Best Practices for Successful Medical Software Development

Medical software is in big demand because even the medics are serving nowadays from home despite expecting a physical visit from their patients. Or at least unless required, the doctors are connected with their regular patients from the application itself using the medical software.

Not only is patient interaction possible, but there are multiple other facilitations that a medic gets through such healthcare software solution and applications which help doctors in exchanging information and overall learning. A doctor, in general, has to keep a handful of things apart from his patients and their health, which includes their own health first of all, and then the other business-related aspects that are otherwise quite time-consuming.

A doctor basically has to coordinate with the -

1. The pharmacists

2. The Hospital

3. The Insurance agency (sometimes)

4. The employees (If owns the Hospital), and

5. The Patients

Read more: 5 benefits of using Medical RCM Software

Now, to bring a solution that could help a doctor mitigate its efforts and time consumption, there have to be a few practices in the form of functionalities within the software. For example-

AUTOMATED PATIENT-HANDLING

The most time-consuming and cumbersome task for a doctor is to deal with a patient. As it includes the registration process, the consultation, the prescription and advice, the medication and its timetable, and then a few re-visits with the same cycle to occur.

Medical software would make sure that a doctor does not have to get himself busy with all this. It would allow the patient (even the new one) to 

• Book an appointment, 

• Know about the length of the queue and the time to be taken,

• Make the prescription available on the app itself,

• The timetable would be available 24*7 on the dashboard,

• The nutrition chart would be asked to add, etc.

This feature would be mitigating a lot of unnecessary hustle that would happen if everything works in a traditional manner.

ONLINE DEALING WITH THE PHARMACIST

When a doctor ties up with the retail pharmacist, things usually work on a regular basis despite on a monthly or quarterly basis. The pharmacist could manage and supply medicines directly looking upon the demand generated in the application for the medicine required. 

In addition, the balance sheet can be maintained in the application keeping the entire backlog of the demand generated and supply made in a month. This feature reduces the unnecessary hustle and makes money-related aspects quite transparent, which is ideal for both ends.

Know more: Cost & Feature To Build Medicine Delivery App like 1mg

LEARNING MANAGEMENT GETS EASY

When things get intricate and complex within a business, it starts demanding knowledge exchange and training sessions for a better understanding of the objectives of a business. People within a business must have a similar depth of understanding about the targets and services.

Hence, a learning management system based on medical software and management would be ideal. In fact, when a doctor runs a hospital, one has to train subordinates, as well as house surgeons too. Therefore, the idea of custom LMS development for medical practices and better knowledge exchange is better than any other source of knowledge exchange.

An LMS would allow communication between the learners as well as the trainer. The learners could not only learn from the live sessions but also could access the data available online.

Moreover, it becomes easy to manage HIS and other relevant practices through an LMS based on medical management.

Conclusively, it is recommendable to integrate the learning management system with the medical practice management software for easy knowledge exchange and better communication.

EASY HEALTH RECORD MANAGEMENT

When patients apply for medical insurance claim settlement, it becomes essential for the hospital to provide all the details from the very beginning to the end, so that the insurance settlement could take place. And for doing so, third-party insurance and its personnel are required ideally.

The communication generally takes place between the insurance providing agency, the TPA i.e. Third-party administrator, and the hospital on behalf of the patient itself. And the information regarding the entire treatment process gets to exchange between the TPA and the Insurance body.

Having medical software deployed benefits a business by keeping the record safe within the database. It helps a lot in the case where manual handling and processing of the data more than a year ago becomes pragmatically difficult.

Moreover, During this data interchange, there come many frauds and data stealers that earn fraudulently by fetching the data and manipulating it through wrong means. Therefore, data securing resources become necessary to be involved. 

EDI-EMPOWERED MEDICAL SOFTWARE

EDI is a technology usually known for its involvement while the employees are getting enrolled for employee benefits by the employer. We use EDI 834 for benefits enrollment, which is nothing but a type of transaction used for data safety.

