management

The thought of having to go to a hospital, let alone a public one, would have many people opting to stay home as long as possible until their ailment turns into an emergency. In some ways, we face this reality here. There is a plethora of complaints – the waiting time is too long, customer service is not up to par, doctors are not available, dockets cannot be found, difficulty in finding beds or the tier system for triaging may not be efficient or effective enough.

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.

AS PEOPLE become more health conscious, there is a need to increase promotion of their involvement in their own care and give them the means by which to participate. The world has been steadily changing for the last three decades, becoming increasingly dependent on technology. I think I can safely say that in the last ten years, we have experienced an immense explosion of technological creativity and artistry. There is hardly any sector that has not been affected in a positive way by technology.

JAMAICA HAS an excellent cadre of skilled professionals in emergency and general medical care. However, over the years, we continue to face significant problems with attaining an acceptable transportation system for emergency and non-emergency care.

Over and over, we hear complaints about the lack of ambulances to serve communities. Many Jamaicans would tell you that it makes no sense to call an ambulance from the public sector. More often than not, none is available and private ambulances come at a relatively high cost.

Despite the very commendable effort of the Ministry of Health to reduce waiting time at public hospitals, it is still a major issue. A staff member at my company related to me that she took her grandmother to Kingston Public Hospital from 7 a.m. on a Friday for an assessment and did not leave the facility until 9 p.m.

This poses several problems, one of which obviously has to do with productivity, as an entire day off from work was required to achieve this.

There are myriad things that we have yet to explore to uncover the benefits of technology in health.

One of them is how we can achieve an interconnected and efficient multiagency disaster and crisis preparation and response mechanism.

Health is integral to any disaster response, and so the first step would be to achieve an interconnected health system. By this I mean a system by which both private- and public-sector health interests can have a symbiotic relationship when it comes to patient care.

Jamaica has long been engaged in strategies to manage population health. From the establishment of the Extended Programme on Immunisation in 1977 to the 1978 Alma Ata declaration which focused on the need to shore up the primary healthcare system.

Efforts have consistently continued along these lines and, admittedly, we have made much progress over the last few decades.

Although we have seen an improvement in general life expectancy, which was 76 years as at 2016, we seem to be going backwards with the increasing incidence of non-communicable diseases.

Several medical practitioners have indicated that they want to introduce electronic medical records (EMR) but they are not looking at the vast opportunities the technology can bring to modernising health care management, or even the much better linkages that EMR could have in digitising other aspects of their operations. 

Generally, we believe in looking at the bigger picture and so when a client approaches us with a need, we demonstrate to them the possibilities beyond that one objective.