A small integrated healthcare system is on a mission to improve its medical management programs including; case management intervention, disease management, and tracking the costs and outcomes. With the reports indicating that there is an increase in hospitalization and emergency room costs, the management of the healthcare facility believes there is an opportunity to obtain a competitive edge by lowering costs through better utilization of specialty and primary care. Currently, the healthcare facility has a disease management program attending to patients with chronic illnesses. The program is led by a team of case managers who use intervention strategies such as prescriptions, lab tests and results, specialty office visits, patient and provider education, and care planning. There has been a low patient compliance to the care plans and many patients have reduced their participation to the disease and case management programs citing socioeconomic issues and lack of incentives as the main challenges.
Currently, the healthcare institution tracks patients’ outcomes and manages its information manually. With the manual system, the organization is missing a lot, especially on identifying. There is need for an electronic medical record system in the physician offices to connect them (online) with the information systems department and the finance department. Given the condition of the healthcare facility, there is need for new system for tracking and managing the available data and information. The system will also help in identifying additional data sources as well as the management of patients with chronic diseases.
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The new system will also be used to improve continuity of care and communication between the various healthcare departments. The healthcare facility may choose to either purchase or locally develop the new tracking system with all the performance indicators. An important role of the new system will be to the outcomes and progress of patients with chronic disease. To ensure that the developed system is the most appropriate for the healthcare facility, the top leadership will go through the proposals and comment on any needed changes.
The first recommendation for the new tracking system is the implementation of an inpatient tracking system. This system will be used improve the flow of patients at the healthcare facility. With the inpatient tracking system, the facility will be able to segregate chronic patients from the rest of the patients and allow the physicians to give a priority to those who need it. The inpatient tracking system will come with a fully supported Real-Time Location System (RTLS) application that will help in monitoring patients’ location without meeting them physically (Mission, & Youngjoo Jang, 2015). The RTLS will use ultrasound, infrared light, and radio frequencies to capture patient details and show the signals when needed.
The main advantage of implementing the inpatient tracking system (RTLS) is increased throughput. To monitor the location of the patient using the RTLS, the monitoring team will simply need to capture the details at the entry point. Increased communication and order is the second advantage of the RTLS. The system will accurately allocate beds and set time for the physicians, thus promoting the speed of service delivery (Fisher, & Lingenfelter, 2015). Advanced recording of treatment costs is the third advantage. With the RTLS system, there will be no need to record the patient’s movement as they can easily be tracked using the system.
Looking through the situation of small integrated healthcare system, it is clear that the facility is having a problem tracking important assets such as medical inspection devices as well as the equipment for clinical procedures. The Asset Tracking System (ATS) provides a good solution by allowing the case managers and the physicians to find the materials and equipment they want with ease (Tarapiah, & Haj, 2016). Like in the case of RTLS, ATS will use radio frequency signals to search for the needed materials. At the start of implementation of this tracking method, all assets will be bar-coded. The RTLS will then be used to retrieve the codes using frequencies (Mardeni, & Othman, 2015). The main advantage of this tracking method is that it saves time by allowing the physicians to quickly locate what they need. Another advantage is that the tracking method is accurate and reduces any chance of using the wrong equipment.
A major discovery made by the management of the healthcare facility is that there has been reduce patient participation in case and disease management programs. This may be an indication that the patients are not happy with the current manner in which the diseases are monitored. The Disease Surveillance System (DSS) will record all the details of all diagnosed diseases and store the data in a database (Kis, & Alexandru, 2015). The physicians can then be given access to the database to use the stored information in managing various diseases. With the use of DSS, the process of identifying and diagnosing a disease will be greatly simplified.
The management of the facility has realized that some patients on Medicaid do not have consistent home addresses, email addresses, or home telephone numbers. By building a Live Map Tracking system (LMTS), facility can quickly identify their locations and go for outpatient care (Lumpkins, 2015). This system will save time by allowing the facility to reach out to its patients more quickly and cost effectively. The patients and other visitors may also use the same system to locate the various sections and buildings in the facility. On the side of the patients and their visitors, the LMTS will improve flexibility and access to the facility.
