How Technology Improves The Patient Experience

Healthcare delivery is practically unrecognizable when compared to its former self from a few decades ago. Today, technology is making it possible to deliver healthcare services even when the provider isn’t in the same zip code with the patient. Today’s patients can also provide more of their own care from the comfort of their own homes, handling treatments and performing tests that at one time required an inpatient hospital stay. There’s no question that technology is making a big impact on the patient experience in a positive way.

No more waiting in lines
The ability to provide healthcare consultations remotely is a major benefit for elderly and disabled patients who struggle getting to a physical office location. For this reason, technology is essentially improving compliance – while some patients would have skipped visits and therefore missed life-sustaining treatments and medications, they’re now more likely to receive the consistent monitoring required to adequately manage a chronic or life-threatening condition.

It’s not just the elderly and disabled that benefit from technology, however. Even patients who simply need a prescription for an antibiotic have avoided making an appointment with a provider, knowing that they’re giving up an entire day of valuable time thanks to a long wait to see their providers.

Now patients can simply email some healthcare providers, explain their symptoms and have a prescription electronically submitted to their preferred pharmacy – no driving to the physical office necessary to pick up a written prescription. Even better, those same patients could go as far as having the prescription delivered by the pharmacy to the front door. Technology has finally entered an era where nearly the entire sequence of events involved with a single healthcare interaction can be conducted without a physical office visit.

Increased compliance
All of the above means that patients now have the ability to be more compliant, with fewer reasons to skip medications or avoid proper monitoring for a chronic condition. Many patients cope with chronic illnesses and fail to take their medication as prescribed simply because it’s too difficult to get to the doctor’s office. When office visits aren’t regular, providers can miss out on important signs that indicate that a patient is no longer responding to a specific treatment or requires a higher or modified dose of a medication.

There are many things that could go wrong when patients take their healthcare into their own hands. Some go so far as to adjust medication dosages on their own to compensate for increased symptoms or to make a prescription last longer – avoiding more office visits and costly co-pays. But when patients can simply email a provider a status report including vital signs and other test results and readings obtained at home, they can often make informed decisions that are in the patient’s best interests – completely virtually.

Less costly hospital stays
When patients are more compliant and more conscientious about following physicians’ recommendations, they experience fewer complications – and that means less costly hospital stays due to infections left untreated or necessary medications that haven’t been taken properly.

But technology also reduces costly hospital admissions in another way. With sophisticated technology available for medical devices that makes controlling the complex underlying processes of the device using simple, intuitive controls, patients are now able to do themselves at home what once required an office visit or even an inpatient hospital stay. This type of technology, such as Pannam imaging switches, creates a simple user interface that patients can readily learn and use to ensure accurate delivery of treatments and tests – even without the presence of a medical practitioner.

There are still some treatments that require in-person coordination and care, because of the possibility of serious side effects and the need of a trained professional to closely monitor the administration or treatment, but there are more and more treatments and tests that can be conducted entirely by the patient or caregiver at home every day. Technology is a critical component of healthcare delivery. With new advancements every day, healthcare in the future could be even more remote and independent than ever imagined.

Nicole Enwright contributes, on behalf of Pannam, to a variety of tech and new gadget blogs to help users find the product they need.