With flu season upon us, healthcare providers and patients alike are gearing up for a busy time of year in the office. As office schedulers know, trying to accommodate all the patients a doctor needs to see in a given day is tricky enough without the added stress of flu season - when doctors are likely to need to see even more patients and hospitals will no doubt see an uptick in admissions and emergency room visits.
The Chief Information Officer in a healthcare system has perhaps one of the most complex and ever-evolving roles in the hospital C-Suite today. Since information technology has now permeated our entire culture - and particularly in medicine - executive level information management is hot field nowadays. Strategic planning within an organization tends to encompass many areas - but for the Chief Information Officer, most of their planning requirements fall under the category of information management. For most modern hospitals, information management is largely to do with electronic health records and the business transactions that surround them. While CIOs are not down in the trenches laying the groundwork for databases or troubleshooting minor issues, they are overseeing the purchasing, implementation and staffing needs to make the whole operation run smoothly.
You’ll recall that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid has adopted the concept of The Triple Aim to serve as a guiding light for healthcare organizations to improve patient outcome measures. The Triple Aim has three interlocking components: 1. Improving the patient experience of care (patient satisfaction) 2. Improving the health of populations 3. Reducing the per capita cost of healthcare It probably seems fairly intuitive that these three measures would be theoretically connected. If you can improve patient health at a population level, you’ll reduce the need for costly and often unnecessary services; and if you achieve positive patient outcome measures, you’ll be reducing readmissions. This equals reduced cost.
Healthcare technology is changing faster than most organizations can keep up. What are you doing to comply? Healthcare technology is a rapidly changing field. Some of the changes are required to comply with current regulations while others are to gain a competitive advantage. Lets’ delve into a few of these areas.
What’s better than knowing you can connect a provider with a patient even when that patient lives in the most rural of places? Telemedicine is an innovative and resourceful communication tool that integrates communications with modern day electronics allowing for the provider and patient to be in different locations during scheduled appointments. Products such as real time audio/video, email and smart phones are just some of the products being used in this delivery of services. The term telehealth which also encompasses telemedicine is a broader definition of remote healthcare that can include non clinical usage such as continuing education and training for providers to support healthcare services.