“Exclusive Article by Lindsey Patterson for EMRIndustry”
Information technology (IT) has disrupted nearly every industry known to man due to the need for faster processes and less redundancy. This has been true in education, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, processing, engineering, and other smaller industries. In health care, technology promises faster diagnosis, better services, more accurate tests, better treatment methods, and a generally healthier society. Following these outcomes, it is important to review some of the underlying reason why information technology is disrupting healthcare at such a rate.
Faster Services
The main reason why the healthcare profession has been so welcoming to new information technologies is the promises for faster service delivery. IT allows nurses and physicians to share medical data across hospital buildings, different hospitals, different cities, different countries, and different continents across the world.
With Local Area Networks (LAN) setup for hospitals, the entire medical staff is able to access information as soon as it is available. Traditionally, there would be a need for messengers to carry around lab results, reports, and other vital patient information. Information technology has increased the speed at which communication takes place.
More Efficiency
In line with faster service delivery, information technology has enhanced the overall efficiency of health care services. With IT, some unnecessary processes have been eliminated from health care entirely. For instance, cloud printing allows physicians to print medical documents right from their work tablets. In many cases, the information may be stored on servers located in a different city.
Technology has had a profound impact on every aspect of health care with clear repercussions as noted. The need for more efficient services has pushed health practitioners to pressure technologists to avail such capabilities in the field. Before IT, poor efficiency was responsible for delayed diagnosis, wastage, backlog, and eventual preventable deaths.
Accurate Communication
Another common problem cited by healthcare providers before the age of the internet was the inaccuracy of medical records. While it was relatively difficult to dispute paper records, the invention of computers and the related ways of storing data meant that it was possible to corrupt medical records.
It also meant that health care providers needed to double-check editable digital files before treating information as authoritative. Information technology was introduced to solve the problem of authenticity without forcing health care providers to give up the benefits of digitally recording information.
Synchronization and Consistency
IT introduced synchronization that has made communication much easier in healthcare. With cloud technologies, no party can access private medical information without the clearance. Such services are more ubiquitous with the popularity of frameworks such as Hadoop cluster that allow distributed processing. If some results of a test are to be transmitted from a digitized piece of equipment to the doctor’s office it is safe to assume that the integrity of the data will be maintained.
IT ensures that healthcare providers offer consistent services. The doctors can easily set up a Skype call with the patient’s former physician or access their medical records stored on their electronic cloud. In the end, the new physician is in a position to have a better understanding of the patient’s medical history and offer the most appropriate treatment.
Cost-effectiveness
While the initial investment in information technology is a hurdle, research has shown that investment in IT is usually a reasonable undertaking for most health institutions. As an illustration, patients can utilize IT conferencing services to conduct electronic appointments with their doctors. This saves time and minimizes the travel expenses. Consequently, it reduces the workload that a physician has to deal with improving their productivity.
Conclusion
The implementation of web-linked electronic health records in many healthcare institutions promises higher levels of efficiency and fewer delays accessing health care. Cloud computing has had a similar effect on healthcare as physicians have easier access to the patients’ data. In some cases, they are able to diagnose the patients long before they arrive in the health centers. The need for faster, accurate, efficient, cost-effective, and consistent health care has made it possible and necessary for the information technology to disrupt the field.
