Question

Questions about cost-control applications:

If a health care organization has a strategy of lowering its cost of care, what types of IT applications might it consider?

If the organization has a strategy of improving the quality of its care, what types of IT applications might it consider?

Compare the two lists of applications.

Answer 1

Answer:

In order to lower its cost, health care system can consider the following IT application:

An application that could automate administrative tasks for more efficient use f the physician’s time would be helpful in lowering the overall cost of the system. Making the repetitive task digital would help in bringing down the number of hours a physician need to treat patients. This will help in the reduction of the administrative expenses. Artificial intelligence and basic digital software could help the health care facility in automating the physician’s interaction with electronic health records. Instead of manually entering the various records, software can import all of the data and can, thus reduce the corresponding paper work. Health care system can also lower the staffing costs by using scheduling applications and would help in accomplishment of the tasks within the predefined period of time without actually needing the over times of the existing workers and hiring of the contractual workers so as to meet the deadlines. In order to reach more number of patients, health care system can use digital platform for its marketing needs. This will reduce the marketing cost of the health care system.

In order to improve its quality, health care system can consider the following IT application:

For improving quality of health care, various IT applications are available for the use in the health care system. Clinical informatics to promote patient’s safety is an application that is used to reduce medical errors and improve patient safety. It includes automated error alerting mechanisms, structured electronics data sets, digital eye technology, database applications, computerised patient self monitoring and communication tools, wearable mini computers, cognitive science and human factor engineering. All these components of the clinical informatics to promote patient’s safety ensure that there is no interference of the human and medical error during the provision of medical services to the patients, thus, improving the quality of health care system.