Doctor clinic management system software is designed for managing a clinic in an automated and easy manner. The software is designed specifically for doctors and health professionals who are seeking to manage their patients, appointments, and want to automate back office and front office functions in a cost-effective manner. This software enables practitioners to run a clinic that is less complex and more efficient. It will save time, money, and provide better patient care. The software manages patient information, such as their records, appointments, and the consultation provided for each patient. This clinic management system is also beneficial in networking all clinics and corporate hospitals very easily. With its innovative features, it can keep data of any number of doctors. This is highly recommended for all small clinics to corporate hospitals. Doc office encompasses a cross-section of activities ranging from maintaining appointment schedules to billing. Doc Office, in effect, automates the workflow in any clinic. Although the benefits of automation of the process in healthcare are many, at the outset, let us look at some compelling reasons which initiate a small clinic to go for a computerized process. These include the need to manage an increasing outpatient load with fewer resources and higher efficiencies, the need to better manage information, increasing regulatory requirements, and the need to link various departments and activities within the clinic. Primarily, Doc Office has features to maintain patient case history which helps in better diagnosis of the patient’s case. A number of databases can be created for various sections in the clinic. The scheduler helps in appointment scheduling and optimally utilizes the resources to reduce the wait time for patients. Another innovative, cost-effective way of sending the patient to various departments is by using a barcode; this will reduce the operational time by eliminating the paperwork and retrieving patient’s records. This barcode would be used in patient billing as well. As more and more people are becoming computer literate and patients get computerized prescriptions, Doc Office has a feature of reminding the scheduled appointments through emails. This will save the time of a clerk calling patients and reminding them of the appointment. A computerized billing process fits in with the need today for cost-effectiveness. The billing software prepares various reports and is useful for higher management analytical purposes. Various clinic activities can be integrated using this software. This would work well in networking doctors’ patients at various locations in the city. A discussion of all functions and features provided by Doc Office is beyond the scope of this document. This software will bring about a change in a process involving various activities of a clinic and will make it a less complex process that is more efficient. This will save time and give an opportunity to the practitioner to spend more time with patients, thus providing better patient care.
Purpose of the Software
The main purpose of the Doctor Clinic Management System is to build an application program to reduce manual work for managing and maintaining doctor’s appointments, patient’s information, purchase and store medicines, and billing and report generation. This system is very beneficial to a clinic. The current system that is used by the clinic is a manual system which means everything is recorded and stored in books or kept in their minds. In the end, the person doing the data entry will end up using a lot of books or using a lot of pages to record data. When the data this person needs to enter is a long lost history. The main user of the system is a person who is in charge of managing and recording information for a clinic. We are targeting him because he has to do a lot of things and he doesn’t really have much time to do other things. This system is very helpful to him because it provides a lot of features that can help him in reducing time used to manage a clinic and mainly to reduce the use of a lot of hours to record and keep data. This system has a friendly user interface and he doesn’t have to spend a lot of time learning to use this system. This is because when he figures out that it takes longer time to manage and keep data in a manual way, he wants to change the way to manage and record data from a manual way to a better way.
Benefits of Using the Software
Enhance decision making Better presentation of patient medical history, alerts on the patient’s medical condition, drug allergies, and current medication will provide a guideline for the doctor to make a proper decision during treatment. It can also ensure that the prescription drug that the doctor prescribed is not among the dangerous drugs declared by the health ministry. This will avoid a trial and error method on the patient.
Cost efficiency As it reduces the use of paper during administration of the patient’s record, it will ensure that patient records are safe and allow the data to be stored for a longer period. Prescription writing is made easier, complete with drug information, thus reducing the need for printed prescriptions and the use of drug lists or brands. This will reduce errors caused by using handwritten prescriptions. An automatic claim and patient medical history report generator would make it easier for the clinic assistant to trace an appointment date or patient medical history report.
Higher productivity By using this software, it will increase productivity and thus ease access to patient records. This will minimize the risk of missing records and patient details. Single-click retrieval of patient and prescription details, paired with reduced waiting time, will be beneficial to the patient.
