Patient Admission Process in Healthcare

Most of us have been to a hospital at least once, if not before, then at least recently to get the vaccine against COVID-19. Upon entering the hospital, you may have seen long queues at a window labelled ‘Admissions’. Have you ever wondered why there is a long queue there? 

In this segment, let’s dive deeper into the patient admission process and resolving the challenges faced by organisations, with our faculty member, Mr Shivakumar Krishnamurthy. 

In this video, you learnt that the patient admission process involves three steps:

• Appointment booking
• Registration
• Consultation with doctor

You also got an idea of the challenges faced at the time of admission, some of which are listed below:

• Patients are given a broad time slot, but the exact schedule is not updated. 
• There is no mechanism to record complaints that the patients may have. 
• Patient records are unavailable at the time of consultation. 
• Physicians and  diagnostics are unavailable. 
• Specialist doctors are often unavailable for various follow-up consultations. 

Next, you learnt how the patient admission process can be streamlined. You understood that the three entities, patient, doctor/physician and the clinic/hospital, must be in sync to manage this process better. There is a need for the right technological intervention to integrate the data and workflow across these three entities. 

You also learnt how an effective technological intervention can help improve operational efficiency. Some points highlighting this are mentioned below: 

• Technological interventions must identify potential defaulters, i.e., those who miss their appointments. In addition to revenue loss, a missed appointment is also a missed opportunity for some other patient who may have been in urgent need of consultation.
• There is a need to analyse drop-in appointments to plan time and resources in a more structured manner. 
• Predictive models may also be used to schedule the physician’s time more effectively.

With this, we have come to the end of this segment. You learnt about the patient admission process as well as ways to improve operational efficiency. In the next segment, you will learn about improving the efficiency of the patient record-keeping process.