Instant Solution To Hospital Problems

Modern hospital care essentially involves three parties: the consumers (patients), the professional medical care provider and the management professional. The consumers expect state-of-the-art medical care at an affordable cost, tempered with humanitarian considerations. Medical professionals face constant pressure and demand for competent care and hence need to keep abreast with rapidly advancing technology in their chosen fields of specialisation. Given these requirements, professional managers need to provide expert inputs to fulfill the aspirations by optimising management of personnel, money, material and most of all, time. The current scenario of hospital care in the country leaves much to be desired. The consumers complain of exorbitant cost and poor communication by the busy doctors. Hard pressed for time, the medical professional can barely upgrade his knowledge and skills and spend time with his family. The situation is worse if he happens to be the owner and manages hospital himself, little realising the need for expert management for which he is not competent and at best be left to professional manager.

The increasing cost of quality medical service and equipment have pushed hospitals run on limited charities into oblivion as it is being realised that such care cannot be provided cheaply. Private hospitals have therefore, emerged rapidly and in large numbers. In view of lack of quality control, not all of them provide the desired quality care but certainly serve the needs of some less privilege communities at lower costs with somewhat better personal attention than they get in government hospitals. Professional managers need to address themselves to the scenario described with the object of optimising management personnel, equipment, time and money. They also need to find instant solution to problems arising in day-to- day working.

Times have changed and so should the healthcare providers. Large numbers of hospitals are opened by doctors thinking that healthcare is something that will sell irrespective of what is being sold. In today’s scenario patient is king and he can afford to choose what he wants. Transparent processing can win the heart and mind of the public at large. However, this calls for formidable skills on the part of the promoters, which includes knowledge, communicative skills and an insight/ foresight into present and future prevalence of the disease in a given community. The book makes healthcare providers to realise that economics is the bottom line of everything which cannot be flouted.

Hospitals of today and tomorrow can no longer operate manually and requires a system that is fundamental for its success. With phenomenal advancements in digital and high imaging technology that has dramatically transformed the way medical practitioners and specialists diagnose and treat morbidities. There has been a paradigm shift in the speed, accuracy and ease with which diseases are being treated today. We can only expect exponential increase in its power and applicability in the coming years. Over the last three decades, IT has been very effectively used in commercial enterprises to streamline business processes, for managing large volume transaction processing supply chain and customer relationship management. With large number of transactions in departments such: as outpatient registration, operation theatre, inpatients data file, pharmacy, investigations and accounts demands for computerised system to store and retrieve data as and when needed.