Key Features of the Software
This application will help the clinic in reducing the paperwork to a minimum. The main feature of this proposed system is that it provides an automatic system for maintaining the details of the patients and doctors who are entering and leaving the clinic. As soon as a patient has taken an appointment or he has to admit, he is given a unique ID for the time being. The details of this patient are stored and would be very helpful in case that patient comes next time. A database is provided for this which includes effective data and this will be easy to retrieve later. These stored records are also an asset to the doctor to keep track of what medicines/treatment he had given to the patient. This also includes further printing the prescription of the treatment or any test to be taken. This project has improved accessibility; we can retrieve a large amount of data in a fraction of time. It also includes an automated email system. SRS is also included. On the security basis, we can manipulate the data that can be accessed by other staff members. It includes all the data of the stock like medicine, etc. We can also keep records of expenses and income of the clinic.
The amazing project “Doctor Clinic Management System Software” is a Linux-based application which is developed to keep the records in the clinic in a very easy and efficient manner. With just a few clicks, you can manage the patients’ and doctors’ records. In this fast-paced world of medicine, it is a very difficult task to manage a large number of patients and doctors. This project is actually for the automation of a doctor’s clinic management. All the activities done in the clinic are included in this software. This will be very helpful to the clinic staff in managing the different work and will also be helpful to the doctors. This project is designed with keeping in mind to make it simple and efficient. The data it stores is very easy to manipulate. All details about patients and doctors are included in the data.
System Setup
Installation and Configuration
Installation basically means setting up the application package and getting it ready for use. Configuration basically means what should the thing do after it’s all set up. Installation and configuration of DCMS is simple and most of the things are taken care of by the package itself. All you need to do is provide the right information at the right time. DCMS uses Ruby on Rails plugin for Open Source Imaging. It is used to store patients’ medical images (X-rays, MRI scans, etc.) and associate a viewer for the doctors to diagnose. This plugin sets up the necessary tables and configurations automatically, so there is no extra work to be done to install it. Starting with installing the base package of DCMS, after extracting the package, navigate to the config folder in the Rails app. There will be a database.yml config file, open that file and set the database name, username, and password according to your system’s MySQL username and password. After setting the database config, run the command “ruby script/autodoc”. This will set up all the tables necessary for storing the different types of medical reports. Finally, run “rake db:migrate”. This will set up the tables with the correct associations. Now the base package of DCMS is fully installed and ready to set up.
User Roles and Permissions
The Appointment Schedule Data Entry operator role is set as default when a basic user is created. This role allows the user to only gain access to the appointment schedule for data entry. However, Superusers can assign and remove this role from a basic user.
Superusers can assign and remove the data entry operator role and hold multiple appointments. Schedule data entry operators can be assigned to multiple appointment books on different dates and at different clinics.
The Superuser role is the highest level of user access that can be granted to an individual in the system. Users with the data entry role can only carry out data entry and are restricted to using only data entry functions. The functions that the data entry operator cannot perform are greyed out and disabled.
System administrators can create new user accounts at any time and perform the following functions: – Establishment of a new user – Changing a user’s password – Administering User Roles and Permissions
Firstly, the system is designed with three types of user roles: the Superuser, data entry operators, and the Appointment Schedule Data Entry operator. The system is set up with a default user when the system is installed. The user ID is ‘Username’, and the password is ‘password’.
Data Backup and Recovery
The system setup follows with a data backup and recovery system. It is very important in clinic systems as there is always a chance of data loss. This software would have the schedule back up of data every day during off-peak hours. The data includes patient’s records, accounts, and all the transactions made during off-peak hours. The data will be saved in a separate storage medium from the main server. This is to ease the recovery process when the system failure occurs. The process of restoring the data will be done automatically if the main server data corrupts. This would help to save time and cost as there is no need to hire someone specifically to take care of data backup and recovery. The restoration process will be recorded and a backup log will be generated. The patient might be informed of the system failure that caused data loss, and this would ensure trust towards the clinic. The reminder would be based on the backup log generated. This system would have the ability to backup new data even before the previous backup process is done. This is to avoid data loss if the system failure occurs again before the backup process is completed. The backup data will have the same encrypted security as the main server data to ensure confidentiality and privacy.
