Tag: healthcare costs

Healthcare Waste Management

Hospitals can efficiently protect public health by lessening the quantity and toxicity of the wastes they generate, and also by employing a variety of ecologically sound waste management and disposal alternatives. As part of a healthcare program, they must not only focus on treating the patients inside the hospital, but protecting citizens as well outside from harmful waste materials.

All over the world, health care waste management is underfunded and inadequately executed. The merging of contagious and other dangerous properties of medical waste symbolize a significant environmental and public overall health threat. It is indeed frightening to think that chemicals and other toxic substances may reach our neighborhood. A current literature review came to the conclusion that over half the world’s population is in danger from illness caused by healthcare waste. It was also found that plenty of inadequate waste treatment methods cause violation of fundamental human rights.

There is certainly no international convention that directly addresses medical waste management, so classification systems vary from country to country. Nevertheless, waste is frequently categorized based on the risk it carries. The vast majority of medical waste (around 75-85%) is comparable to normal municipal waste and also considered as low risk, unless burnt. The rest consists of more harmful forms of medical wastes, which include infectious and sharp waste, chemical and radioactive waste and hospital waste water.

Burning medical waste products creates numerous hazardous fumes and compounds, such as hydrochloric acid, dioxins and furans, as well as the toxic metal lead, cadmium, and mercury. The disposal of biodegradable waste produces greenhouse gas pollutants, including methane, which can be twenty-one times stronger than carbon dioxide. The government, as well as international organizations, must have a strong stand in managing hospital waste materials. This is to improve the quality of healthcare and avoiding possible spread of diseases in the community.

Ways Technology Is Improving Healthcare

It is undeniable that more and more people are depending on the internet to inquire about their medical conditions. Healthcare has been using the internet as a medium for people to get in contact with the necessary information they needed. The internet is a good source of medical information, from symptoms, as well as treatments and medicines. It is of course not advisable to depend on the internet and avoid the doctor, it is somehow an immediate source of information on what they are about to do next.

Healthcare facilities like hospitals and other facilities are using the social media to get connected with the patients. Through the social media, they are able to inform the public the services they offer, their available facilities and answer patients’ queries. Technology has been able to improve the facilities, equipments, medicines and treatments offered by hospitals today. Through this, they are able to save more lives.

Information Technology has made patient care secure and more efficient than it was before. Hand-held computers are now being used by nurses and physicians to trace a patient’s medical history and check that they are administering the correct treatment. Results of lab tests, records medicine orders and vital signs are all automatically put into a main record that can be checked and updated. Many healthcare institutions are using electronic health records. It is much easier to access patients’ information to make more accurate medications and treatments.

Electronic databases are used to consolidate large amounts of information that are used for health research. By studying patient history, scientists can have a better understanding of trends and causes of ailments. Technology can reach more milestones in the future and could lead to more breakthroughs. It has no limits and its capability has not yet been fully achieved.

Healthcare Problems

Charles Krauthammer provided us all advice when he recommended that we should neglect what President Obama says and focus on what he does. The reality is that very little that Obama peddled to America when he was attempting to gain support for the Affordable Healthcare Act was true. What is going to happen to many People in America in the next months and years is what individuals should be focused on. We might want to consider some of the following, because it may affect us all, one way or the other.

As many as one-half of all American doctors may refuse to join the healthcare transactions. Without doctors, it will be a very hard to make the transactions work and guarantees long waits to see a doctor.

The White House and surrogates say a few individuals will lose their healthcare coverage. The estimate of a 5% cancellation rate would signify about 16 million individuals, or about one-half the number of the uninsured that was originally used to rationalize this problem. Each cancellation provides with it a tale and for some, a complete loss of insurance plan and lack of ability to get treatment. And perhaps as many as a third of the population could be affected once the employer mandates kick in.

The government gets to decide on the details of healthcare coverage each resident will be needed to buy. An older woman may be needed to buy pre-natal coverage; a younger man may be needed to buy coverage for geriatric care. The Affordable Care Act does not differentiate between the needs of the younger and the old, or the sex of the policy-holder, or the needs and wishes of the individual. It is an all-encompassing, like it program, because there is no leaving it.

