Modernization in healthcare is important to keep up with grueling demands
We’ve talked about the nature of legacy infrastructure and its role in healthcare, discussing the impact old hardware, systems, and tech has on the care quality of a patient environment. Because of those problems, practices are rapidly transforming into a modern model capable of handling new patient challenges, executive paperwork, and growing demands for managing the invoice cycle.
What, then, does the modern healthcare practice look like? Is your practice leading the charge, or falling behind? And can tools like Dragon One’s dictation software not only help, but fit into the modern medical practice model? We’ll take a look at how the healthcare industry is modernizing and why it’s so important.
The need for modernization in healthcare
Not only can legacy infrastructure impede patient care, but also processing time for things like lab work, paperwork, transferring files, and general operations. Directly and otherwise, it also helps with clinician burnout, fatigue, and stress. Today, practitioners are faced with increasingly burdensome odds, thanks largely to the COVID-19 pandemic. The need for additional emergency services combined with administrative paperwork has also fostered a stressful, demanding environment. In those scenarios, legacy infrastructure can’t keep pace.
It’s not just a healthcare problem either. If professionals are overwhelmed, stressed, and burnt out, they can’t perform their jobs as effectively. They may even leave the healthcare industry entirely. Unsurprisingly, sick patients need professionals, and the fewer resources they have, the fewer resources we have. It also means, thanks to said demand, workers and doctors have reduced time for patients. And, that doesn’t mean each patient receives the same level of care. Stress and burnout can cause diminishing returns for patient healthcare, since meeting as many patients as possible is necessary to accommodate for a lack of time.
It’s clear from these elements alone, a healthcare practice in America needs a swift change from legacy infrastructure.
Modernizing and moving forward
How do medical practices deal with this encroaching issue of burnout while still maintaining patient care services? While the industry is trying to tackle it by shifting away from legacy, they also employ other approaches too.
In the instance of modern techniques, practices use smart devices and technology to enhance their care abilities. For instance, virtual and remote care are growing in popularity, both as a response to COVID and as an accessible format for patients. Virtual care and virtual assistants allow patients to seek medical care when physical visits are too difficult. Or, caregivers can even prescribe basic medications without needing extensive visit time.
Other practices and medical facilities take advantage of remote devices (or remote patient monitoring) to further improve their ability to respond to patient care. For instance, visiting patients in a hospital with chronic conditions are sensitive to health changes, and any alteration in their blood pressure, heart rate, medications, and/or sleeping are a few points of interest that remote systems can monitor. RPM and remote devices even transfer their analytics to responding programs, creating data nodes that can be used to further improve care. It’s another reason we emphasize data literacy in the healthcare workspace, too.
Remote services are just an example of modernizing healthcare infrastructure, but what other tools exist for medical professionals?
How Dragon One fits into modern healthcare
Dictation software, specifically Dragon Medical One, is another example of modernized infrastructure. As the contemporary healthcare model utilizes tech, remote solutions, and monitoring applications, Dragon One fits into the big picture with ease. We’ve discussed before how Dragon Medical One is a natural addition to healthcare IT but also completes the picture for a modern healthcare model.
One of the big advantages, for instance, is the time component. The dictation software is accurate and accessible, more so than other primitive counterparts. Therefore, clinicians and professionals can record patient symptoms, medications, and encounter reports with hand-free accuracy. In the appropriate environment, this can expedite patient care services and shift hours of redundant data maintenance into minutes.
Given we’ve already emphasized the need for agile reporting and care in the modern demanding environment, any tool which offers relief and accuracy is a major advantage. Since the Dragon Medical One program is available on all of your workstations, it’s a natural fit. It also doesn’t require major changes to IT infrastructure or current systems beyond the use of the actual app, so it can dash away from legacy systems without overhauling delicate policies. It even works for remote visits and remote patient care, since practitioners can record details when speaking.
Conclusion
Since the pandemic there has been a steady escalation in demand in the medical industry. Without major revisions and changes in said industry, professionals are left holding the bag and face continuously rising demand in all areas of healthcare. But the modern practice utilizes new-age tools like remote monitoring, virtual appointments, and dictation assets like Dragon One.
How the medical industry shapes and changes, however, remains to be seen.
For more information on the Dragon Medical One dictation software, contact us today.
