In this roundup of some of the most interesting Health IT stories in the news, Future Healthcare Today examines how the patient journey is being redefined by technology. Apps and other tech tools are being put to work to increase patient satisfaction and generally make accessing healthcare easier, which, as a result, have been found to increase patient willingness to follow doctor’s orders. Technology also is being used to help patients make better healthcare choices, seek preventive care, and maintain a healthier lifestyle. Read about it in this news roundup:
Nursing Grad’s App Targets Patient Satisfaction
What started as a class assignment for a Shenandoah University graduate student now is being used to improve patients’ experiences at 30,000 emergency rooms and urgent care facilities. The website and smart phone app is called Checked In and publishes patient wait times, using geolocation to pull up all nearby medical facilities in a chosen category so the patient can see wait times to choose where they should go for health care. It also provides medical providers with employee performance and patient trends. The idea came to the student when she was researching the connection between wait times and patient satisfaction as part of an assignment in a nursing course. She found that patients don’t generally mind waiting if they have an accurate expectation of how long they will wait—and get that estimated wait time before they arrive. Read the article here.
Redefining the Patient Journey
How do healthcare organizations remain agile, marry the patient journey with emerging technology, and protect patient privacy at the same time? In a recent podcast, Relatient CEO, Michele Perry, explores this question and others related to it with Future Health Today. She sheds some light on the forces behind some of healthcare’s big changes and how we can expect them to impact both patients and providers. For starters, healthcare consumerization is driving much of the change. “If you look at what’s going on in the last year with companies like Amazon getting into the market with the acquisition of PillPack, with the CVS-Aetna merger and things like that, there are big changes underfoot and practices are realizing that they’re going to be left behind if they don’t really focus on the patient journey and making it easy that way.”
To hear the discussion, listen to the podcast here.
Healthcare It Isn’t Really About Technology, It’s About Making The Patient Journey Better
When talking about injecting more technology into healthcare, the conversation frequently revolves around how to bring down costs in the U.S. medical system. Americans pay more for healthcare, without seeing comparable gains, than any country in the world, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. In fact, even though the United States spends twice as much per capita as the next-closest country, life expectancy is dropping. It is important, however, to remember that the healthcare “system” is comprised of millions of individual patients, each with their own needs, according to Wyatt Decker, M.D., vice president and CMIO for the Mayo Clinic, and CEO of the Mayo Clinic in Arizona. The connection between those individual patients and advances in technology lies in the data, according to Decker. Read the entire article here.
Technology Solutions Meet Unmet Healthcare Needs In Hispanic Communities
When consumers can engage with primary healthcare providers according to their specific wants and needs and gain full access to their own individual healthcare data, they can make better healthcare choices, seek preventive care, and maintain a healthier lifestyle. For underserved populations in the United States, including Hispanic communities, being able to access healthcare services in a supportive environment is harder than it should be. This is especially true when they use a healthcare solution that enables information to be shared easily and securely with their physicians, clinics, hospitals, family members, and within their own communities. For Hispanic communities, the ‘best care’ is not only care at an affordable price that can be accessed without insurance or third-party payment, but it also takes into account linguistic needs and care that enables information to be shared easily and securely with their physicians, clinics, and family. Read more here.
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