Tag: health care

Healthcare and the Use of Modern Technology

In today’s time, doctors, nurses, hospitals and other public health officials are encouraging all patients to track their medical data by the use of modern technology. It is not a surprise that technology is one of the best tools to prevent diseases and other chronic illnesses. Medical professionals are very eager to know if patients can manage their health all by their selves by using all available modern devices and data.

In most advanced countries such as in the United States, their government is promoting online health programs which allow Americans to access their own medical records. These programs can be used by citizens to help them manage their health. Physicians and other health professionals can also use the online program to locate and connect with their patients. They can easily interact and give health advices to patients thru live chat and e-mails.

Fortunately, there are a lot of mobile applications related to health. These applications have the ability to help physicians closely monitor the health progress of their patients since there are portions in the application wherein patients can encode their daily meal intake and exercise being done.

Modern technology can also lessen healthcare costs. Recent studies show that patients who are using technology related to health have lessen their healthcare costs and have shown better and improved health. Most facts, blog articles and other data from online health programs and applications are well-researched and true. It can help patients with everything such as identifying correct drugs for certain minor diseases.

However, there can be instances wherein some mobile applications are not authentic. That is why health organizations around the world have warned patients to be extra careful in using applications and data since some of them don’t provide appropriate health facts and data.

Before using all modern devices and gadgets, it is better to visit and consult a healthcare provider personally. By doing it, physicians have the chance to assess patients internally and physically.

Medicare Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has new financial incentives and penalties. This is done in order to improve the health care system, mainly hospitals, performance in the country. The new mandate has been proven to be hard to manage and has encountered several problems. However, it provides new opportunities for leaders to have a good collaboration with different health care providers.

Medicare’s Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program or the (HRRP) penalizes hospitals that allow patients to have excess 30-day readmissions specifically for health conditions like myocardial, pneumonia, and heart failure.  The program was intended to punish hospitals with surplus 30-day readmissions not considering whether the patient was readmitted to the same hospital or to another hospital.

Actually, the penalty itself is not that substantial or damaging to the hospital’s income. What makes it more significant is its effect on the image of the hospital. The penalty data of each hospital is open for public viewing every year, so they know what hospital has been paying a lot of penalties recently. This could affect the number of patients that will choose that hospital. If the hospital is located in a very competitive location, having a high penalty rating could greatly affect them.

The program has forced hospital leaders to develop, filter, assess, and implement care management programs in different areas. It is essential to use the information technology for data incorporation. Evidence-based decision-making is also important to make the services more effective and fast as soon as the patient was admitted. It is also crucial to the development and rapid-cycle learning. Hospital leaders as well as their management must be aware of the changes in the rules. They now need better collaboration with other health care institutions to be more effective in terms of the services they offer to patients. Keeping the patients from readmission to the hospital due to their total wellness and recovery is a very good sign for the hospital’s development.

 

Patient Care Quality

Many view quality health care as the overarching umbrella under which patient safety resides.  Quality patient care, dedication to patient satisfaction and rigorous attention to patient safety are the best services a healthcare institution can offer. Because we believe that people can make better decisions about their healthcare if they have accurate information, there is an organization that made a commitment to report publicly how hospitals rank on a range of quality standards and benchmarks.

Maintaining and improving the quality of the Nation’s health care system is an important part of keeping patients safe. The aim of every healthcare institution must be to improve patient safety and health care quality in many areas of health care, reduce health care-associated infections and the adverse drug events

Patient or consumer centered care is health care that is respectful of, and responsive to, the preferences, needs and values of patients and consumers. Different definitions and terminology have been used to describe the concepts in this area, but key principles of patient centered approaches. Treating patients, consumers, care providers and families with dignity and respect is a must in a quality care.

The participation of the patient and family is encouraged in the decision making in every decision about healthcare. Communicating and sharing information with patients, consumers, and families is also a must.

The collaboration with patients, consumers, carers, families and health professionals in program and policy development and in health service design, delivery and evaluation is highly needed to upgrade the services of the institution.

