We are living in the year 2024 already, but there are still plenty of healthcare organisations working with Excel documents and even paper forms. Often this is because care processes are complicated to digitalise after all, healthcare is not an 'exact science'. There are many roads that (can) lead to Rome and there are often new insights - when it comes to human health, we are still constantly learning. Add to that the fact that within healthcare there are a huge number of disciplines that are very different but also have to work closely together... You can imagine that this requires a degree of flexibility that makes the traditional way of automating nigh impossible.
As such, many projects to digitalise work processes in healthcare have foundered on a lack of flexibility. However, knowing that this flexibility is needed, there are solutions to be found. In this article, we highlight some examples of processes within healthcare organisations that often rely on separate documents and how they can be digitalised.
If it aint broken, don’t fix it?
First, back to basics - why do we want to get rid of all these separate documents? Why change something if it works? For many, the disadvantages of working with separate documents will be clear, but to summarise:
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Information Security
The biggest reason you need to get rid of separate Excel files and A4 sheets is because of information security. It's easy to lose track of who has copies, and the risk of sheets of papers wandering around where they don't belong is relatively high. -
Logging
This point is related to information security - you want to know who accessed certain information and when and who added, changed or deleted information. When processes are properly digitialised, there is logging in place so that you have this usage information available. -
Saving time
Printing and mailing information obviously takes more time than making information immediately available digitally to the right people. Working with individual Excel files can also be time-consuming, especially when multiple people need to be able to collaborate in them. Where is the most recent version, can everyone access it who needs it? Plus, how does the necessary data find its way back into the patient record, does it require manual (duplicate) entry? -
Sustainability
We all know the emails with the disclaimer at the bottom: "Think before you print this email" or even, "Save a tree, don't print this email!" When a work process relies on printouts, it requires quite a few trees - not to mention toner. Not very sustainable.
Admission Management
The admission of patients to clinics involves quite a bit of work. Patients must be registered and placed on a waiting list, triage must be done, an up-to-date overview of available and occupied beds must be available, a planning must be made, etcetera. At many organisations these are separate steps in a complex process, which take place in various digital and physical locations - from emails in Outlook to lists in Excel and even notes on whiteboards. This makes it very difficult to get all the necessary information to the right people and structure the process.
What is needed is a solution built based on knowledge of the admission process, so that the entire process can be managed from one central location. Admission24 is an example of such a solution. The module was developed in consultation with healthcare professionals and is integrated with your EHR.
Lab orders and lab results
Many healthcare organisations (in mental health and nursing / home care, among others) work with multiple laboratories in the region to do lab tests. Because laboratories often have their own practices, this process is not always easy to digitalise. As such, healthcare providers often still send paper lab order forms to the laboratories and then also receive the lab results by physical mail. This obviously causes delays in the process and a lot of manual labor, not to mention the chance of paperwork getting lost somewhere during this process.
In this article, we describe how this collaboration between laboratories and healthcare organisations can be successfully digitalised.
Supporting practitioner consultation
When teams collaborate around the treatment of patients (think of, for example, multidisciplinary team meetings, FACT teams or IHT teams), an Excel is often used to registerconsultations about these patients . Information from these consultations is then not automatically recorded in the EHR - this requires double entry.
Working with a digital 'board' integrated with the EHR (a FACT board, IHT board or MDTM board, for example) saves time and gives you optimal control over access to the data on the board - only those caregivers belonging to the treatment team are granted access.
An example of a solution that provides this is CTB24. With this module, your organisation has the freedom to create various types of boards and configure them to display what your teams need.
From rigid to fluid
All change takes time - but it takes all the more time if you stick with the status quo. Smart digitalisation has the potential to go beyond rigid molds that will never fully capture the process. When techies and healthcare professionals stay in conversation with each other, even in healthcare technology there is room for flexibility and it will increasingly be possible to move away from disconnected documents.