Home Health Care The shift to paperless healthcare: Don’t get left behind

The shift to paperless healthcare: Don’t get left behind

6
0
SHARE

As healthcare evolves, data is playing an increasingly important role in how we provide care. Today, healthcare organizations are constantly looking to capture new types of information that can be used to improve overall outcomes, and also enhance the experiences of both patients and their care teams. Now, organizations can collect and analyze a vast array of different data, providing real-time insight into key areas such as patient satisfaction, staff satisfaction, staff competency, cultures of safety and care quality – resulting in an astounding amount of data at an organization’s disposal.

Collecting and documenting all this data can be time- and resource-intensive, depending on how it’s done. While we live in a technologically advanced society, and technology’s proliferation in the healthcare industry is nothing new, surprisingly, many healthcare organizations still use paper-based data collection methods. This process typically results in stacks of paper sitting on desks for a period of time, and doesn’t provide any value until someone takes action and manually enters the data into a computer, which can be a long and tedious activity.

With paper-based data collection, organizations also risk important data getting lost and potentially compromising patients’ health information. According to research by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office, roughly 40% of data breaches are paper-based, with nearly two-thirds of paperwork lost or stolen. As expectations increase around both security and faster access to information, now more than ever organizations need to let go of paper-based data collection and embrace faster and more secure digital processes.

The Power of Digital Technology
With the surplus of advanced yet easy-to-use technologies available on the market today, data collection and analysis can quickly become a more streamlined and efficient process for healthcare organizations. Innovative technologies can immediately tabulate data and make it readily available for analysis, freeing up significant time for individuals tasked with entering data into spreadsheets and allowing them to spend time completing more meaningful tasks.

Making the shift from paper to digital will allow organizations to immediately access and pull reports on specific data sets, showing data trends over time, providing insight into who is collecting the data, and how often they are doing so. These insights will help organizations identify areas they can improve in real-time, allowing them to make more immediate changes and ultimately, drive better outcomes. Through the traditional paper process, these insights might take days to uncover, delaying the speed at which organizations can make improvements and potentially lowering patient satisfaction.

In addition to saving time compiling the data, technology also helps streamline broken and manual follow-up processes associated with data collection, which often take even longer than the initial process. New technologies allow for any data collection form to be accessible electronically on any web-connected device, or from any mobile device using mobile applications (iOS or Android). This means that regardless of the data being captured, clinicians can use their phones or tablets to complete any form and have all the information immediately populate into a report or graph. Doing so essentially turns a clinician’s mobile device into an electronic clipboard without the need to submit a physical form to someone.

Achieving a Paperless Future
In healthcare, we spend a lot of time, energy, and money figuring out how to save time, energy and money. If we continue to use inefficient processes like paper data collection, we will continue to spin our wheels and hinder the efforts being made to achieve meaningful efficiency gains. With increasing industry pressure for faster and more secure data collection, now is the time to fully shift away from the era of wasted paper and resources, and allow technology to do the legwork instead. By allowing organizations to become more agile with their data, digital innovations will help clinicians get back to the crucial task of understanding what their data is actually telling them, enabling them to better personalize patient interactions and positively impact overall outcomes.

Photo: iodrakon, Getty Images

 

 

 

 

 

Source link

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

1 × four =