Patient or consumer centered care is increasingly being recognized as a dimension of high quality health care in its own right and there is strong evidence that a patient centered focus can lead to improvements in health care quality and outcomes by increasing safety, cost effectiveness and patient, family and staff satisfaction.

Internationally, healthcare services use a range of strategies to promote patient centered care and partnerships with patients and their families. A range of organizations provide frameworks and tools to help implement these strategies.

 

Anatomy & Physiology Textbooks

Usually, nursing students study anatomy & physiology books in the first year. Though they study the books, understanding structure of the human body is quite tough for them. They rely on lessons of their instructors. After passing the first year, they do not need to study anatomy and physiology books for their educational programs. As a result, they forget the requirements very easily. But these textbooks are very good resources of information. If they regularly try to study these books, it will be easier for them to use the knowledge. These days, career of nursing is very essential for humankind. Nurses are the assistants of physicians. Sometimes they have to do a lot of essential tasks. Consequently, they need to know about anatomy and physiology. This textbook is the primary foundation of their nursing education.

Maybe you are starting college and you want to buy some books immediately? But, like most of the learners, you are on a limited price range. So, how do you go about purchasing the necessary books within your budget? There are a lot of choices available out there. So, one has to be skeptical about the offers that are made to him, while looking for inexpensive copies of textbooks like Anatomy and Physiology 9th edition and Microbiology 11th Edition, you need to consider a few things.

Anatomy of the human body and physiology is not that easy to understand. One would really have to understand each body organ and learn to discover how one can considerably impact the other organs’ features. Several techniques are made in educating the said topics. Traditionally, a teacher-students’ conversation in a class room setting will be noticed. These days, most learning organizations have also been starting to implement a lab where preserved parts of one’s human body or body parts may be found. This is one excellent way for learners to better appreciate the course. Movie or animation demonstrations will also be a great resource, aside from textbooks.

Nursing Education Trends

Health care is changing quickly. It’s impacted by a number of different things, from overall expenses, to government oversight, towards the changing demographics of society, towards the advances in scientific analysis. And every one of these changes will modify the trends and styles in nursing education, too. Yet, another apparent pattern is using computers. Using fraxel treatments has elevated use of healthcare information and it has reduced how long it requires getting accessibility to the information. All this has enhanced the care and brought higher end results.

Another major pattern is using the electronic permanent healthcare record, which replaces the traditional paper documentation. Customers are going to be a lot more educated too due to internet connection. And more healthcare products or services are going to be shipped electronically. Nurses these days will have to be experienced within the use of computers. Nursing education may involve more online learning, making it simpler for nursing staff to carry on their professional education. Computers allows student nursing staff to imitate healthcare conditions electronically, to assist them to learn. Due to globalization, nursing education will need to deal with the problem from the spread of illness across national boundaries and deal with emerging illness risks all over the world.

Nursing education will also have to deal with the changing economy in health care. Nurses must have an awareness of techniques to look after sufferers with techniques that improve quality, deal with the complexity of care, and achieve this in an inexpensive way. As expenses increase, state and federal rules will end up much more of an issue in health care. Together with the management, there will also be trends toward moving to less costly techniques to deliver health care, and to apply market forces to help keep expenses low. Additionally, there is a pattern in healthcare education to include more healthcare science and analysis that are playing much greater tasks in healthcare practice. Nursing study is supplying a technological model for health care. These researches handle how patient behavior affects health, how you can manage symptoms of sickness, helping sufferers as well as their families deal with sickness and its treatment.

EMR and Patient Care

The EMR or electronic medical record’s guarantee of participation to health care price benefits got a second look recently, and the results were inadequate at best.  But what I found interesting was the “second look” was from the same company that did the first look: the corporately-funded, non-profit think-tank called the RAND Corporation.

