With growing burden of life style related diseases , increase in number of cities which have a million plus population , increase in purchase power and awareness and government initiated regulation and initiatives to streamline personalized information like UID for inhabitants , information capture , storage , retrieval and usage would become a priority for the health sector.
Compared to the last decade it is observed that hospital owners and entrepreneurs have recognized and stressed on the need of appropriate hospital information management. However the average IT spending remains low. The demand of the community of the hospitals is for a software which optimizes productivity , captures information as per the requirements of hospital authority and provides a scope for the management to utilize information to take decisions.
However, the top management needs to take appropriate action to ensure that software for the hospital is chosen carefully. This is the first step , but the second and most important state is to ensure the software adoption and usage to get the maximum benefit.
The software would not bring the desired outcome automatically. Rather it is a medium for achieving the better productivity. When the hospital information system is procured , it becomes important on the part of the hospital to follow certain stages as follows.
1. Select a management representative who remains as a one point contact between the decision makers and the software vendor and service provider.
2. The adoption and installation of the software is a grueling process for the software vendor, and the implementation team needs various kinds of help such as keeping the require hardware ready and functioning for the process, mental preparation of the end users to be ready for the implementation and understanding the basic uses of the software and if any issues arise then redressal.
It is often noticed that , hospital owners adopt a software , to bring the processes and systems to standard practice podium , but because of a lacunae in the system itself adequate action from hospital side is not there to help the implementation team. The first most critical stage is the implementation phase which is the best time for the hospital to get maximum benefit from the software usage , as the implementation team is present at the site . During the implementation phase , a diligent approach taken from hospital side and keenness shown by the employees can bring considerable positive change to the hospital management environment.
- Phase-wise implementation of the software has its benefit in terms of better understanding of the software and usage. At the same time it helps in parallel switch over from manual system to the new software usage or from prior software to new effective software
- Documentation using the software and utilizing the same for every process of the hospital environment gives scope for addressing quality aspects and evidence based practices.
Now when we see how important are information management in the hospital environment internally and at the same time there are external changes in the local and national stages to indicate a positive change for information management , every hospital and healthcare organization would need Information systems and this would create a need for effective hospital information systems to make the information management better.
Tags: Hospital information system, Information management
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