Did you know that total admissions in the US hospitals have exceeded 36 million in 2020? The American Hospital Association states that the number of patients in healthcare institutions is rising each year, which creates new challenges for medical workers in processing these requests.
Manage and Care: Health Cases On-the-Go
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Medical organizations have to deal with massive data flows daily, which often comes in the unstructured format of patient records, recordings, raw texts, language flows, etc. The inability to categorize this information might lead to a set of risks and often result in data leakage or disclosure.
Given the importance of monitoring the patient’s history and keeping the clients’ sensitive data confidential, healthcare organizations require an efficient solution that would help them improve and automate data management in medical institutions.
System of Multiples
According to CMSA, case management is defined as a collaborative process of options that are organized to meet the patient’s or his/her family needs through constant communication and the provision of high-quality medical care.
According to the formal explanation of the professionals, case management is applied in many branches and disciplines, such are geriatrics and trauma medicine, or in spheres of social work, mental health, and primary care.
Case management is a complex process, which usually consists of four vital parts: case identification, assessment, care planning, and care coordination.
Currently, such software solutions are applied across a variety of disciplines, including care coordination that consists of:
- medication management
- self-care support
- advocacy and negotiation
- psychosocial support
- monitoring and review, etc.
What is Case Management?
- planning,
- assessment,
- facilitation,
- care coordination,
- evaluation,
- and advocacy.
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The primary goal behind case management is to reach and maintain an optimal level of well-being and functional capability for patients where all the parties will benefit from the outcome. The case manager helps the client achieve a higher level of autonomy and involvement, while hospitals ensure that the optimal resources are used, saving the medical workers’ time and effort.
Technologies step here to ease the burden of red tape for all parties involved and ensure the patient and healthcare providers will reach their treatment goals. Case management systems are introduced to help healthcare practitioners coordinate their workflow with innovative software solutions.
Case Solution
There are plenty of problems Case Management Systems can address, we’ve listed just a few of them.
1 Program-Centric Approach
Conventional case management systems are more focused on the process and program rather than a client. They strive to ease data management flow, enhance diagnosis, and intervention choices for healthcare professionals. However, clients often have to wait until their treatment method is selected without the right to engage in the process. Case management solutions can be brought here to improve collaboration between all parties.
2 System Complexity
While Case Management Systems are expected to add clarity to the healthcare process, they often do the opposite by confronting specialists with a greater choice of interventions and information. Thus, healthcare professionals often have to allocate more time for choosing the optimal treatment option that would align with the patient’s needs and meet all the system requirements.
Also, studies have shown that healthcare innovation resulted in increasing specialization. Such fragmentation also adds to the complexity of medical care. The more parties are involved in the process, the more documentation is required to diagnose an individual and choose the best course of action in his/her particular case. This way, practitioners face more information requirements, which contributes to their workload.
3 The Lack of Trust
Shifting from paperwork, spreadsheets, and other traditional case management systems might be disruptive for some workers. Insurers need to make sure healthcare professionals use the data they provide them. Thus, a case management system might be useful in building trust and ensuring that all parties have access to the same information.
4 Working with Unstructured Data
As we know, healthcare professionals have to deal with an unprecedented amount of data that comes in different formats and from a variety of sources. While working with multiple patients, it might be difficult for medical workers to keep track of all the records. Case management systems are effective at unifying the patient’s records, which enables healthcare workers to create and access the individual’s medical history quickly.
5 Limited Visibility and Transparency for Program Evaluation
Every innovation needs to be evaluated for efficiency to ensure it brings the desired outcome to its users. Healthcare professionals need to have access to analytics to measure their performance, address, and identify issues timely. Otherwise, they won’t be able to track how the chance affects their performance and evaluate their results.
Traditional Case Management Systems do not provide medical workers with such a possibility, which sets limitations to practical evaluation of their impact on the healthcare system. Digitizing and automating a part of data management tasks might help to address this challenge with smart tech solutions.
Case Closure
Among all the problems above, healthcare complexity, the lack of a client-centric approach, and difficulties of processing unstructured data appear to be the primary challenges faced by medical institutions and their patients.
The question of whether case management solutions can benefit the healthcare industry is still relevant. However, state-of-the-art software is already introduced to address critical challenges. In particular, Vareger’s Case Management Solution that successfully combated almost all of the stated problems, or Selenity that has recently granted free access to the HR case management system to enable UK businesses to manage COVID-19 absence. Thus, companies can keep track of statistics to monitor their employees’ well-being.
Technology has the potential to combat those problems with high-end case management software that can be brought to achieve tight collaboration between doctors, insurers, case managers, and patients. And it definitely will win in this struggle. Just give healthtech a little time.