Saving time and moving efficiently at the first point of care at a hospital usually comes down to the ability to quickly and accurately triage.
Triaging refers to the categorising of people who seek care into most and least urgent and by the type of care they will need based on their complaints and symptoms. When we speak about waiting time at hospitals, it is usually at this stage that this has the most impact.
The long wait for non-emergency healthcare, both privately and publicly, can be frustrating. Such is the extent of the problem that, some years ago, the Ministry of Health began to focus specific interventions on reducing waiting times at public-health facilities. Still, waiting time remains a problem, which I don’t believe we will be able to effectively tackle without the help of technology.
Jamaica began its hospital digitisation journey less than a decade ago with the University Hospital of the West Indies. At that time, they saw the economic and efficiency benefits of such a move. Increasingly, more hospitals worldwide have been on a similar journey, and the ones that have gone fully digital have been investing more to improve how they offer services to patients and other clients.
For the past few years, the health system has been faced with the issue of overcrowding and a lack of beds to facilitate the number of persons who need to be admitted to hospital.
It may be time to start thinking about putting more robots and automation in our healthcare system. This is important and takes on even more relevance with the current pandemic and the levels and rate of infection of COVID-19.
COVID-19 has shed light on the importance of having a connected health network to be able to more efficiently coordinate supplies and equipment across health sector facilities.
The difficulty in sourcing and distributing essential items and equipment that was experienced in some countries at the beginning of the spread of the virus was a call for a closer examination of the technology systems in health that can facilitate better information transfer and management.
The world over is dealing with the issue of ageing populations where the number of persons over 55 is steadily increasing while the number of children born to families reduces.
More persons are deciding to have one child or, maximum, two. Jamaica’s birthrate, for example, is approximately 2.01 per family while people are living longer due to advances in technology and improved health services. Living longer, however, does not necessarily equate to living healthier or having a better quality of life. Healthcare will be forced to catch up to this phenomenon.
The electronic health record (EHR) offers a plethora of opportunities for digitised healthcare management. Imagine if there was a system where a doctor can get an alert to warn that a patient may be close to a life-threatening condition, giving him/her enough time to respond to save that patient before it is too late. With the increasing implementation of electronic systems, this no longer has to be imagined. It is possible today. Many healthcare organisations have been taking advantage of this feature in their electronic heath management systems.
I was once on site doing an initial tour of one of our prospective information technology (IT) implementations. We had just signed the contract and so decided to do a walk-through to have a more complete view of what to expect once we got started. Our initial walk-through had been done a little over a year before, so we wanted to know whether there had been any changes to what we saw then.
The opportunities for the development and use of technology in healthcare are vast. Knowing how to apply the technology to make hospitals a consumer-friendly and viable business is important. We are generally a population that is ‘technology suspicious’, and in some cases, downright afraid. This cannot stop us from making the required changes to improve healthcare generally, and the hospital experience, specifically, with technology. I often use the fact that I was told years ago that ATM machines would never work in Jamaica, but look where we are now.