Integration with Existing Systems
When a new system is acquired, there is often a history of data related to the new system that is too vast to convert all at once. In such cases, it is neither cost-effective nor operationally feasible to convert the data all at once. The ClinicPro System is designed to facilitate easy conversion of your existing data to the new system. It has flexible upload tools to get your legacy data into the new system. It also has the ability to attach certain data records and files at the patient level by going into the patient’s chart and accessing the specific feature of the legacy data. For instance, if you were storing x-ray images for patients in files on your computer, you can use the x-ray feature to attach those files in a referenced way. This way the existing x-ray files can still be utilized and will be stored with any new x-rays taken in the future. It may be the case that even after new system acquisition, certain functions will still be carried out using the legacy system because they have not yet been transitioned. In this situation, the ClinicPro System can be utilized in parallel or simply for the new functions, and its data can be integrated with the rest of your system at any time in the future. This a Software as a Service (SaaS) model is highly scalable and has no associated risk. At the ClinicPro System end, System Management is used to define the clinic organization and hierarchy of clinics, doctors and staff. The main purposes of the System Management The ClinicPro System data should be integrated with the existing systems by implementing the relevant new data entry and data access functionalities. This can be done using custom software development or by using the ClinicPro System with its configuration modified to reflect only the new data. The goal is seamless transition to managing all data with the ClinicPro System.
Patient Management
The EHR is the most vital part of patient management. This is an electronic form of the patients’ health records. It includes past medical history, examination results, investigation reports, progress of treatment, any prescriptions, and also doctor’s advice. To improve documentation, we have added a new feature to attach files or scanned documents like X-Ray reports, MRI scan reports to the EHR. This documentation can be shared with other doctors or patients (if permitted) for a second opinion. This reduces the risk of hard copy losses in maintaining paper documents and also improves communication between doctors working in the same or different clinics.
Every patient that walks into the clinic is registered as an out-patient or in-patient case. For each patient type, the system gives different options. For OPD patients, the staff will fix an appointment, give a printed schedule, and this appointment can be tracked using the system to remind the patient about his appointment by sending an email or SMS. For in-patients, the staff will directly assign a bed to the patient. With each registration and appointment scheduling, the system creates a unique registration number as a reference for the patient’s future visits.
This module allows you to keep track of the patient from the time he walks in to your clinic, giving appointments, to the time he pays his bills.
Registration and Appointment Scheduling
Registration is the initial step for a patient to avail any clinical services. The front desk official generates a unique patient ID and maintains a case sheet for the patient. The case sheet holds all the data given by the patient. It also stores a detailed history of the patient’s health record. The software helps in maintaining a case sheet, scheduling a patient, and also in preparing a letter or a requisition. The patient is provided with a print-out of the appointment details and a printed/prescribed letter if necessary. This is a state-of-the-art resource scheduling system that manages all the resources within the clinic in the most effective and intelligent manner. It puts the right people in the right place at the right time! This management tries to optimize resources for various combinations of over and under scheduling for a group of different resources. It also tries to account for the priority set for different appointment types and set a resource-dependent rule for appointment scheduling. A comprehensive graphical chart view is also available to find the schedule of any doctor/resource. This module is a unique intelligence that is unmatched by any other system ranging from paper to any other e-system!
Electronic Health Records (EHR)
Electronic Health Records (EHR) provide a better way to manage patient information. EHRs are real-time, patient-centered records that make information available instantly and securely to authorized users. Information can be created and managed by authorized providers and shared by authorized providers, patients, and other organizations that are involved in the patient’s care. EHRs contain information such as medical history, diagnoses, medications, treatment plans, immunization dates, allergies, radiology images, and laboratory test results. EHRs can automate and streamline a provider’s workflow. The provider can quickly retrieve patient information, input orders, and send prescriptions. The information will be flagged by the system if it is incomplete – such as a missing prescription dosage. This will help in providing more accurate and efficient care for the patient. By having EHRs, information can be built over time. This is beneficial for patients because if they see multiple providers within a health care organization, the new providers will be able to immediately access their medical records. If a patient sees a provider out of the health care organization, on an emergency visit, or a provider who works in a different health care organization with access to the same EHR system, the data will be available. EHRs have the potential to access clinical decision support. Clinical decisions are used to enhance the quality of health care by assisting providers in making clinical decisions that are both patient-specific and knowledge-based. EHRs have also shown to decrease medical errors and enhance patient safety. EHRs are built with safety alerts and will automatically check for errors in the data. It is then stored and shared in a legible and complete format. This will improve communication between caregivers and decrease the chance of an error in the patient’s medical record.
