As most healthcare failed to cope with an influx of patients during the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s a growing concern that history will repeat itself in case of another, deadlier pandemic. These concerns place more stress on healthcare institutions to increase the efficiency of their operations.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a problem that has hounded the American healthcare system for decades, where, despite spending more on healthcare per capita than any other high-income nation, they still had one of the worst outcomes.
This means that the health sector depletes a significant chunk of the nation’s resources without showing any substantial improvement.
Many solutions to these problems rely on making the clinical or healthcare processes more efficient. By doing this, institutions can maximize the number of patients they can treat and eliminate costs that can be used to improve other areas like preventative care.
To elaborate on these concerns, the following steps can help speed up these processes.
Incorporating the Use of Technology Into Clinical Processes
Technology can help streamline and improve overall functioning in various healthcare settings, from those institutions that primarily deal with patient care to ones focused on research, such as preventing the outbreak of contagious diseases.
Incorporating these technologies, like Laboratory Information Systems, enables the automation of laboratory work like sample registration, testing, and data collection. This eliminates any chance of human error that can arise both in the recording of data and the performance of tests.
Further, these technologies can be used by healthcare workers to instantly access an updated version of their patient’s health records. By using wristbands with a unique code that can be accessed via bar code scanners, doctors can be confident that they are interpreting the latest tests when assessing their patients.
Further, incorporating telehealth services can also significantly speed up healthcare processes while enabling greater access to healthcare systems. It includes technologies that allow patients to receive virtual consultations and ones through which doctors can monitor their patient’s health remotely.
It means that being unable to access a physical location like a hospital is no longer a barrier to entry to receiving healthcare services since healthcare IT solutions allow access to many services remotely. It also gives doctors important information about their patient’s health instantaneously instead of having them at the hospital to run tests.
All these technologies allow healthcare providers to deal with more patients at any given time, enabling healthcare institutions to be more efficient and productive without relying on existing healthcare workers or investing additional funds in recruiting more.
Adopting A More Multidisciplinary Approach To Patient-Care
Often, a patient’s condition will require them to visit and consult with a wide range of specialists. The process must be streamlined so the patient doesn’t face problems during diagnosis and treatment.
Without proper communication, a single diagnosis can lead to an unnecessary strain on the healthcare institution, where two doctors could be ordering virtually the same tests without knowing the diagnosis.
With time, this affects the quality of patient care, with bits of information lost in the diagnosis/prognosis of a person due to the lack of collaboration between these professionals.
A multidisciplinary approach, by contrast, involves the collaboration between a wide variety of specialists within a healthcare setting to improve the overall quality of healthcare provision within that institution.
Such an approach allows for a more comprehensive assessment of the patient’s condition, with professionals from various disciplines, each with unique specializations providing insight. There is also better coordination between these doctors, where previously, information obtained by one doctor that might have been crucial to the diagnosis of another would have slipped between the cracks.
Finally, it enables more optimal utilization of resources, eliminating the unnecessary duplication of tests.
Creating A Culture That Focuses On Constant Improvement
The philosophy of continuous quality improvement argues that healthcare institutions should constantly ask themselves how to improve their overall functioning.
It is a focus that prioritizes analyzing and identifying problem areas within a healthcare institution, both in its processes and outcomes, and then creating solutions to solve these issues.
It is a continuous process of analyzing, planning, implementing, and evaluating, through which healthcare institutions remain aware of any flaws or faults that may arise from new policy or administrative decisions.
This focus on constant improvement should also exist on the individual level, with healthcare workers feeling encouraged to focus on their professional development, keeping themselves up to date with the latest trends, techniques, and research within the medical industry.
Greater Level Of Focus On Preventative & Patient Self Care
COVID-19 showed the world that the only way to prevent another global medical emergency is to focus on taking steps that prevent the rise and spread of diseases in the first place.
For too long, healthcare systems have been focused on mitigating harm once the disease has spread rather than creating an environment where that disease is unlikely to arise in the first place.
By prioritizing preventative healthcare, we can make clinical processes more efficient by reducing the number of cases that these institutions have to deal with in the first place.
Preventative health measures can include universal access to vaccination against infectious diseases, which must be coupled with programs and initiatives that dispel myths about the hidden side effects of these medications.
Finally, preventative health includes providing patients and the general public with important education and advice about health. It can include promoting healthy lifestyles, nutritional diets, and more knowledge of addictive habits like tobacco and alcohol.
By improving the general public’s overall health and focusing on preventing diseases rather than treatment, healthcare systems that were once overburdened can now more effectively perform their tasks.
Conclusion
Access to adequate healthcare facilities is the fundamental right of all individuals, but often, inefficiencies within the healthcare systems prevent the realization of this right.
By focusing on factors that can speed up these clinical processes and make healthcare more efficient, we can ensure that more people have access while improving the quality of care.
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