Buyers Speak
Affordable treatment coupled with modern medical technology
The latest and modern medical device advances will improve treatment outcomes and make treatment more affordable, reduce hospital stay, reduce the risk involved, and enhance convenience to the patients. The outcome for a patient will be excellent, based on the latest available technologies and infrastructure, which attract talented doctors from across the world. Ultimately, this will lead to giving the patient the best of treatment and with confidence, which also indirectly affects the outcome of any treatment.
For any hospital, introducing sophisticated medical equipment and technology, a heavy capital outlay is needed, as a result of which the treatment cost increases. Therefore, the government and the medical equipment manufacturing companies should help hospitals to tide over the situation by supplying sophisticated medical equipment at highly subsidized rates with CSR funds. This will reduce the financial burden on hospitals.
Ayushman Bharath Health Insurance, CGHS schemes, and ECHS need to be revised so as to take care of the latest technology available in hospitals.
The government schemes do not differentiate among hospitals, category wise – whether A, B, or C. Thus the schemes are universal even if some hospitals have skilled professionals along with excellent infrastructure and latest modern equipment. The government treats metro cities differently. More than two decades ago, rates were fixed and these have not been revised. There is an urgent need to increase upward the treatment cost by the government and insurance companies, which alone will help hospitals to survive and adopt newer technologies. Any corporate hospital will replace the old medical equipment once repaid the investment made for the old equipment before obsolete old equipment.
To tide over the situation, the government has to come up with some schemes under their healthcare plans for the hospitals that treat the patients under state government health scheme, so that hospitals do not suffer.
A part of profit earned by the medical insurance companies should also be invested by them in hospitals as partners in healthcare. This will boost the morale of hospitals. At present, medical insurance companies do not pay for master health checkup. They may be prevailed upon to pay for such schemes, so that the people will voluntarily undergo health checkup periodically and keep themselves fit and healthy.
Data collection is also needed to analyze and improve the treatment modality. Many patients in critical care in hospitals are hooked up to monitors and ventilators that will automatically collect a continuous stream of data. Data from their integrated medical devices are pulled into a platform that gives doctors, insights for making decisions about their patients and automates their documentation and manages devise alarms. These integrated devices not only reduce clinician’s workload but they also eliminate delays and human errors in data entry, which can impact the treatment.
Outside of the ICU or in similar environments, hemodialysis data is manually recorded and later entered in HIMS or case sheets manually. This process frequently results in incomplete or inaccurate records, which can be a potential danger because patients receiving hemodialysis typically have multiple comorbidities, such as diabetes, hypertension, and liver disease. Automatically capturing the data creates comprehensive and accurate documentation that better supports care decisions and allows clinicians to spend more time with patients.
Cardiopulmonary bypass machines, are commonly used in hospital operating rooms. Yet, these devices typically are not integrated into clinical IT systems. While the patient’s vital signs are constantly being monitored during surgery, the perfusionist is left to communicate machine-captured data to the operating room team verbally. This not only is inefficient, but also introduces the potential for human error.
Most significantly, the data collected by integrated medical devices provides clinicians with a complete and accurate patient record from connected documentation and clinical information systems. This provides evidence-based support for their decisions and strong interdisciplinary communication to facilitate care coordination.
