Introduction
Healthcare workers are all busy taking care of patients in need of medical assistance. There still seem to be issues of organization and effectiveness in the workplace when it comes to managing work or taking care of patients and managing their well-being. The new era comes with an arrangement of new technology and more effective ways to function in a healthcare workplace. In hospitals, there is an issue of not properly implementing a new way to process information technology that would greatly benefit the workplace.
Improvements to Efficiency
With technology comes a new way to make tasks easier or faster to complete. Sometimes, technology can even present a solution to an unsolved problem. It can lead to a brighter future for the healthcare industry in general.
Although technological advancements in the medical field are not unprecedented, new technology can further improve the efficiency and quality of the care that healthcare workers can provide.
In a fast-paced workplace, physicians, nurse practitioners, lab technicians and other workers are expected to operate like a well-oiled machine to be able to help their patients. Still, even as certain technology has been used such as Electronic Medical Records (EMR) which is software that automates the documentation, storage, and retrieval of patient records. There are still plenty of problems in the industry when it comes to coordination and organization of the workers to run a healthcare workspace properly. Many patients still complain about the quality of care they are receiving and there are still many errors in the industry when it comes to giving the proper care for patients.
It is especially troubling in today’s unparalleled day and age. Efficiency is needed by the healthcare industry to effectively take care of the numerous patients rushing into hospitals as the pandemic affects people across the globe.
New technology, and especially information technology, is the solution to the issues of communication and organization within the hospital setting. This can be achieved by using certain systems that organize the data being processed all the time in a workplace. Once these issues are solved, the efficiency of the workplace becomes a lot more noticeable and beneficial not just to the patients involved, but also by improving the quality of life for the healthcare workers in their workspaces.
Updating Paperwork
The healthcare industry is a place where paperwork is still a mainstay for almost all information gathered. Whenever information needs to be passed around, healthcare workers typically still rely on fax machines to be able to transfer this information to each other. This is an archaic way in today’s times since a lot of technology is out there to help ease the passing of information from one person to another. Examples of these new technologies are the aforementioned EMR and the Electronic Health Record (EHR) which gives a digital version of a patient’s paper chart. Only a few places are using these implementations in their systems, so the old fax machines are still used primarily in a lot of workplaces.
But why do healthcare workers still do this today?
There is one simple reason for this to still be the norm — confidentiality. Healthcare professionals have a responsibility to ensure the information being passed is confidential and as secure as possible. In this current digital age, one of the biggest issues we are facing is data leakage and cyber hackers.
However, this digitization of information is still faster and more intuitive to implement today as it can speed up the time for healthcare workers to send and receive pertinent information.
Conclusion
Many healthcare workers out there are facing issues regarding efficiency with communication and disorganization within the workplace. In these current times, companies have come up with a lot of different technologies to be able to make many human tasks faster, more efficient, and even offer solutions to problems that haven’t been solved in the past.
It is time that the healthcare industry adapts to new technology and information technology to be able to keep themselves afloat in this huge commotion happening in the world today. We need to adapt to survive.
What technology do you think can greatly help improve the conditions within the healthcare industry?