In order for the program to work, younger, healthy individuals must buy the government required insurance policy. Since most adolescents have no medical problems and the penalty enforced is much less expensive than buying the actual policy, many will no doubt opt to pay the penalty. The fact that previous medical conditions cannot remove one from buying insurance plan makes the choice to pay the penalty and wait until the need for healthcare insurance coverage occurs, a no-brainer.

Transformation of Healthcare

Why are we changing healthcare? Why do we feel forced to act with such emergency and in such wide reformative strokes? Did we just awaken one morning shaken to our very core by the scale of having to complete the same health background form several times? Are we driven by hopelessness by the thought of an elderly homeless person having to suffer several fights of disease demanding frequent hospitalizations? Is our battle-forged feeling to human rights egregiously upset by the understanding that some People in America live a few months less than people living on the French Riviera?  Or is it perhaps the American Dream, having satisfied itself in all other factors of our lives, that is now growing to the next frontier of toning down the healthcare system to independently and pleasantly serve our pursuit for everlasting happiness?  Or maybe it has something to do with cold hard cash.

Healthcare, we are informed, is way too expensive. We are also informed that this is really our mistake because it is our job as customers to police markets, and wellness care is a business. The blame can be traced back in 1965 when we permitted government and consequently, third party payers to place themselves into a well-functioning industry, which treated us from the need to exercise stewardship of our limited sources and caused us to practice careless excessive intake of wellness care sources motivated by opportunistic avarice of medical companies. The obvious solution is that we continue our responsibilities as customers and definitely practice shopping for wellness care on our own penny and at the same time, our supporting benefactors will try to rebuild the wild array of multi-colored and ineffective suppliers into a lean wellness care machine better suited for present day mass consumption.

Mass consumption needs huge manufacturing, which in turn needs proper department of machines and networked software applications. Mass manufacturing improves the value and comfort of solutions for customers. Pay attention to the language. We are referring to value, as in “how much car for the dollar”, not about absolute great quality. A higher enough value feature allows cheap, low great quality products and solutions to be provided as great value good deals for smart customers. The term comfort is a lot simpler to parse, since it is really an inverse measure of calories consumed for the purpose of acquiring a particular service. You can buy anything today with some taps on your iPad, while sitting on the bathroom, enjoying the guidance of thousands of people in the same shoes as you. Nothing should prevent a present day customer from healthcare guidance from the same area.

The Future of Healthcare

Parents already know the worry that comes in when you think your kid has an ear disease. Then there is the mind-numbing shouts that your kid will make during the time it requires to get to the physician, complete the necessary forms and wait to be seen. All in all, a distressing encounter for both you and your kid (and your eardrums). Now, what if that procedure was converted to using your smart phone to breeze images of your kid’s ear and posting it to an app? From there, a physician could identify the disease and recommend the medication. You will avoid doctors’ workplaces and collections completely.

Mobile applications like this already are available and are trying to easily simplify individual healthcare. But scientists at Rock Health have discovered that even though there are more than 13,000 electronic healthcare applications, sufferers have yet to head to the pattern.

 

The mobile healthcare market has made significant progress within the doctor community. Rock Health found 75% of method and small size healthcare and dental workplaces will purchase tablets within the next year. And almost 40% of healthcare professionals use healthcare applications on a regular basis. The digital healthcare field is also treating the costs of patient care and increasing the scale at which physicians and the medical staff can help individuals. The healthcare market is already damaged, Zielger says, and a lack of primary care healthcare professionals in years to come will only aggravate the problem. She says mobile phone applications can link that gap.

But sufferers have been more slowly to realize the impact applications could have, Zeigler says, potentially because the applications force individuals to take notice of their own. “No one wants to definitely track what they are always doing, so we really want to make the experience inactive,” she told us, adding, they are scheming to create technical applications that “provide rewards for individuals to manage health more effectively.”