Prescription and Medication Management
Features and tools to enable clinics to handle the entire process of prescription and medication management. At the point of diagnosis, it is important to have tools that check drug formularies to ensure that prescribed medications are both covered and approved. Upon validation, medications can be prescribed and printed to a patient instruction handout. Education of the patient is always an important step and we have found that providing an instruction sheet to the patient regarding their diagnosis and medications will greatly help with adherence to the treatment plan. At any time, a record of medications prescribed can be viewed from the patient’s past medication list. Records of discontinued or altered medications are kept in a discontinuation form to ensure that there is no medication error and to serve as a reference if the need for the old medication arises in the future. Electronic prescriptions that can be sent directly to the patient’s pharmacy will have the ability to be validated and signed by the clinic using their own provider numbers and custom provider DEA numbers. A sent history of electronic prescriptions can be viewed for the clinic’s reference. Usage of active medication lists and medication reconciliations will help a clinic keep accurate up-to-date records of a patient’s medications, and using drug interaction checks will help prevent any errors due to detrimental drug-drug interactions. Finally, to make replay of their visit easy, an option to print or save the prescription and visit details to a PDF document is available.
Billing and Invoicing
Billing section is designed for easy billing for different types of consultations such as for registered patients, walk-in patients, patients referred to other doctors, company employees. Different billing rates can be defined for the type of patients. The system helps to manage the clinic’s revenue. The doctor can generate a report for daily clinic collections or sales of a selected period of time. This system can also generate a report in the form of a graph for better understanding. Company and insurance billing are also catered for and the relevant documentation. When billing a company, the software allows you to record a list of explanations and suggestions. This can then be printed on an official receipt. The system comes with standard invoice, receipt, debit note, and even label printout. All can be custom designed. There is an option for importing consignment data from a client in the form of an ASCII text file. For example, a laboratory or pharmacy may send a list of their charges incurred on a particular patient. A specially designed invoice will prompt you to be able to generate a file and send it to the client, allowing an automatic remittance. An integrated Accounts Receivable enables you to keep track of payment by patients or third party with an aged debt analysis.
Clinic Administration
The meeting of internal and external clinical and administrative staff is a common use case for DCCMS. By allowing secure, role-based access to different staff members, it’s easy for some staff members to schedule appointments and refer patients into the system, while allowing external physicians to view their own personalized schedules. Managers can use a variety of built-in reports to see which staff members are utilizing the system effectively and which may require additional training. As DCCMS is a web-based software, staff from each clinic location can access the system remotely, hence reducing the billing lag time associated with paper super-bills and other encounter forms. DCCMS provides built-in billing functionality; however, it also allows external billing companies and individuals to access only the billing and report sections of the system. This is beneficial for clinics who do not have a biller present every day and free-standing billing companies who provide services to multiple clinic sites, as it eliminates the need to have billing software loaded on specific machines. Access to specific areas of the system is controlled using security parameters, and the administrator is able to provide personalized billing-only accounts.
Staff Management
Overall, staff management is a well-organized module to manage the clinic staff and their tasks.
The third SMS module is a value-added software for the doctors. This is a special provision to send an appointment/task notification to a patient on his mobile. In order to access this feature, the doctor must register to the way2sms service and he has to take an API Key and secret. Then the doctor needs to purchase an SMS balance. Now this SMS module requires an SMS balance to send an SMS. There is a short-lived/reusable token to send an SMS. The token dynamically deducts the SMS balance when the user sends an SMS. This provision is a very useful feature to intimate the task status to the user who has assigned the task.
The second staff tasks module provides a table showing the list of tasks assigned to the user. This is a very useful module to assign and track the daily tasks of the user. Tasks can be appointment or an enquiry or a bill or treatment. The task table has a provision to view a completion status of specific task. User can also edit the task.
