As a health care executive or medical practice owner, you have to keep up with trends that can reduce errors and improve the quality of care that your patients receive. Increasing evidence suggests that you can achieve this by integrating touchscreen technology into your workflows.
What Are Ways To Integrate Touchscreen Technology in Your Operations?
Your facility likely already uses electronic health record (EHR) or electronic medical record (EMR) systems or some other type of healthcare information technology (HIT) to log patient notes, track medications, and perform other functions. How many of those systems are compatible with touchscreen devices, though? It's unlikely that they are, but they should be.
An increasing number of medical systems have adopted touchscreen technology in recent years. Some doctors' offices have long been using this technology for patient check-ins, but it's only recently that medical centers have started equipping patient rooms with this technology too. Nurses and doctors are also increasingly using touchscreen devices to access patient data and notes, view imaging studies, engage with patients via telehealth, and more easily collaborate with other medical team members without moving about the facility, saving valuable time.
What Are the Benefits of Touchscreen Technology in Health Care?
If you're wondering why it is important that you have touchscreen technology at your medical facility, it comes down to:
Building That Provider-Patient Trust
A previous study published by the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) showed that 62% of patients reported concerns over the loss of eye contact when their medical providers used traditional desktop or computer technology. At least 31% of patients described their medical providers' use of computers while in the room with them as rude.
Touchscreen technology has the potential of allowing medical providers to maintain eye contact with the patient because it poses less of an obstruction due to its size. It also poses less of a distraction when used with guided EHRs.
Reducing Provider Errors
Many medication or treatment mistakes occur because there isn't an adequate infrastructure for communication between providers and shift tradeoffs. Having touchscreen technology available in patient rooms can ensure information gets recorded right away. An integrated system allows different medical team members to provide their input from where they're at for a collaborative treatment approach.
Minimizing Barriers to Care
Touchscreen technology has a degree of intuitiveness built into it. It allows a more diverse population, such as the elderly, to quickly adapt to and use it, reducing barriers they might otherwise face in receiving the medical care that they need.
What will touchscreen technology mean for the future of health care?
Touchscreen technology has the potential of making health care more accessible for all and significantly reducing miscommunication that often results in adverse medical outcomes. Touchscreen technology also has the potential of making patient care more efficient and accessible as medical providers won't have to spend as much time moving around to communicate with patients or doubling up on their documentation efforts because they can be done on the spot.
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