Question

IT Alignment and Strategic Planning" Analyze the manner in which the use of technology improves the overall quality, safety, and efficiency of health care delivery. Next, speculate on one (1) risk of using technology within a health care system, and suggest one (1) way to mitigate the risk in question. Provide a rationale to support your response.

Answer 1

Answer:

The use of technology improves the overall quality, safety and efficiency of the health care delivery. Technology helps in better diagnosis, enables digital maintenence of records, cheaper healthcare facilities.

With the advent of technology the patients data is today stored digitally in the form of Electronic Health records. All the details of the patients like height, weight, age, medicines they are allergic to and the medical history is stored online. This data is accessible to the doctors as and when they require it. The digitization of health records has lowered the cost of treatment per patient, compared to paper records. A study conducted by the university of Michigan has revealed that digitization has reduced the cost of treatment given to outpatients by 3 percent. The use of technology has helped in medical research and development of new health care facilities and also in researching medicines for rare diseases. With the advent of technology, telemedicine has become popular and doctors can now see their patients and speak to their patients online. The high precision medical diagnosis devices provides better diagnosis for critical ailments and also helps in surgery.

However, there are certain risks that are associated with the incresing dependence on technology. With all patients data, being maintained online, there can be a major emergency if the data is unavailable due to internet connectivity issues. The availability of patients data online makes them vulnarable to data theft, and has to be stored with high security.

The way to mitigate the risks is to store patients data on servers that are secure and not easily prone to being hacked. The hospitals have to ensure their internet connectivity has no issues and regular maintenence is done. The equipments being used for diagnosis and surgery should also undergo regular maintenence to avoid any malfunctioning.