Sir, good evening again. Here is my 4th NU6. Thanks again. - Bong Canlas
Smartphone Application to Monitor Hospital Bill
By: Jose Tiburcio S. Canlas
Monitoring of hospital bills has not been easy for patients at Mother Teresa of Calcutta Medical Center. Actually, inquiries for billing updates may be made in the billing window that is provided for this purpose. A billing clerk is designated to receive requests for billing updates. When requested, the billing clerk will print the updated patient statement of account and give it to the requesting party. The problem here is that, if you are a 142 bed capacity hospital, it is not surprising to see long lines in the billing window. This discourages some patient relatives in falling in line and making inquiries for billing updates.
We have heard many cases of patients or their relatives complaining that they were not aware that their hospital bill has reached such a high amount until the discharge time. When this happens, patients or their relatives become angry and would normally ask for a meeting with any member of the management team to voice out their complaint. It is such a waste of management time if this happens over and over again. Worse, if the patients are really incapable of producing enough funds to settle the final hospital bill, the Credit and Collection Department would have no other option but to authorize the discharge of the patient after signing a promissory note. This adversely affects the liquidity of the hospital.
The solution I have thought regarding this problem is a smartphone application which will be installed to the smartphone provided by the patient upon admission. This is not possible only for patients who cannot provide a smartphone. But that would be a rare case. From the time of admission of the patient and the installation of the application, the hospital bill may be monitored from time to time. The application will also include a calculator which can compute the estimated hospital bill of the patient for every additional day of stay in the hospital.
This installation of the hospital bill application can result to a lot of good things. First, the patients and their relatives can effectively monitor the hospital bill. If they find that they are exceeding their budget, they can request to be transferred to lower rate rooms or even to hospitals where rates are lower such as government hospitals. Second, this will significantly reduce the complaints for unexpected high hospital bills which result to waste of management time. Third, this will save on office supplies since there would be no need to print the patient statement of account. 4
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