Best Medical Software: OPD Billing Module

Best Medical Software: OPD Billing Module: BILLING Billing module handles issuing bills for services or goods given to customers by any department of the institution. Billing module...

OPD Billing Module

BILLING

Billing module handles issuing bills for services or goods given to customers by any department of the institution. Billing module is commonly associated with other modules like Laboratory, Pharmacy, Petty Cash or Professional Payment.

USER FRIENDLINESS

The application is focusing on improving the user experience. Most of the works are automated and there is minimal handling of computer for a particular task. Billing interface is also made in a way it is very easy for the cashier to invoice a customer.
The users can select a theme appropriate for their choice. The size of the screen can be easily adjusted to match individual preferences. The menu visible to user depends on the role based privileges so that easy for the user to locate the required functionality.

Figure 1: Three out of 20 different themes available to user

Figure 2: Two different zoom levels

PAYMENT METHODS

Payments can be accepted as cash, credit, cheque, credit card or bank slips. Authorized users can use staff members or agencies as source of payments. (Refer Figure 3). Depending on the selected payment method, required data may be needed to be added in addition. For example, if cheque is selected as the payment methods, it is mandatory to enter the issues bank, cheque data and cheque number. (Refer Figure 4)

Figure 3: Different Payment Methods Possible as Source of Payment

Figure 4: Additional Details Recorded for Cheque Payments

DISCOUNT SCHEMES

The user can be selectively allow to use different discount schemes. These discount schemes automatically calculate the discount depending on the discount scheme, payment methods selected, credit company and client membership type. For example, only the chief cashier may be able to use the discount scheme called ‘Company Director Discounts’ which will add 20% discount for cash payments or 15% discount for credit card payments. The other cashiers may be able to use ‘Doctor Discount’ which will add 10% discount for cash payments or 7% discount for credit payments.

CLIENT DATABASE

The clients can be searched from the database easily or can add a new customer inside the same billing frame without any fizzle. (Refer Figure 5 and Figure 6 )

Figure 5: Search clients from the database

Figure 6: Add new client from Billing Window

FLEXIBLE REVENUE MODEL

The data structure is made in a very sophisticated and detailed manner, so that the complex logics involved in the billing process is completely hidden from the end user. For example, take the following example.
PAP smear by Rd. Kamal
When that is billed, the following people or departments must get there income as follows.
1. Rd. Kamal, VOG, Rs. 1200.00
2. Rd. Saman, Pathologist, Rs. 800.00
3. Assisting Nurse , Rs. 200.00
4. OPD Department, Rs. 200.00
5. Pathology Lab, Rs. 600.00
When the cashier is bills a PAP Smear, only he has to select that single item. But all the revenues will be generated as once designed by the user who is responsible for managing item fees. The total charge will appear as an income to the billed department and will also be listed in the Shift-End Summery and Day-End summery for the cash handover. The revenue will be listed under each person or department for payments and analysis purposes. (Refer Figure 7 and Figure 8 )

Figure 7: Single Bill Item has been added by user

Figure 8: Two Fees has been generated as Hospital Fee & Staff Fee

Figure 9: Different Discount Schemes

FLEXIBLE ITEM CHARACTERISTICS

The items can be marked as discountable or not. When calculating the discount, those items that are labelled as discountable will be given discounts. Charges for any item can be marked as editable. Only such marked item fees will be available to edit at the time of billing, charges of other items are not allowed to be changed by the cashier.

MEMBERSHIP SCHEMES

Clients can be registered by the system and can be allocated to various membership schemes like Platinum, Gold or Silver. Depending on the membership scheme and the payment methods, different services can be discounted at different rates automatically.

DEPARTMENT-VICE BILLING

Each Investigation and service has assigned to a specific department. For example, FBS is performed at the Biochemistry department whereas FBC is performed in the Haematology department. The user do not have to have any idea about the relevant department and all he has to do is to add investigations or services to the same window. There will be generation of multiple bills with different bill numbers which groups the requests to separate departments. (Refer Figure 10 and Figure 11)

Figure 10: Adding Investigations or Services From Three Different Departments

Figure 11: Three Bills for Separate Departments Have been generated from a single event of billing

PACKAGES

When several services are bundled together and given a different fee structure, it is called as a Package. Any number of packages can be created and there fees can be configured to vary depending on the package, payment method, discount scheme or membership. For a single package, the user has to enter client details and add the packages. Then bills will be generated separately for each department.

