9 Essential Clinic Management System Features in 2024

There’s no doubt about it—using medical software to run your clinic is essential in 2024.

A clinic management software can help you:

• Run the best possible patient management.
• Streamline and automate all your clinic data management.
• Run your clinic more efficiently.

Not all medical software tools are created equal, though. Some have more, and significantly better, features than others.

Which leads us to the question: What are the essential features of medical clinic software in 2024?

In this article, we’re going to answer that question, starting with:

9 Must-Have Medical Software Features

#1. Online Booking

Sometimes, receptionists are so busy that they simply don’t have the time to book appointments over the phone. And even if that isn’t the case, online booking is simply something patients expect from your clinic these days.

An online booking tool is one of the most essential healthcare software solutions for any medical practice. Your admin team will spend less time scheduling appointments over the phone, while patients can quickly book themselves a time slot based on real-time availability.

By implementing online booking for your clinic, you’re going to be able to:

1. Attract new patients.
2. Free up your receptionists for more urgent administrative tasks.
3. Track your performance. You can see where your bookings are coming from.
4. Improve the appointment scheduling process.

With online booking, you also:

• Learn where patients first heard about your services.
• Understand which patient acquisition channels and referrals are most effective.
• Allow for pre-payments to reduce the risk of cancellations and no-shows.
• Create unique booking links for individual doctors, services, and locations.

#2. Electronic Health Records

Electronic Health Records (EHR) are much more convenient and secure than physical records. They are the digitised version of a patient’s complete medical history. This healthcare software solution is a crucial component of patient care, as it stores and organises a patient’s medical history in the form of user-friendly graphs, summaries, and tables.

Using an EHR (so-called EMR, electronic medical records), you can share data quickly across many medical institutions, including other practices, partnering laboratories, and imaging centers. Having your patients’ complete medical history can have a significant impact on future treatments.

For example, clinicians can check previous diagnoses and prescribed drugs to see what has worked for the patient in the past and to avoid possible complications.

It also comes with dozens of other advantages, including:

• Better care quality. Doctors can have easy access to patient records. Some EHR tools even help by analysing patient data and proposing treatment plans.
• Accurate patient information. Physical medical records can be misplaced, damaged, or accidently altered. EHR, however, keeps patient data safe on the cloud.
• Interoperability. EHR makes it easier for patients to switch providers or move their data around different treatment facilities.
• Improved security. Online data is much more secure than physical paper records.

In addition, EHR software offers the following benefits:

• Provides evidence-based decision-making support through tools that help organise, interpret, and react to critical data.
• It allows you to connect with patients, medical assistants, labs, imaging centres, other healthcare providers, and more.
• Provides vital information to doctors during an emergency.
• Allows e-prescribing so that doctors can send prescriptions directly to the pharmacy, saving their patients’ time and making collecting their medications more convenient.

#3. Medical Billing and Financial Management

Financial clinic operations can be overwhelming. Whether they are big or small, medical practices ought to have a reliable and secure healthcare software solution to keep track of all financial activities, such as invoices and transactions involving patients.

Without a good system in place, invoices might get lost, payments might be delayed, and the accounting team will need to spend unnecessary time putting everything in order.

Billing software keeps all financial aspects under control and provides a secure way to handle payments. Not to mention that having a system that functions like clockwork allows you to focus on other things in your healthcare organization.

The software should also allow for different access rights, giving financial and billing reporting access only to authorised staff.

Moreover, it should allow integration with your preferred accounting software (e.g. Xero) to make the billing process much easier.

Last but not least, such medical software solutions also provide data summaries and a more in-depth financial analysis of your practice.

#4. Reporting and Analytics

Nowadays, it is easier than ever to collect, structure, and analyse large volumes of data. You only need to find the right practice management system, and it will take care of the rest.

The benefits of data gathering are endless. From proof of concept to deciding which department or specialty to expand, so-called big data is key. By regularly running reports and looking at graphs, you can improve the quality of your service and ultimately increase future revenues.

