The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveals that the total number of Americans suffering from chronic mental and physical health conditions comes to a whopping 91% of the USD3.8 trillion the country spends annually on healthcare. The right kind of care management helps healthcare organizations bring down these costs while enhancing care quality as well as efficiency.
What Exactly are Care Management Solutions?
Care management means a comprehensive line of solutions and services that assist patients with complex or chronic conditions in managing their health. Care management’s key objective is to foster patient health. To achieve this, the solutions facilitate care coordination, bring down the number of hospital visits and bolster patient engagement.
Comprehensive care management involves clinicians, physicians, caregivers, and patients all working together to allow patients to have higher control over their health needs. To summarise, care management solutions facilitate
- Better communication between healthcare professionals and their patients
- Care coordination with home-based service providers as well as community
- Medication along with care-management tools
- A hospital-to-home framework
- A dedicated, committed care team
- Patient education
- A comprehensive plan for the management of conditions
What are Some of the Major Features?
Although care management solutions are known for a variety of features, some extremely crucial ones that are the most effective include:
Electronic Health Records
A crucial feature of care management solutions is the activity involving the management of health records of patients in an easy manner. This is when the care management solution and software are integrated with EMR (Electronic Medical Records) or an EHR (Electronic Health Records).
EMR/EHR module allows the development of an extensive care plan by offering the patient’s health records, along with prescription details, invoices, and hospitalization details. If there is an emergency, the EHR feature makes use of analytics to detect risks and facilitates patient care by dealing with various providers, coupled with patients as well as their families.
Appointment Scheduling
The care management solution has a primary feature, which is scheduling medical appointments. At present, calling over the phone and making appointments is not the norm anymore. The automated patient scheduling feature helps patients make appointments whenever they want, from anywhere.
Medical Billing
Healthcare’s financial aspect holds high importance. Care management solutions offer a billing feature for maintaining patient accounts, such as the present and past payment records. Following the patient checking into the hospital or any other medical setting, the billing module instantly evaluates if they are insured before starting with the treatment. This platform transmits alerts to the patients regarding payment schedules or any pending bills.
HIPAA Compliant Security
Securing data belonging to the patients is one of the most crucial features since the medical setting’s credibility depends on it. EHR/EMR solutions are expected to be Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant, abiding by the stringent federal security standards, given that the message system can potentially expose confidential information about the patient.
What are the Benefits of Care Management Solutions?
Care management solutions provide a plethora of impressive benefits to healthcare providers. It is therefore not a surprise that more and more hospitals and clinics worldwide rely greatly on these solutions. So, the impressive benefits of these solutions include:
Efficient Patient Care
The organized and automated appointment scheduling option offered by solutions helps bring down the patients’ total waiting time and helps place all relevant elements in order.
Lesser Administrative Pressure
Appointing staff to carry out administration is one of the main reasons for the significant healthcare costs across hospitals and clinics. Automating everyday administrative tasks, such as patient flow management, allows a reduction in administrative expenses as well as staff load.
Better Providers and Patient Satisfaction Rate
Scheduling appointments remains the most basic and significant feature of care management solutions. In place of making a phone call to make appointments, patients are now able to schedule appointments online, however; they want and at their convenience. With 24/7 access to care administration software, appointments can be rescheduled or cancelled with no absolutely no hassles. Also, this particular appointment scheduling feature transmits automated reminders through email or text, constantly keeping the physicians and patients in the loop.
Reduced Chance of Error
A care management solution integrated with EMR/EHR module is efficient and accurate. This reduces the possibility of errors that are usually caused by humans since the complete activity is automated. An automated platform doesn’t give way to erroneous treatment options that happen due to wrong diagnosis or medication, which in turn take place owing to illegible writing.
