What Is Nursing Home Software: Its Main Features and Benefits

Published:
April 2, 2021
What Is Nursing Home Software: Its Main Features and Benefits

Nursing home software is an excellent solution that helps health and homecare businesses eliminate most of the paperwork and manage processes such as appointment scheduling, billing, invoicing, staff scheduling, and patient intake online.

Due to a rising aging population and a growing number of chronic diseases, the long-term care market is growing significantly. This creates demand for cloud-based solutions for medical process automation, better data management, and more efficient administrative processes.

This article will review the most prominent examples of nursing home management software, its features, and pricing to help you better understand the market demand.

Nursing home software's main goal is to improve the quality and consistency of long-term care services and optimize the cost of maintaining the homecare business. Nursing home software helps to:

  • Optimize the costs spent for providing care
  • Automate most routine processes to boost staff productivity and reduce safety risks
  • Improve the care quality level
  • Allocate time and resources to provide better performance of administrative tasks in a shorter period of time
  • Provide better care and resident satisfaction

The popularity of custom software development solutions in the nursing industry is booming.

“[Nursing homes] face myriad operational, financial, and clinical challenges. From inconsistent and varied inbound referral information to day-to-day care coordination with other providers, from reimbursement complexities to staffing challenges; and from ineffective benefits design to a broad scope of clinical practice, there are many hurdles to running a safe, effective, and successful healthcare organization [without proper software]”

Seth Joseph, Managing Director of Summit Health, in his column for Forbes

Nursing home management applications offer nursing homes a set of tools for managing, monitoring, and treating their patients. Let’s review the main features of nursing home software together with examples and use cases.

Care Coordination

The nursing home application provides you with assessments and progress reports to better manage care planning and track the results. With care coordination solutions, staff can track services and treatments for individuals, improve collaboration between nursing staff, and manage all staff responsibilities in one place.

Another feature is the care management dashboard for nurses, doctors, physiotherapists, pharmacists, dieticians, and administrators. Such dashboards allow tracking and managing of daily activities, nurse worklists, care planning, clinical decisions, and incident logs.

Facility Scheduling and Management

This feature allows medical staff to assign and schedule facilities for long-term care needs and set reminders for different care activities. Most of the nursing home software that has this feature provides their users with dashboards, where they can track facility operations with a consolidated and granular view.

Billing Management

Billing management lets you track all the accounting and operational procedures in one system. You can easily manage vendor maintenance, invoicing, and timely payments, as well as get detailed reporting on rent roll, vacancy, and availability.

ePrescribing

ePrescribing allows providers to electronically prescribe medications, check interactions, and protect residents from unintended medication errors. With ePrescribing, providers can also create care plans and associated reports on medications and patient treatment.

Tele-health Monitoring

Tele-health monitoring is another great feature that allows for remote measurement of vitals with connected or manual measuring devices. Telehealth also provides healthcare professionals with a billing module and the opportunity to prescribe treatment via e-prescriptions.

Inventory and Stock Management

Inventory management helps keep all the information about depleted or expired items, consumed statistics, and pending purchase orders in one, centralized place.

Patient Records and Medication Tracking

Another must-have feature of nursing home software is patient records and medication tracking. It allows for creating and managing care plans, trends and regulations, and maintaining patient health records.

Long Term Care Software Market and Characteristics

According to the Market Data Forecast report, the long term care software market is estimated to grow from $1.84 billion in 2020 to $3.32 billion by 2025. Growth of the global long term care software market was also significantly boosted by COVID-19.

“Long before the pandemic, nursing homes struggled to meet infection-control standards, who introduced the legislation. The essential steps that need to be taken to maintain proper infection control protocols are made even more difficult when nursing homes do not have an adequate workforce”

— Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr

The number of people (especially the elderly) who visit hospitals has decreased, with a corresponding increase in higher demand for remote patient consultations.

Usually, long term care software is integrated with different non-clinical solutions such as electronic health records that pull the data into the nursing home software and help personnel improve long-term care facilities.

Cloud-based systems enable staff to manage financial and operational information about patients with just one system. No more spreadsheets. You can easily assess residents, create detailed service plans, provide quality care, and manage accurate bills. Now medical staff can easily retrieve the needed data, process, and organize it conveniently to reduce assisted living caregiver workloads and stress.

Usually, long term care software is divided into clinical and non-clinical software. The clinical software segment includes:

  • EMR/EHR
  • E-prescribing
  • Electronic medication administration records
  • Medication management
  • Clinical decision support systems

The non-clinical software segment consists of such features:

  • Real-time location systems
  • Remote patient monitoring systems
  • Remote training and supervision systems
  • Payroll management
  • Talent management

One example of such software is Storii Care software that comes with the application programming interface for importing data and integrating the solution with several third-party systems. It provides professionals the ability to create custom care plans, track updates, manage documents, and receive reminders about upcoming activities. They can also communicate with staff or family members and share notes on the patient's progress.

Nursing Home Charting Software

Smart charting is another great solution that allows accessing and entering notes, prescription information, billing history, and immunization records in your facility’s system, no matter where you are at the moment. Charting includes full electronic medical records to document procedures and progress notes, input orders, send/receive care summaries, and transition of care documents.

Image by Proxet. Smart Charting in Nursing Home Charting Software
Smart Charting in Nursing Home Charting Software

Nursing Home Solutions List and Pricing

Let’s review the most famous examples of nursing home solutions and their brief overview. Empower new technologies in your healthcare organization based on the following phone nursing apps and home care software review.

“Custom nursing home development solutions meet a lot of goals in healthcare. They provide automation for clinical and administrative processes, help manage billing, invoices, track patient data, and prescribe medicine more efficiently. But the most important consequences of digital transformation are better patient treatment and reduced costs”

Vlad Medvedovsky CEO at Proxet, a custom software development solutions company.

Unfortunately, nursing home software companies do not make their pricing public. You have to contact them directly to get a suggested plan. Their consultants will help you come up with a package that best suits the needs of your organization.

Napier

Napier is a software company that specializes in the healthcare provider industry. It helps manage different nursing home processes such as appointment scheduling, data processing, charting, patient intake, medication tracking, and invoicing.

Matrix Care

Matrix Care is a senior living software that enables staff to manage financial and operational information, track resident evaluation, and improve revenue management. The staff has role-based information for each resident, which helps them prioritize tasks and receive alerts when a resident’s condition changes. The system is fully mobile, so the information can be gathered anywhere, enabling staff to spend more time with residents and reducing data entry time.

AL Advantage Software

AL Advantage is a cloud-based solution created by assisted living health care experts. Senior caregivers can record resident care activities for specific state compliance and optimum clinical outcomes, schedule caring functions such as the resident’s laundry, medications, bathing, and other patient needs. Their key features are one-time data entry, state-specific compliance, and customizable levels of care.

PointClickCare

PointClick Care software is a senior living platform that aims to improve the organization's financial health, retain staff, ensure compliance, and provide the best resident experience. One of their prominent features is the Companion mobile app that helps caregivers in senior living communities manage their day by quickly capturing the delivery of services and medication using a mobile phone. With PointClickCare, staff can even predict the residents' needs based on real-time access to resident care status.

As you can see, the number of digital health applications is growing. Healthcare providers should follow the industry trends and take steps to improve the processes in their organization.

Proxet has significant expertise in implementing nursing home solutions in the healthcare sector. Proxet helps nursing homes identify the market’s needs and offers tailored solutions based on the client's goals. Our experienced product owners and developers will gladly help you build your best nursing apps.

Related Posts