healthcare workers have them in place to be used during an epidemic.
For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, those hospitals with efficient HMS could manage supply PPE better to prevent shortages whilst their healthcare workers were kept protected.
3. Integration of Telemedicine
Telemedicine is one of the most valuable tools in this battle as patients can access doctors from remote places. In fact, a good number of HMS platforms nowadays come with telemedicine and enable healthcare providers to both treat and diagnose the patients without visiting the hospital. This limits the spreading of infectious diseases at the waiting rooms besides curbing the pressures on the limited resources available in the hospitals.
Telemedicine features will be utilized for managing patients’ health. These include receiving advice, prescriptions from the doctor, and monitoring one’s own symptoms. The patient is protected from exposure, thus helping hospitals focus on treating the most critical cases.
4. Electronic Health Records for Better Data Management
EHR systems are often found on HMS platforms and keep the medical history of patients safely and accessible in time. EHRs allow health care providers to access the entire medical history of a patient, and such information is deemed essential during epidemics because some underlying conditions may influence the response of a patient to a treatment.
For example, in case an older patient suffering from COVID-19 is aware that s/he suffers from several other pre-existing conditions, such as diabetes and heart problems, treatment can be most efficiently determined. EHRs improve the communication capabilities between hospitals and public health organizations that may provide easier monitoring of the spread of diseases.
5. Minimization of physical interactions
In the outbreak, transmission of the nosocomial infection between patients and health care workers should be limited. HMS helps automate various processes that are part of the patient registration, billing, and prescription management processes with the aim of reducing direct contact of patients with hospital workers. Patients can check-in online and pay their bills online, and prescriptions can be sent through e-mail. This is to reduce the number of patients visiting the hospital to make inquiries or request prescriptions.
Finally, HMS will enable electronic communication among hospital staff and hence abolish all physical contact hence reducing chances of transmission.
6. Data Analysis and Predictive Analytics
With a huge amount of patient data collected, HMS could be useful for ascertaining the transmission dynamics of an epidemic. Infection rates, recovery times, and outcomes from treatment can all track the ways in which disease spreads and can help predict future outbreaks. This information, therefore can better prepare hospitals ahead of time through advanced stockpiling and staffing departments.
Predictive analytics can also identify the high-risk patients and then target the treatment at those patients. For instance, in an influenza epidemic, HMS could identify patients with depressed immunity, flagging them for early intervention in that epidemic.
Case Studies: HMS in Action During Epidemics
Many hospitals worldwide have applied HMSs in containing epidemics. For example, when the COVID-19 virus reached countries such as South Korea and Singapore, many relied on HMS in terms of patient data management, tracking the spread of the disease, and coordinating their treatment efforts. With such hospitals, their massive patients were managed very efficiently and effectively, thus recording lower mortality rates and quicker recovery times.
To those who are familiar with South Korea, the application of hospital management systems has indeed been highly productive during their process of constructing a centralized database on COVID-19 patients. From here, the healthcare providers could keep track of patients in other facilities. The streamlined approach would have accounted for quick and efficient virus control in that country.
Epidemics pose comprehensive challenges to the functioning of healthcare systems, but an HMS is an effective system of resource management, care for patients, and eliminating or reducing infectious disease. HMS enables an improved hospital management in case of an outbreak: builds on the centralization of information about patients, automating their activities, and inducting telemedicine into their schemes. Threats of epidemics will continue to prevent the world from experiencing epidemic outbreaks hence, the embrace of HMS will be a critical factor that will be ensuring that the healthcare system remains prepared in responding to outbreaks promptly and efficiently.
Hospital management software would not only prove to be a tool for managing hospital operations during epidemics but also constitute a very integral part of controlling diseases and thereby preventing them. Health care units would be equipped with the challenges of large outbreaks.
