#Visitor Management System in Hospitals — 3 Significant Benefits

Hospitals and healthcare facilities have unique and complex security and operational needs. Hospital premises include not just healthcare facilities but a wide range of amenities that serve patients, visitors, and staff alike. Some large premises even include medical university campuses and hostels.

Hospitals generally comprise of sprawling campuses & massive buildings that serve hundreds and thousands of patients and their visitors on a daily basis. They also host millions of rupees worth of assets. Not to mention the various categories of workers and visitors i.e. staff, contractors, laborers, medical reps, vendors, etc. — who enter and exit the facilities day in and day out.

How Can Hospitals Benefit from a Digital Visitor Management System?

The size and complexity of security and operational challenges that hospitals face make it imperative that they have a robust and efficient security and hospital operations management system in place. One such solution is a digital visitor management software for hospitals to ensure security in the hospital facility as well as efficiency in the management of its visitors.

For example, replacing paper registers or semi-automated systems that require clunky, high maintenance hardware, with digital VMSs. However, its adoption across the healthcare industry, mainly in India, has not yet taken off.

Many five-star hospitals in India still issue printed paper badges to their visitors and patients.

This is despite the obvious benefits VMS offer to a healthcare campus. Embracing tech in visitor hospitality is the way forward, be it for any industry.

“The minimal obligation of the front desk is not just to check guests in,” said Aditya Sanghi, CEO of Hotelogix, a Bangalore-based tech provider. “It’s also to be accountable to your brand’s entire promise.”

In this blog, we list the top 3 important ways how a visitor management system can help hospitals and medical facilities secure their premises and fast track their processes at the reception.

1. Secure your Hospital by Monitoring & Tracking Visitors

Since hospitals receive a great influx of visitors on a daily basis, it becomes imperative for hospital security and facility managers to have a track of visitors and have a report for any further decision making. For example, Ara’s Visitor Reports gives a great overview of visitors in detail to better understand the overall functioning and make better decisions.

A visitor management system also recognizes different categories of visitors and captures maximum visitor data along with visitor photo and standard details such as email id and phone numbers, within seconds. This way, hospitals can prevent unlawful activities on the premises. All records are accessible in a single dashboard and can be viewed in real-time as well.

Another additional security measure you get from VMS is that the software is easily scalable to hundreds of locations and manages all of them from a single location or dashboard. It can help you schedule appointments via the dashboard which will send alerts and notifications to the host and the visitor, making the entire visitor process seamless.

It can also send alerts in case of an emergency such as an earthquake and notify all the visitors to vacate the building as soon as possible. This comes extremely handy especially when hospitals in seismically active areas are deploying quake-ready technology to keep them safe in an emergency.

2. Improve your Hospital’s Brand & Reputation

Having a Visitor Management Software at the front desk enables automated check-in processes which leads to a decrease in the pressure of handling visitors on the staff, eventually resulting in building the reputation and brand image of hospitals, which is necessary for highly competitive hospitals industry.

A good system can create mutual dependency and trust between the hospital management and visitors. Also, the system will impress visitors which might directly or indirectly affect your brand reputation. They know that your hospital is more concerned about visitor security and also about hospital management. Naturally, it builds mutual trust between the visitors and the hospital management and also it leads to building a brand reputation in the visitor’s mind.

3. Improve Work Efficiency and Patient Satisfaction

According to a recent survey, 45% of people said they choose to have a VMS for their organization to improve work efficiency.

A sophisticated visitor app has advanced self-service functions. Such a system offers a patient or the patient attendant the facility to add his or her own list of visitors to the system. The visitors can then be given automatic access to visit the patient during visiting hours.

The system can also enable the patient or the attendant to identify someone as an unwanted visitor. This empowers the patient and goes a long way in enhancing patient satisfaction.

Hospitals also have receptionists in the main lobby as well as in the reception areas of respective departments. Self-registration software can lessen the burden on hospital receptionists who are usually overburdened with managing visitors. The modern digital visitor management system enables visitors to manually enter their details and schedule the meeting with hosts and give a seamless experience for the visitors. The QR code-based visitor id in the VMS gives a seamless check-in experience for the visitors.

Self-registration visitor app is an efficient way of handling visitors, especially, pre-registered visitors, and can complement manual check-ins that receptionists handle. Having a VMS at your front desk can reduce pressure on hospital receptionists who are mostly overburdened by managing visitors thereby improving their work efficiency by leaps and bounds.

Originally published at https://getara.co