From their second and more recent report:

A team of RAND Corporation researchers estimated in 2005 that fast adopting of health information technology (IT) could save the United States more than $81 billion dollars yearly. Seven years later, the scientific data on the technology’s impact on health care performance and safety are combined, and yearly health care expenses in the United States have grown by $800 billion dollars.

Who would have thought that such a famous company like the RAND Corporation could have made such a little, tiny multi-billion dollar mistake? After all, their 2005 study was financed entirely by several of the major EMR producers who have gained enormous amounts in income on EMR sales since.  Is there any wonder that now the same RAND Corporation sensed that the EMRs deficiency of price benefits is really the end-users’ fault?

In our view, the frustrating performance of health IT to date can be mostly linked to several factors: gradual adopting of health IT techniques, in addition to the choice of techniques that are neither interoperable nor easy to use; and the failing of medical service providers and organizations to re-engineer patient care procedures to obtain the benefits of health IT.

What a superficial evaluation.  There is no talk of the price of these techniques, their maintenance, deficiency of interoperability, inadequate user-interfaces, and in many cases, deficiency of design support.  Even more interesting, there was no consideration that someone might actually figure out a way to efficiently dress the government’s arcane certification requirements for compensation that would permit more patient care spending.  No, those tests would have been too obvious.  Instead, the Rand Corporation informs us that there were no price benefits with the EMRs because doctor- and hospital-customers did not re-engineer their patient care procedures or “adopt” poor first-generation techniques.

Future of Hospitals in the U.S.

According to the latest Presidential vote, we as a country do actually wish to nationalize medical care.  We do believe that a bigger government is the response to our problems and lastly, it is ok to ask for more taxation to allow this to go on. Bottom line prediction:  Under pressured work programs, physicians will keep medical care, hospitals and other Government programs in huge figures. Individuals will have government protected medical care but less physicians will be available to care for them. Following the latest Presidential election, this position will be more strongly and quickly actualized.

I often listen to the discussion that other “civilized nations” such as Canada and Britain has socialized health care and that it is a pity that America does not follow their lead and assure health care to all individuals. Unfortunately, no one is asking, “If these nations provide free care, does this mean that most individuals are getting good care”? If asked this query, they would see that sufferers are declined services in hospitals every day while the program is still paying for their “care”. I think we can say politically, we are offering for all and we do not need to ask the next query “are the individuals really getting care?” I have suggested all along that assuring everyone does not mean actually offering health care. Saying that a socialized health care program is “covering everyone” does not mean that proper health care is being provided. Perhaps we should ask ourselves, “if the nationalized health care design is looking after everyone, then why is it in these socialized nations, the rich go outside of the nation or outside of the socialized health care program to get their needs met”?

Before this vote, but many years into the PPACA law, we can now say that in the US, there is a “silent exodus” of doctors in the labor force. Can this be relevant to the point that the country is going towards only one payer, (Medicare/Medicaid) system which is allowing hospitals and other large organizations (i.e. wellness insurance coverage companies) to be the only heirs of a bureaucratic wellness plan which is staging a coup against its people. Other data reveals that there is a lot more hospital employed doctors. Hospitals are now currently using 20% of practicing doctors. Many others are in group methods owned by health systems.

Long Term Senior Care Costs

It’s hard to predict the future. But it’s not a huge shock to learn that long-term care expenses are increasing. This has been a continuous pattern, however, as the economic downturn in combination with ageing middle-agers has not assisted with pension and health care expenses. And while old age and pension are generally associated with balance and relaxation, a time to reconnect with grandkids, golf and associate with friends. Today, our elderly people have been hit with the economic downturn, real estate problems and late retirements. And long-term senior care expenses have definitely affected not only elderly people and care providers, but also the country as a whole.

The good news? Medical health insurance is providing more. And different types of senior housing and care mean different expenses. We have found that many family members are not actually aware of the different senior living options as most search specifically for “nursing houses.” This detachment between community understanding and individual senior needs reveals us how important senior care cost education is to the United States. After all, smart planning for expected long-term senior care expenses is half the fight.