The right medical software is also going to come with reporting and analytics features.

Healthcare professionals should, for example, be able to pull out data on how effective specific patient acquisition channels are. Or understand which of your services are most popular with your patients, as well as profitable for your clinic.

#5. Telemedicine

According to data from Statista, the popularity of telehealth has been rising significantly since 2018, and it’s projected to grow even faster in the upcoming years.

As telemedicine becomes a standard for many patients, you might miss out on many opportunities if you don’t implement a medical software solution that gives your patients the option to book online consultations.

Which makes sense. Telemedicine allows patients to:

• Get an online consultation when they can’t physically go to a clinic.
• Get in touch with a doctor over something minor (e.g., prescription renewal) without having to waste time going to the clinic.
• Avoid going outside during a pandemic.

And more.

As such, telemedicine is another essential feature of medical software.

The right medical software solution should have the option to:

• Book consultations via the online patient portal.
• Start making secure calls with doctors through the platform.
• Integrate with payment providers.
• Convert any booking into an online video consultation.
• Share screens with your patients to increase their engagement in their own care.
• Automatically send reminders directly to patients using secure video links.

You will be able to conduct online patient appointments directly in Medesk. There is no need to use personal numbers, employee contacts, or third-party programs. Within the platform, all actions and connections are performed on behalf of your clinic.

#6. Stock & Inventory Management

Your medical software solution should allow you to manage all incoming goods, including medication and consumable items.

The right platform also allows you to:

• Generate stock reports with ease.
• Automatically write off products and consumables sold.
• Calculate the costs and profitability of goods sold.
• Set up notifications for key staff members when stocks are low.
• Request new stock via an automated approval process.

Moreover, you can mark certain items as products and sell them independently of appointments. When these items are sold, the software can automatically generate a sales invoice and update the inventory.

#7. Medical CRM

Medical CRM functionalities are another essential feature for medical software and just as essential for your clinic’s marketing team.

In a nutshell, medical CRM allows you to track and log all patient demographics and data, including: personal and medical history, patient notes, preferences, and previous interactions with your clinic.

This allows you to:

• Discover trends among patients. E.g., who's responding well to your marketing communication? What’s the average no-show rate? How do patients find your practice?
• Personalise communication. Your marketing team can send targeted SMS or emails to specific audience segments.
• Improve the patient experience. You can use the CRM feature to set up automated appointment reminders for your patients.

#8. Payroll Support

Cutting-edge medical practice management software allows for payroll tracking functionality.

The software keeps track of all the hours worked by your colleagues and gives you automatically generated reports on how much every team member is due.

It also allows you to set up a commission-based payment structure (if that’s something that your clinic does), create bonus schemes for your employees, and more.

Set up the conditions for calculating employees’ income in the convenient payment scheme constructor of the Medesk platform.

#9. Cloud-Based Platform

Cloud-based software lets you manage your practice wherever you might be in the world.

Instead of having to head over to the clinic every time you want to check something, you’ll simply be able to log on to your platform through your PC or mobile, and check it on-the-go wherever you might be!

Pros:

• Simple online installation with no need for a large or in-house IT team.
• Can be accessed from anywhere and by anyone as long as access is allowed.
• The vendor provides robust security services you might not be able to afford yourself.
• Is backed up online and safe from any kind of physical damage.
• Implementation is cost-effective.
• You can collaborate with everyone who is using the same system, even if you operate across multiple locations.
  
  

Try Medesk, the Leading Medical Software

Looking for a medical software solution that comes with all these features?

Well, look no further!

Medesk is an industry-leading practice management software with cutting-edge features:

• Customizable online booking platform.
• In-built medical CRM, giving your clinic’s marketing team the edge it needs.
• Simple reporting and analytics. Pull out all the data you need with the click of a button.
• Telemedicine capabilities. Enable online consultations with your clinic through the Medesk platform.
• Stock and inventory management. Keep track of your inventory through a single dashboard.

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