Similarly, when insurance bodies come into the role while claiming settlement, EDI 837 and EDI 835 are used. As one is the file comprises the information sent by the hospital to the insurance company, and the other is a response to it sent back to the hospital.

Thus, having medical software empowered with EDI technology, is an ideal case as to hire an EDI analyst and get the entire EDI processing done externally costs equal but increases the overall handling of manpower and other resources.

EDI outsourcing services is another option, which can be taken into consideration based on the budget and time we have.

In the Nutshell,

As far as only medical-oriented solutions are concerned, there exist multiple other medical solutions.

But what we were focused on here is those functionalities based on the medical practices that make medical software successful. Therefore, we have mentioned them above and would recommend here on further, to get the same developed from such an experienced enterprise software development company, which would have developed all the following solutions that are also in the same category-

• Pharmacy Management Software

• PACS Software Development

• EHR & eRX software integration solution

• Veterinary Practice Management Software

• Custom Veterinary Solutions

• Electronic Health Record Solutions

• HIS & Practice Management Software Solutions

How EDI 835 and 837 Are Different?

EDI 835 and 837 are two transaction types usually concerned with insurance matters. Especially in the case of claim and its application. Now, to differentiate between them we need to consider a case in which a claimant, one healthcare provider, and the insurance providing company exist altogether.

Before proceeding ahead, we need to be clear about the healthcare provider and insurance provider both, as the one which provides the healthcare facility is not necessarily the insurance provider always. 

In fact, a healthcare provider is mostly the employer which offers the healthcare service to its employee i.e. ‘the claimant’ in our case here. However, the insurance company is the one which pays when the claim is applied.

Also read the benefits of deploying a medical software and how it can help in managing claims and overall benefits administration.

Now when we are clear about the basics, let us consider the case we have assumed the characters from, the storyline would be sufficient to differentiate EDI 835 from EDI 837. Assume, there is an employee who works in an enterprise software development company based in California, USA. 

The company i.e. healthcare provider has to offer the health insurance to its employee under the healthcare act of the federal government. According to which, the employee would choose a specific health safety plan and enroll as an employee for specific benefit.

This entire process of enrolling an employee is done via EDI 834, and the overall work related to benefits is called employee benefits administration and is accomplished via different types EDI including-

• WEB EDI
• MOBILE EDI
• CLOUD BASED EDI
• EDI VAN
• EDI Managed Services, etc.
• EDI Outsourcing Services

Considering the case that the employee later requires to claim for its same health insurance. Here, the employer would send the request to the insurance providing organization for the specific amount that has been requested by the hospital or medical body. This information is to be sent via EDI 837.

Now, considering the case from the insurance providing company.

Supposing that the insurance company has received the claim request and the details about the different benefits and amount that has been claimed by the claimant.

The information would be in the form of EDI 835 transaction order and now the insurance company would scrutinize the details in it. This process generally takes a week or two.

But when the insurance company replies back or sends the aforesaid amount, whichever it finds worth sending and verifies, it sends through EDI 835.

Means, we can say that, if EDI 837 is a request order, EDI 835 is a reply to it.

• EDI 835

It is also termed as ERA or Electronic Remittance Advice. However, both EDI 835 & 837 are two transaction types but EDI 835 is an information based transaction that consists of information regarding the claim or the payment concerned with it.

• EDI 837

EDI 837, on the other hand, is the request order consisting of all the information regarding the claims that are requested by the customer or the beneficiary. However, the payment is subject to verification.

However, both EDI 835 and EDI 837 have a lot to dig upon deeply, but the basic difference that we should know is quite this much. 

Out of 400 different standards for the transaction types, EDI 8434, 835, 837 are some of the most utilized standard formats across the globe. Make sure you know EDI before deploying it into your healthcare business because things change when you keep generalized and strictly standardized stuff like EDI into a business. 

You would start getting the filtered audience which is as credible as you are after implementing EDI and its standards set by ANSI and that’s the best part as it mitigates the biggest risk of fraud influentially.