Reducing Leakage in Admissions, Pharmacy and Diagnostics at Hospitals

Significant OPD but Tiny Sales in IP, Diagnostics & Pharmacy?

Hospitals have two big challenges to stay profitable. First, they have to continuously work to get new patients to discover their hospital. Second, most important aspect, is to get as much revenue from each patient visit. The second one drives both top-line and bottom-line significantly, but is also the least understood process due to inherent limitations.

Many hospitals achieve great OPD inflow but very little sales in IP, diagnostics and pharmacy. If you are facing this problem, then this article is for you!

Typical OP to IP Conversions in Metro Cities
	Conversion Rate (%age)
Average	13%
Good	15%
Excellent	18%

Typical advised diagnostics in OPD in hospitals ranges from 20% to up to 50% depending on specialty and month of the year. You really need to see how many of these are being lost to competition nearby.

Understanding patient flow at hospital

For multi-specialty hospitals, OPD is like a landing place where patients first land. Based on the treatment advised on OPD records (mostly prescriptions), patients can either use pharmacy, diagnostics or IP services inside the hospital or from other providers outside. For example, a patient coming to OPD with chronic pain would need to get scanning, medicines, surgical belts and physiotherapy. Patient could do these either inside the hospital or outside hospital.


Typical Patient Flow at a Hospital and Revenue Loss

Hospital would like patients to avail facilities inside the hospitals rather than outside. Hospital management is always worried about the losses due to patient going out of the hospital for follow-on diagnostics, pharmacy or procedures.

Need to measure leakage

Unfortunately with current set of tools available with hospitals, they cannot measure this leakage effectively and continuously. Although hospitals know very well on who is landing on their pharmacy, lab and admissions, they do not know who were advised one of these but chose to go out for fulfillment. If somehow their OPD records became digital they could measure this easily. But this does not happen and hence the fallout.

What they actually need is digitization of their OPD records. The only option available to hospitals is using EMR which is very costly in terms of allocating resources or equivalent cost of doctor’s time for electronic-entry. Nor are the specialists and super-specialists inclined to do it.

The benefits of digitizing OPD records are obvious but how can this be achieved efficiently? How can this be done with no changes to current work-flows for the hospital and the doctors?

Proposed solution to reduce leakage

Do hospitals need to live with this till EMR becomes a reality? No! There is a solution.


Stop Admissions, Diagnostics, Pharmacy Leakage

Health-PIE service available as of now can digitize OPD records cost effectively. This solution uses artificial intelligence based technology to reduce cost. Also gives direct benefits of digitization to patients as well. Realizing hospitals are already overburdened, the solution comes with zero need of training to hospital staff or any major change in workflows.

Health-PIE helps hospital understand their OPD patients and flow, helping hospital with measurement of leakages and analysis. Health-PIE will also uses artificial intelligence to continuously communicate with patients through their treatment creating stickiness. This stickiness helps increase OP to IP conversion. This double-pronged approach of Health-PIE is a killer solution which can increase top line as well as bottom line of any hospital!