IT in health care: More hope than ever to doctors and patients
Filed under: Healthcare Information Technology, Healthcare Management Information Systems
While much has been talked about the use of information technology in health care, the HCIF team feels passionate about bringing forth its perspective on the relevance of IT in this sector of utmost importance.
The softwares in healthcare which were earlier made to be a part of biomedical equipments have reached the common people in last d
ecade and are used by doctors right from the patient history taking to the final medical treatment. However, the initiatives are not in wide reach and the potential for further development is huge.
The most commonly used programmes so far are of the hospital and laboratory management systems, which not only do the automation of most of the patient care and management processes, but also store and analyze data according to the needs of the doctors or the hospital. This automation saves a lot of time, improves patient satisfaction and makes the management highly efficient. The Hospital Management Systems include Business Intelligence Systems, Revenue Cycle Management, Claims Processing, Data Warehousing, Electronic Heath Records, Electronic Medical Records, E-Prescribing and Tele Consultation Systems.
One such advancement is of ICD coding and insurance clain processing systems for various diagnoses, which is helping in easy understanding and standardizing of medical diagnoses and billing for such diseases. The insurance sector is hoping very high on such standardization to make the insurance benefits error and risk free.
Other big advancements are in the field of online medical consultations, online diagnoses, online lab reporting and online medical education.
The development of Watson by IBM is another milestone and a much awaited outcome for the medical professionals and common people.
Imagine a doctor sitting amongst a crowd of OPD patient and solving the mystery of a rare diagnosis, while not being able to find a common answer; In such a scene , a software designed with the requitsite programming would not leave any scope for such errors, prompting all the possibilities with their relevance in a single go and faster than a clinicians logic.
To HCIF it gives a hope that instead of mugging the existing diagnoses algorithms, a medical professional can focus on future research and addressing the unsolved health care and medical mysteries!!