What is Healthcare Integration & How Can Healthcare Providers Benefit From It?

What is Healthcare Integration & How Can Healthcare Providers Benefit from it? Inefficient practices have long been prevailing in healthcare, particularly when it comes to efficient patient care, informed clinical decisions and payments. In an effort to make better healthcare decisions, cut down costs and receive payments on time, healthcare institutions are now planning to invest in technologies and software. There are multiple systems for creating and maintaining patient records, billing, payments and more. However, a well thought out healthcare integration is necessary to make the healthcare revenue cycle management smooth and effective. Challenges that Multiple Systems Impose on Healthcare Organizations Although these systems work well individually, they do not function together. This leaves you with the option of adding manual steps to make optimal use of the technology you leverage. As healthcare looks at higher mergers and acquisitions, the problems associated with the usage of separate processes and systems gets worsened. What is Healthcare Integration and How Can It Help? Healthcare integration helps you to automatically connect your systems to shared data. However, successful integration requires the healthcare organization to implement trusted solutions with a rich and flexible application program interface (API), which enables simple yet seamless integration across multiple systems. This helps organizations to develop a seamless information flow across every system, which enables your staff to efficiently collect payments. Following are some of the ways in which healthcare integration can help you: 1. Superior Patient Care Healthcare integration helps healthcare providers to provide advanced and accurate patient care based on their medical history or prior medical records. This kind of superior patient experience increases patient trust, which is becoming extremely with the rising consumerism. 2. Secure Patient Payment Information Handling Sensitive patient information such as the payment related details should not be printed, copied and pasted or written down while transferring from one system to another. Payment integration automatically gets populated in the PMS without the need for human intervention. When integrated properly, healthcare systems reduce the instances of fraud and improve the bottom line. Technologies like tokenization and point-to-point encryption ensure secure payment processing. 3. Your Staff Will be Freed from Payment Processing If you do not integrate your payment system with your practice management system, you cannot account for patient payments. Manually posting and reconciling payments is not only time consuming but also significantly increases the chances of errors. Furthermore, manual processes involve back to back follow ups. Payment integration automatically populates and updates all the data and helps to stay updated with the patient payment information.the problems associated with the usage of separate processes and systems gets worsened. 4. Increased Cash Flow Integrated payment systems offer many payment channels to collect the payments from the patients. When the payment system gets integrated with the other systems, it provides healthcare providers with an opportunity to collect payments at specific points of patient interaction. When you consider multiple patient interactions, the chances are that you will make better collections. Summing Up Innovations like these have helped healthcare providers enhance their efficiencies, improve patient care and streamline processes. Blockchain along with cloud technology drives personalized medicine through analytics and data integration.