Health Care Fc Discussion
Outpatient care, commonly referred to as ambulatory care, is a medical treatment that does not need the patient’s overnight stay at a facility. Outpatient care is commonly administered at a medical office. It entails routine services like check-ups and even surgical procedures, after which the patient will be discharged from the facility. Unlike inpatient care, outpatient treatment is less expensive and is also convenient for the facility since the patients use a limited amount of a facility’s resources. A patient is, therefore, called an outpatient if the doctor has not issued an admission order.
Technological innovations can positively impact the delivery of care in several ways. Electronic health records, for example, make it easier for the health care professions to access patient records. This further makes it easier for coordination at the facility and thus making the process of intervention faster and more integrated. Electronic health care records also reduce cases of diagnostic errors since the patient’s health records are stored and easily accessed. The resources that would have been wasted in the diagnosis process are therefore preserved, and this, therefore, saves on the facility’s expenses (Habibi-Koolaee, Safdari, & Bouraghi, 2015). Lastly, electronic health care records relive the health care providers of the effort of having to keep and share the patient records manually. They thus focus entirely on health care delivery, and this also improves their productivity and quality of care.
One disadvantage of technology on health care delivery is that it can be expensive. The development and integration of technology in a health care system can be an expensive process. It also requires skilled personnel to maintain, and this can adversely affect the operations at the facility. Technological is also susceptible to incidents of viral attacks, glitches, or security breaches. In the event of a viral attack, for example, crucial data may be corrupted, and this may paralyze the operations at the facility since the medical records of the patients may be lost, including their diagnosis and health history. In the event of a security breach, crucial patient information may be lost, exposing the patients to incidents of fraud (Jha et al., 2019). Secondly, the integration of an electronic system at a facility may require time. Operations at the facility will be slowed down while the health care providers adjust to the newly developed system. The organization may also pay more focus on the training of the personnel rather than the delivery of care.