REFERRING DOCTOR DETAILS

Billing process can also record details about the referring doctor, so that analysis can be easily done in back office. (Figure 12)

Figure 12: Record of Referring Doctor Details at the Time of Billing

DISTRIBUTED BILLING

Billing can be at one physical location to another physical location as this application can be hosted in internet. For example, gall branch can bill a TSH performed at main branch in Colombo.

FLEXIBLE PRINTING

The bill printing settings varies significantly from one place to another. The software is flexible enough to accommodate different printer settings. There are department-vice preference to for printing so that each department can have their own way of printing bills. Some front offices use 3 inch wide point of sale printers (POD Printers), where others are use 5.5 inch papers on impact printers. Some papers are pre-printed with company details while others prefer to print every detail in the bill through the program on blank papers. The application can easily cater to the above requirements due to the flexibility of department-vice printing preferences.

REPRINTING

Authorized users are allowed to take reprints when required. Searching bills are very easy using client name, address, bill number, bill date or bill total. The bill will contain a label which states that this is a duplicate bill.

CANCELLATIONS

Bills can be easily searched for cancellation by authorized users.
In cancellations, the whole billing process is reversed. The total bill fee will be paid back. All the items for that particular bill will be cancelled as well. For example, if two investigations had been added by the bill that was cancelled, will be marked as not available to proceed. It is not possible to issue reports for those investigations. If investigations has already been performed, such bills are not allowed to be cancelled, unless there is a special permission from an authorized person to cancel such as that violates the business usual practices.
The re-payment method for cancellation can be decided by the cashier as authorized by the management. For example, repayment of credit card bills can be cancelled and pay as cash to the client if the management has already decided to handle the case in that way.
The cancellation process will be added to that particular days shift end summaries and day end summaries. When the bill that was cancelled had been billed in a previous day, there will be no change in the previous day summaries. Attempts to cancel the same bill by accident by more than one users simultaneously from one or more locations are not allowed by the system.

REFUNDS

Multiple Refunds can be done by authorized users easily after searching the relevant bill using various criteria like client name, bill total, requested investigations or bill number.
In refund, part or full charge of each individual bill component can be cancelled. For example, when one bill contained UFR and Urine Culture & ABST, only part of the Culture & ABST can be refunded to the patient. Multiple refunds for the same item can be done provided the total repayment amount do not exceed the original payment. Multiple users can refund the same bill from one or more locations, but will not allow them to exceed the total payment.
The refunds, as in the case of cancelled bills, will not affect previous summaries, but will be added to the current summery only.

Stock Reports of Pharmacy Module

Stock Reports

The Pharmacy Module is designed for independent retail and wholesale pharmacy / drug stores, retail or wholesale pharmacy chains or indoor/outpatient pharmacies in hospitals. It can be deployed as a single pharmacy module or as an interacting module with other modules like inward patient module, theatre module, laboratory module or OPD module.

An extensive collection of reports are available which streamline business operations, logistics, accounting, sales and inventory management and clinical audit. These can be used to make informed business intelligent decisions by the top level managers. All the reports can be directly printed or can be exported to Microsoft© Excel® format. If a user want any additional report, we can easily develop the new requirement to the system.

Here we lists the reports directly related to the stock of medicines or surgical items.

The user has the freedom to select one theme out of more than 20 available themes according to their preference. The look and feel of the reports also vary with the selected theme. We have attached reports from several different themes as examples.

BATCH STOCK REPORT

Figure 1: Batch Stock Report

Stock Report by Batch (Figure 1) lists all the stocks of the selected department in batches which have different expiries and rates. The report can be filtered by the name or the code of an item. The sorting can be done using any other listed character like stock quantity, sale rate, purchase value, etc.

