Background
Jeram Community hospital is located in the north-western part of the country. It is the biggest private hospital in that region and has a 350-bed capacity. The outpatient department serves over 500 patients a day in various clinics like medical, imaging, maternal-child health, accident and emergency, physiotherapy, and nutrition. High-quality healthcare services involve accurate record keeping used for the follow-up of individual patients on their prognosis. The client flow in the hospital is high in relation to the health records staff available, and it is common to experience some delays at the desk.
High-quality healthcare service is the priority of all hospitals, and waiting time is one of the pillars in the quality of services. To counter the long queues, the hospital identified biodata collection and subjective examinations as the top two areas that brought about delays. The two had to be improved to enhance the response time and promote timely interventions.
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Technology Implementation Concept
The hospital top management brass thought of a way to ease patient data collection. Electronic data collection emerged top on the list of available options. A trial on mobile data collection was done in the maternal-child health clinic for over a month. The results were exemplary, and now the technology is set to be rolled out in the entire hospital. Survey CTO was the preferred software among the various mobile data collection tools available. With this technology, every consultation room had an android phone used to input data of clients. In essence, the long waiting queues at the health records desk were reduced. The efficiency of service delivery was also improved because of the reduction in the waiting time.
Survey CTO also allows sharing data between departments at the facility; for instance, patients in an obstetrics clinic who requires laboratory investigations are sent directly to the laboratory, and they do not need to give information again since it has already been shared. This data collection technology also increases patient engagement as the information is shared with him/her (Bradway et al., 2020). Synchronization of the data eased client follow up in such a way that nurses who relieved their colleagues in different shifts could easily retrieve progress notes of individual clients. Waiting time at the health records desk was significantly reduced.
One important factor considered while developing the software entails the context of users, including hospital staff and patients (Mahmoud, 2017). The software used within the hospital was modified to align with departmental needs. It can also be adapted to incorporate insurance claims to ease the processing of payments after treatment. Running costs incurred in operating survey CTO are relatively low in that data can be collected and stored in offline mode. The Internet is only required when sending the data to a server. Therefore, a cost-effective and efficient approach can easily be implemented in resource-constrained environments.
All patient-related information is controlled to stay within the required standards of privacy and confidentiality. Therefore, access to information in the survey CTO is controlled, and only relevant staff working at the hospital can access it (Sovova, 2019). Digital technology used in data collection must remain consistent with government guidelines and policies. Structures have to be established to mitigate any risk of infringement and transfer of such information to third parties. The Healthcare industry guards the dignity of all clients, and in many countries, violating the privacy policy leads to severe punitive measures, including revoking of legal operating licenses of the implicated institutions. A good record keeping and biodata filing system, if well implemented, enhance productivity in the healthcare industry.
References
Bradway, M., Giordanengo, A., Joakimsen, R., Hansen, A. H., Grøttland, A., Hartvigsen, G., ... & Årsand, E. (2020). Measuring the Effects of Sharing Mobile Health Data During Diabetes Consultations: Protocol for a Mixed Method Study. JMIR research protocols , 9 (2), e16657.
Mahmoud, F. Z. M.(2017). The strategies and policies of IT systems implementation in Malaysian hospitals and its benefits and challenges . Journal of Advanced Science and Engineering Research 7 , (2), 12-22
Sovova, O. (2019). Electronization in health care and privacy protection. Journal of Sustainable Development , 9 (23), 72-80.