Here is more information on senior care expenses, depending on care type.

  • The national regular daily amount for rooms in a assisted living facilities has improved a little bit this season (approximately $10 more)
  • The national regular monthly base amount in served residing areas has improved a little bit this season (approximately $100 more)
  • The national regular house care on per hour basis rate improved a little bit by 5.3% in 2012

While these increases may be minor, they’ve only been over a season. This is why smart retirement and financial planning are so important for American families.

Quality of Patient Care

People check out the healthcare center for a variety of ailments; some minimal, some serious, and some life-threatening. Whether you are getting stitching for a small cut or going through a major surgery treatment, the anticipations of every individual are generally the same; that you will get qualified and sympathetic patient care when you visit the healthcare center in a time of need. But what happens when physicians are tired or sick themselves? Nurses’ work is not easy. Especially in healthcare center configurations, many nurses must deal with the perceptive suffering and stressful actual requirements of a 12-hour work-day. As a result of working in such an extreme and challenging atmosphere, the healthcare staff often experience accidents themselves.

The American Journal of Nursing shows that 75 % of the healthcare staff experience some level of actual pain from a muscle stress or stress while at work. In addition, almost 20 % of the healthcare staff engaged in the study had warning signs of depressive disorders. According to the American Journal of Nursing, the quality of patient care does, in fact, reduce when the medical staff is tired. Scientists discovered that the risks of a patient fall such as prescription mistakes and mistakes including sedation or discomfort drugs, increased by about 20 percent when a health professional was in discomfort or suffering from depression.

The significance of these conclusions should not be taken gently. Medication mistakes created by physicians or the medical staff can have risky repercussions for sufferers and may result in serious injury or loss of life. Adding to the problem, nurse-to-patient employment percentages are not always consistent in medical centers. Because of this, the medical staff can find themselves in potentially risky situation of looking after for more sufferers than what is comfortable. The outcome is that sufferers may receive insufficient or inadequate treatment. Unfortunately, when avoidable mistakes occur because our caretakers are tired, harmed, or over-worked, sufferers are the ones who suffer the most.

Goal Oriented Patient Care

The largest U.S. health insurance provider, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), has set a multiple aim: better care for patients, better health for communities, and lower costs. At the same time, major efforts have been released to make healthcare more patient-centered, defined as “respectful of and aware of individual patient choices, needs, and principles, and ensuring that individual principles guide all clinical choices.”Attention to patient-centered actions and results will be particularly important as CMS moves increasingly to link medical healthcare providers’ compensation to their performance on selected actions.

 

So far, tests of quality of patient care and wellness results have not incorporated patient-centeredness. Rather, amount of quality has resolved preventive and disease-specific wellness care processes (e.g., smoking-cessation guidance and start of appropriate medications after myocardial infarction). Similarly, results measurement has focused on condition-specific signs, both short-term (e.g., glycated hemoglobin levels and high blood pressure control) and longer-term (e.g., disease-free survival), as well as overall death rate.

Though these process and results measures work well for relatively healthy sufferers with single illnesses, they may be unsuitable for sufferers with several circumstances, serious impairment, or short life expectancy. For such sufferers, the overall quality of health care is determined by more than just disease-specific health care procedures. Furthermore, disease-specific results may not effectively indicate treatment effects in sufferers with several coexisting illnesses. Adopting of more worldwide results, such as efficient position, would not ensure patient-centeredness unless they were regarded within the perspective of individual patients’ objectives and choices in the face of trade-offs.

Perhaps the most important hurdle to goal-oriented patient care is that remedies are greatly based in a disease-outcome–based model. Rather than asking what sufferers want, the culture has respected handling each condition as well as possible according to recommendations and inhabitants’ goals.

Ultimately, good remedies are about doing right for the affected person. For sufferers with several serious illnesses, serious impairment, or limited life expectancy, any bookkeeping of how well we’re following in providing health care must above all consider patients’ recommended results.