STOCK REPORT BY EXPIRY

Stock Report by Expiry (Figure 2) lists all batches by the Date of Expiry between selected periods. The period can be adjusted manually or can take single click report for items expiring in three months, six months or one year. The initial order is by date of expiry in ascending order, but that order can be changed easily to order by the name, code, stock quantity or value as needed. The items can also be filtered by name or code. Comments can be added to the batch for further reference. Ex., “The supplied was informed, will collect on the 15 Jan 2015.”  The total retail sale value and the purchase value are listed at the table footer.

Figure 2 : Stock Report by Expiry

STOCK REPORT BY ITEM

This report lists stocks by item (Figure 5). A single row in this report is a summation of one or more rows in Report by Batch. For example one row of Amoxil 100ml Syrup in this report (Figure 3) sums data in three rows in batch stock report (Figure 4).

Figure 3: Stock by Item Report Filtered with word 'amox'

Figure 4: Stock Report by Batch filtered by word 'amoxil'

Figure 5: Stock Report by Item

STOCK REPORT BY PRODUCT

This lists the stocks by the product (Figure 6). For example, Amoxicillin 500mg Capsule is considered as a product. (The name given by the NHS, UK in dm+d is Virtual Medicinal Product.) There can be several items (Which are called as Actual Medicinal Products in dm+d) for a single product, like “Amoxil 500mg capsule”, “Amoxicillin (SPMC) 500mg Capsule” and “Decamox 500mg Capsule”. The sum of all the stocks of such items are listed as a single row in this report. Clicking on the name of the product directs you to a new report which list the distribution of the product (Figure 7). This report is very useful for the ordering process to take informed decisions. Most of the other competitive products are not capable of generating this report because they do not adhere to a standard data model like dm+d from NHS, UK. As this software was developed from scratch to become a medical software, we have always adhered to the world recognized medical software development principals. 

Figure 6: Stock Report by Product

Figure 7 : Click on Single Row in Stock Report by Product Brings this report

SUPPLIER STOCK REPORT

Different medicines may be supplied by different supplier. In some cases, it is needed to get a list of stocks of items which are supplied by a particular supplied. This report lists the current stocks of all items supplied by the selected supplier (Figure 8).

Figure 8 : Supplier Stock Report

SUPPLIER STOCK SUMMERY REPORT

This report, which is a summary of the last reports, lists the total value of the stock of items supplied by each supplier. (Figure 9). The supplier name is hyper texted so that clicking on that will lead to the distribution of stocks is listed.

Figure 9 : Supplier Stock Summery

STOCK REPORT BY CATEGORY

This reports lists the stocks of the selected category. (Figure 10) Some categories, for example, include Tablets, Syrups and Drops. 

Figure 10: Category Stock Reports

CATEGORY STOCK SUMMERY

This is a summary report where the stock value is calculated for each category. This gives an overview of the available stocks (Figure 11). The list can be ordered by the category or stock value.

Figure 11: Category Stock Summery

 

STOCK HISTORY REPORTS

In an average pharmacy, there are more than 6000 different items. The stock of each item can vary every second. It is practically difficult to record the history of all items all the time. We record the history of all items at the end of the month automatically for future reference. In addition the user can record the history when needed at any time.

In this report (Figure 11), clicking the display available days button lists all the days where history has been recorded. After selecting the required day, click on the display history button to list the stocks on that day of all the items. 

There is a “Record History Now” button, which records the current stock of all the items.

Figure 12: Stock History Report

CONCLUSION

The above described are the reports already available to get information about the stocks. There are numerous reports related to sales, transfers, purchases and so on. In addition there are graphs to display the same data which are easier to understand from first look. The details about those are discussed elsewhere. 

In addition, if a customer wants more reports, we can develop to give the exact output they need.

If you have any comments please leave a comment or contact us.

lakmedipro@gmail.com

(+94) 71 5812399

Hospital Information Management System - Pharmacy Module - Stock Reports

Probably the best billing interface for Pharmacy Software

The pharmacy software of Lanka Medical Programmers have developed to make it very easy for the end users to make informed decisions. Once the user use it for few hours, they will never find it comfortable with any other software. Here is a description of how informed decisions can be easily made using the software for effective billing process.

