Patient Care Goes Digital: Enhancing Convenience & Reducing Costs - Essay Sample

Introduction

Conventionally, a patient has to physically visit a hospital or call for home medical care to receive medical assistance, get their test results and speak to a doctor. Visiting a hospital is time-consuming for the patient and resource-intensive for the hospital while requesting for home-based care is expensive for the patient. Thus, in a world that is going digital, technology had to be invented to enhance patient convenience while also reducing operating costs for medical facilities. This document discusses how evolutionary technologies (telemedicine) can transform the culture and reputation of a health facility.

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Telehealth

Telehealth involves the use of digital devices like cell phones and computers to access and manage one's healthcare services. For example, a patient with diabetes may upload their mediation, diet history, and blood sugar levels for online review by a physician. They could also learn about carbohydrate counting apps by watching online tutorials. The patient can also feed her diet and exercise activity on the apps for estimation of how much insulin she may need. She may also order medications and testing materials online (Gillis, Newsham & Maeder, 2015). Remote diagnosis and virtual care have dramatically reduced the burden on health facilities.

Telehealth enhances access to healthcare for communities in marginalized regions or rural areas. It also provides more convenience for people whose mobility is impaired or busy patients. Telehealth also offers a customer the ability to review available specialists and choose the best for them. Another importance of telehealth is that it enables the patient to self-manage their health and outcomes. Telehealth also brings experts together and allows the sharing of ideas. A group of medical professionals can organize online conversations and share insights on best practices and recent advances in patient care.

A typical pioneer of telehealth implementation is the Cumbria and Lancashire Telestroke Network In the UK. The system helps to provide a 24-hour remote stroke diagnosis and quick medication prescription from physicians in 8 hospitals. The service gets delivered despite the patient's or doctor's location. This intervention has speeded up diagnosis and enhanced patient convenience greatly.

Patient Portal

A patient portal is a patient-centered care system where the organization designs an online website where a patient can obtain all his health information from anywhere at any time. The portal is secured with a username and password and offers the patient information such as medications, laboratory results, Allergies, immunizations, and recent or upcoming doctor visits. The portal may also allow the patient to send their doctor a private message, schedule appointments, check coverage and benefit details, update their contact details, and request prescription refills and updates (Wulfovich & Meyers, 2019).

The patient needs to have a computer or smartphone and an internet connection. For first time users, they need to follow a given registration procedure online to set up. After successful login, they can message the contact center for any queries. Parents can also be allowed to create accounts on their dependents' behalf and to manage the accounts. Back and forth communication with the health institution will be fulfilled through email reminders requesting the patient to log in to view or respond to an issue. A patient portal improves communication between the physician and the patient, enhances the focus on patient care, advances the operational efficiency of the faculty and thus reduces errors, and reduces costs.

The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) was among the first organizations to implement a patient portal (they called it My HealtheVet) (Pepper, 2019). Through it, veterans were able to view and track their disability benefits and quickly seek assistance from their physicians. This approach helped them to recover quickly from psychological conditions like PTSD. Overall, the world already lives on technology and more patients are accepting and adopting telemedicine as their preferred channel of seeking healthcare. So clearly, implementing these technologies will be a significant milestone towards moving the hospital in the correct digital direction.

References

Gillis, G., Newsham, D., & Maeder, A. J. (2015). Global Telehealth 2015. Burke: IOS Press, Incorporated.

Pepper, J. (2019). The Electronic Health Record for the Physician's Office E-Book: For SimChart for the Medical Office.

Wulfovich, S., & Meyers, A. D. (2019). Digital health entrepreneurship.