In this module, there is a provision to select the type of user. User can be a doctor, direct assistant, indirect assistant, or PHC staff. As per the selection of user type, the form will display only those specific fields related to the user. The user form has validation for certain fields according to the type of user. For example, the user must enter qualification details if he is a doctor or a medico. User can also upload a photo in the form. Uploaded photo will be displayed in the reports whenever the records of this user are taken. Admin has a special data access to create a UID for this user. This data access will be helpful to get a user ID and password of the MedicoPHC user to access and login the previous software version.
User management module enables the top user to perform tasks such as add new user, delete a user, edit a user, and view the details of the user. By using this module, the admin can create a login ID for his assistants and also for the PHC staff. The assistants can also login to this software. By this way, our software becomes very useful for a clinic doctor to manage his daily tasks. It is a paperless automation.
Staff management is the main exclusive feature for the administration. This feature is subdivided into three main modules: user management, staff tasks, and SMS module.
Inventory and Stock Management
The inventory in the clinic can include various clinical/medical items apart from the drugs and consumables, such as dressing material. This type of item can be added through customization, the information can be stored likewise, and stock and maintenance reports can be generated similarly. This module can serve many large clinics/hospitals whereby it can also support to generate store information for various departments and identify/store drugs and consumables in various racks/wards. This management also has provision to fully print or partially generate store activity reports and share with related suppliers. This management would be an effective way to outsource store management. Full use of this module can effectively serve the purpose of outsourcing and supply contracts for the inventory.
Functionalities: – Store Drugs and Consumables Information: This would allow adding and maintaining various information regarding the drugs and consumables. This would primarily include the name, type, category, and storage information about the drug. – Maintain Supplier Information: The various suppliers for the drugs and consumables are to be added, which will aid in purchase information. Supplier-wise listing of purchase information and drugs consumables purchased would be reflected in it. – Update Purchase Information: This would allow individual updates of the purchase information of the drug/consumable from the supplier. – Maintain Stock and Consumption Information: On the purchase of the items, the stock information should get updated automatically. There should be consumption entries undertaken which will decrease the stock, and various reports will indicate a clear picture of items unavailable due to various reasons (for example, under maintenance – stock consumed but services not taken by the patient). – Generation of Various Reports: This includes the purchase and consumption report of the drugs and consumable item and low stock status.
This software application facilitates the administration of a medical store. It is useful in maintaining drugs and consumable inventory. This module deals with various aspects of adding information regarding the drugs and consumables, their suppliers, updating their purchase information, maintaining stock and consumption information, and generation of various stores related reports. This helps in efficient management of the store’s inventory.
Reporting and Analytics
The system provides several reporting and analytics features. Analysis of clinic income is made possible through income reporting. Financial analysis can also be done through accounts receivable and accounting reports. For patient analysis, our system provides demographic reports. This can be used to find out the origin and frequency of patients. To check on the general performance of the clinic, users may refer to the appointment reports and user access logs. All reports in our system are exportable into several common formats. These can then be printed or manipulated for presentations. This is useful for upper management review or just general record keeping. Our system also has data mining capabilities to allow discovery of patterns and relationships in data through a variety of methods, and to summarize the information into useful knowledge. This is useful for some of the automatic algorithms for appointment reminders. For example, if through data mining it is determined that patients who book appointments on Mondays are very likely to forget their appointments, a selective group of patients can then be flagged for the reminder service. This is just one of many ways that data mining can provide useful information for the clinic. Other examples include finding patterns for illnesses given certain demographics, effectiveness of certain treatments, etc.
Security and Privacy Measures
While some information needs to be kept for a considerable amount of time, there will be some information that needs to be deleted. We will use the file or usage duration-based access control. This will restrict a subject’s access to an object based on a certain time frame or data that is being classified for a specified duration of time. And at times of information de-classification, we set a specific date for the file to be destroyed.
We will use the role-based access control to enable organization-regulated access to resources. A role can be assigned for a group of users, providing a simplified way of assigning user privileges. This will establish tight control over resource access, ensuring that only the right users have the right access.
The Health and Beauty management system will have many users. This system consists of paid staff members, such as receptionists and health professionals. This system also needs to cater to patients. There needs to be different levels for users to access certain parts of the system. We are going to apply the user-based access control. This only allows authorized users to access certain parts of the system.