Technology across the Care Continuum Essays

Technology across the Care Continuum Essays

Technology across the Care Continuum

Effective Use of Technology Across the Care Continuum

Overview of The Care Continuum

The health sector is undergoing a massive transformation in terms of the technological advancements, which are promoting efficiency in the access to quality and affordable care by all citizens. Telehealth is one of such changes that enhance faster delivery of health education, public health, and health care using telecommunications technologies.

The approach employs a number of tactics and technologies to deliver virtual health, education, and medical services. This paper will look at the telehealth technology that is being utilized in an ambulatory clinic that is concerned with cardiovascular diseases. The system is used in services such as offering advice, education, monitoring and remote admissions.

Unlike telemedicine, Telehealth is broad and encompasses more services apart from diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up. Healthcare givers are able to collect a wide range information from the patients and interact to share valid information with regard to their health and status. The most used technology used is Electronic Health Records.

This helps the healthcare providers and patients to share critical information openly, which help to minimize medication errors (Berner, 2014). However, the effectiveness of telehealth may be affected by various factors including insecurity of data, organizational culture, and patient education. An organizational culture enables the nurses and other staff to familiarize with the systems while patient education enables patients to embrace the system and begin using it.

Types of Patient-Care Technologies

Telehealth use social media platforms, Cloud CRM, smartphones, and tablets to contact patients and share information in the form of videos, texts, and pictures. Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) allows transmission and sharing of patients’ health information and medical data among the care providers remotely (Yang et al., 2015). RPM is also used to monitor patient well-being after being discharged from the hospital.

Thus, instances of readmission are largely minimized. Other communication and information technologies that have been developed over the years. They include electronic health record, Remote monitoring tools, mHealth, Sensors and wearable technology, Portal technology, Self-service kiosks, Tablets, smartphones, Telemedicine/telehealth, and Pharmacogenomics/genome sequencing (Cascarino, 2014). Mobile health (mHealth) entails the use of modern mobile tools such as phones and tablets to share health information that promotes positive behaviors (Sidani & Fox, 2014).

Another technology that is widely used under telehealth is Store-and-forward (asynchronous). This system is mostly used to transmit recorded health history. Data collected from a patient need to be transmitted to other individuals or departments. Such information includes x-ray images, tests results and past medication.

These can be transmitted electronically through various forms such as videos, images, and e-mail. Another type of technology used under telehealth is Live video (synchronous). This is one of the most advanced technologies that involves live video communication between the patient and the caregivers. The technology is efficient in that there is immediate feedback and the information can be recorded for use in future.

How to Manage Change and Technology to Improve Outcomes

In order to implement the use of technology in the healthcare continuum, substantial investments are needed in training healthcare providers and educating patients.

The nurses and patients should have necessary skills to handle advanced technologies to prevent data breach and unauthorized access to confidential data. In addition, the management must be able to forecast the financial needs to have the technology run effectively.

he nurses and patients should have necessary skills to handle advanced technologies to prevent data breach and unauthorized access to confidential data. In addition, the management must be able to forecast the financial needs to have the technology run effectively.

The involvement of all stakeholders in the design and execution of the proposed technology is mandatory to minimize resistance to change. The leadership must also develop guidelines that ensure strict adherence to timelines and budget.

Therefore, information technology has proven to enhance fast and accurate communication which results to streamline the process, improved the flo………………………

Technology across the Care Continuum Essays