subject: The Increasing Need For Medical It Solutions [print this page] Medical IT solutions have become a new success mantra for the medical industry. The need for advanced IT solutions is on the persistent rise due to the rising pressure for want of better productivity, improved quality of patient service and increase in ROI (return on investment) for the practice. Newer medical procedures are introduced to the industry from time to time that requires advanced medical IT solutions to deliver optimum results. Due to the above factors the age old notion that IT solutions has nothing to do with the healthcare industry is slowly fading out and newer technology solutions are becoming a part of day day life of any healthcare professional.
The new age medical IT solutions like billing software, claims processing system, online schedulers, EMR (electronic medical records), practice management software, digital imaging, clinical and more are making life easier for doctors, patients, hospitals and in fact the entire healthcare industry. These solutions ensure to make the path easier for achieving better productivity, to bring about improvement in the quality of patient service and better profit margins. With rising costs the physician practices and hospitals are finding it very difficult, however, adoption of IT solutions could help the industry to a great extent.
Medical IT solutions like EMR (electronic medical records) can help to streamline the overall back-end process of doctors clinic. EMR is the digital version of manual patient records. The medical history of the patients is recorded with the help of software in a digital form on computer storage mediums. The software provides with readily available data entry forms. The service codes and other inputs are available as pop ups or drop down menus and many more facilities for entering the patient data. This helps to maintain detailed patient medical history and that too with greater accuracy. It also helps to cut-down the time usually spent in creating and maintaining the patient data.
This is the case with EMR, however, other medical IT solutions like billing software, claims processing system, practice management, imaging, clinical and more are not behind. These solutions too deliver higher end functions for the practice that can help to streamline the overall operations of the practice. These IT solutions help physicians concentrate on their core function of patient care rather than killing their time resources with the back-end administrative processes. The out put being better quality of patient service resulting into more number of smiling patients i.e. better satisfaction among patients.
There are many difficulties in the path of implementation of medical IT solutions such as the age old notion that the healthcare industry has nothing to do with information technology, lack of understanding as regards the IT systems, cost of implementation, cost of IT infrastructure, training cost, upkeep cost, and doubt as regards the success of the system. The government and many healthcare IT organizations in the US are providing a lot of support for the adoption of IT solutions. As for example stimulus package provided by US government is a step towards taking care of cost factors to a great extent. Apart from financial there are many other kinds of support that are being provided to the healthcare professionals and hospitals.
Till date, the adoption of medical IT solutions across the entire healthcare industry was very slow as compared to other industries, however the trend is changing with more and more physician practices and hospitals adopting various IT systems. For sure there is increasing need for medical IT solutions due to various financial and non-financial factors. Information technology is the trend, it is the need of the hour, and medical industry is not an exception to the rule.
