5 Biggest Issues in Healthcare Today

The healthcare industry has experienced a lot of interesting changes during the last few years, and it will not exempt 2015.

However, there are still a lot of major healthcare programs being practiced all over the world. There are still recurrent issues concerning healthcare today. In this article, we will discuss more about the 5 biggest issues in healthcare.

Wasted Health Funds
According to the recent report of Institute of Medicine Health, there are billions of dollars of health costs that are being wasted each year. Some of the funds were used for unnecessary programs.

Excessive and Needless Care Rendered
Half of all healthcare costs were used for unnecessary and excessive health care. According to the American College of Obstetricians, these healthcare issues have been around for more than a decade. A lot of healthcare organizations carried this burden for so long yet did not dare to do something to fix it.

Chronic Disease Rates Are Extremely High
According to recent surveys, out of the seven countries being examined, Americans have the second highest rate of chronic disease next to Australians. Where in fact, Americans pay the most expensive healthcare costs. How did it happen? Authorities were not able to focus more on preventive care. Majority of adult Americans are becoming at risk to diseases and illnesses due to lack of healthcare support.

Preventable Harm to Patients
This is considered to be one of the most common healthcare problems. According to research, one of four health insurance recipients that were admitted suffers harm during their hospital stay.

Absence of Transparency
Transparency stimulates healthcare change like nothing more. Regardless of getting a lot of warnings from respected national health organizations and other medical societies, the rates of healthcare problems continues to rise. There were a lot of early elective deliveries reported since 2010 but were not taken care of due to unexplained loss of funds.

Healthcare Insurance  

Health is rooted in everyday life. If you, or any of our family members become ill, you lose the focus on what is important to you—learning, providing for our family, building a home and family, and realizing our true potential.

In order for you to do all those things, you must take better care of our health. Therefore, the importance of healthcare insurance cannot be minimized. No one plans to get sick or hurt, but most people need medical care at some point in their lives. When that happens, when you need to see a doctor, you can afford to go with healthcare insurance.

Health insurance is there for the unpredictable, unexpected, and fundamentally uncontrollable problems the come up in people’s lives. You pay for it but you hope that you will never need it. And although you are still young and healthy, you will never know when you will require medical care.

One of the reasons why it is important to get health insurance is to avoid the risk of a financial ruin. When an unexpected medical care is needed such as in a sudden or serious illness or a traumatic event, paying high medical bills is expected. The inability to pay these bills is one of the reasons why people file for bankruptcy which can ruin your credit history and set you back for years.

Another reason is to have access to preventive and primary care. This means you are more likely to stay healthy and catch health problems early. The earlier an illness is detected, they are easier and less expensive to treat. Even young people benefit from this kind of healthcare coverage.

There are many other reasons why health insurance is important even if you are not sick. Having good health insurance provides you with an affordable way to get medical care when you need it.

Importance Of Good Communication In Healthcare Settings

According to the recent evidenced-based research results, there is really a strong and powerful relationship between having a good communication in healthcare team and patient’s satisfaction, safety and fast recovery. An expert says that “no matter how knowledgeable a clinician might be, if he or she is not able to open good communication with the patient, he or she may be of no help.” It simply means that when doctors, nurses and other member of the healthcare team can listen and provide better explanation to patients, they can prevent unwanted emergency situations such as emergency coding, wrong medication and severe health complication to patients. Furthermore, good communication among the healthcare team promotes smooth and positive working connection.

Since there are lot of cases reported about miscommunications among nurses, doctors and other team members, most hospital owners require them to have team buildings and seminars related to importance of good communication to minimize chaos and complain from patients about dissatisfaction, malpractice and ineffective healthcare team communication. Also, they are being reminded that even if they are performing well, they still need to learn more and improve their communication skills.

According to studies, patients suffer the most when the medical and healthcare team fails to communicate well. If all members of the healthcare team have good communication, they can achieve positive patient outcome and prevent situations such as:

  • Malpractice and other human errors
  • Sudden death of a patient
  • Severe complication of patient’s disease
  • Chaos within the healthcare team

Listening is still part of communication. The healthcare team must listen well to the primary complains of their patient in order to provide better diagnosis and care to them. Once they have all the important information, they should collaborate with each other to deliver the best medical care to the patient.

Improving Healthcare Services

From healthcare discoveries to the most recent treatment options, America’s healthcare educational institutions and teaching hospitals, as well as their doctors and experts, possess a legacy of developing treatments and establishing the standard for the best patient health care. By way of a multi-year initiative to enhance the standard and security of health care, it is vital to work together to generate guidelines for better quality health care.

Through guidelines for much better Healthcare, it is necessary to integrate verified methods to guarantee more secure surgeries, decrease infections, and reduce hospital re-admissions. We must built an even tougher tradition of quality and protection in medicine by passing these guidelines to each new doctor educated and make sure high quality and safety is part of medical training from day one. Through good research and evaluation, best practices will be improved, learn new ones, and discuss our knowledge with others to enhance health care.

It is, of course, the responsibility of a hospital to secure their patients by giving quality standards, updating procedures, regular maintenance and developing technology. The health care education facilities must be able to educate the next era of doctors with quality and patient security. Through continued research and study, patients must be more secure with safer surgeries. Hospitals must as well develop or enhance a program that will reduce the hospital re-admissions especially for high-risk patients. This will reduce the hospital cost and the stress of staying long in hospital wards away from home.

Lastly, there must be a continued investigation, research and examination of new and efficient health care practices as well as the use of efficient technologies to establish a better future of the health care industry.