We will consider the possible use cases of a client is visiting the pharmacy with a prescription from a doctor.

Case 01 : Doctor has prescribed using generics
Ex. Azithromycin 500mg daily for 3 days
Azithromycin is a generic name. He is referring to a generic product. He is not concerned of a particular brand. In the pharmacy, there is no item called Azithromycin 500mg tablet. We may have Azilide 500mg tablet, Zithrox 500mg tablet, AZ 250mg tablet and so on. There prices, manufacturers, suppliers all differ significantly. So we can not sell something like Azithromycin 500mg 3 tablets. We have to select one item available and sell that particular product. But even for an experienced pharmacist may find it difficult to remember the suitable products. So we have developed a way to list all the possible Items available when we start typing the generic name in doctors prescription.

The details easily displayed along with the possible products include the Rate, Available Stocks and their Expiry Dates. The pharmacist has the option to to select any of the listed items and he can consider the available stocks and expiry dates to make a decision which is the exact item he is going to issue. The listed rate of items can be discussed with the client and he may prefer an item depending on financial constrains.

Usefulness of Typing first few letters of a Generic name

Case 2 : Doctor prescribe from a Propitiatory Name and Item is there in the stock. Pharmacist issue the very same product.
It needs to write first few letters of that particular brand and if stocks are available, they will be listed with the details like stocks, generic name, rate and expiry. All are listed as batches and helps the precise stock control (and we will be discussing on how well stocks are traces in another day.) The pharmacist can select the medicines with few key strokes or mouse movements and add the quantity and and add to the total bill.
Ex. Azilide 250mg tablet once a day for 3 days.

Case 3 : Doctor prescribe from a Propitiatory Name and Item Is out of stock.

Doctor has prescribed Zithrox 500mg tablet once a day for 3 days.

The Pharmacist types the word Zithrox, and notice that Zithrox 500mg is among the items that are out of stock.

But no worries for the pharmacist, she can click on Zithrox 500mg tablet label to get a complete set of available substitutes, if that can be considered on her setup.

When the pharmacist and the client agrees on one substitute, after considering the stocks available, expiry dates and rates, the pharmacist clicks on the selected item so that it will be billed.

Case 4: Doctor prescribes from a Proprietary Name, there are stocks, yet the client can not afford.
Doctor has prescribed Azilide 500mg tablet once daily for 3 days. The Pharmacist can easily select it as stocks are available. But the price is very high and patient may request substitute, and by that time, the user can see a list of other medicines with there details including the price, so that user can request another substitute.

Here user has selected Azilide 500mg tablet, and the replaceable medicines are listed below. Clicking one of the newly medicines will bring it as the billing item.

The above four use cases can be easily handled using this software. It is possible because of the complicated and detailed designing of the system which needs deep understanding of medical and software engineering domain. The complexity in the underlining design has make it possible for the front end to be feature rich, simple and fast.
Most of the other pharmacy software are mere extension of a normal inventory software. We have designed this specially for pharmacy software.But there may be exceptions. If any one can comment of any other software which also has all these features in one screen, I will remove the "Probably the best" part from the topic and will also edit the article in include the details of that software stating this also have similar or better feature.

This is only one point which makes our software superior to our competitors and we will describe one by one in other articles.

About us

Lakmedipro Pvt Ltd is a registered company in Sri Lanka, which was established by a medical doctor with the goal of developing the best medical software available for the country. After seven years of hard work, it has achieved its goal to make a complete range of medical software which exceeds the versatility of any other competitive medical software available.

The development team consist of a medical doctor who is also specialized in Health Informatics and five hard working, dedicated and skilled young software developers.

The company was mainly focused on the development, but not marketing, at least until the time is blog is been written. The aim of the marketing campaign is to stress the superiority of our applications over the other vendors' products.

We can be contacted by the following methods.

Email : buddhika.ari@gmail.com
Phone: +94 715812399
Skype: buddhika.ari
Website: www.lakmedi.com