Point of Care technology allows long term care carriers to successfully catch and disperse vital patient details. Deployed on booths, wall mounted-touch displays, and wireless laptop, POC provides functionality to speed up the collection and mandate of documents and disperses this to all needed stakeholders.
Exact homeowner details is important to the operations of the long-lasting care company. The collection and accessibility of resident info enables front-line employees to look after locals, medical management to keep track of care efficiency, and invoicing personnel to account for services provided. It covers
- Test accuracy
- Turnaround time
- Data management
- Quality control
- Regulatory compliance
- Cost-effectiveness of testing
How Point of Care Technology adds value?
One aspect of systems engineering is the utilization of information and communications technologies to optimize system functionality, thereby enabling patient-centered care across various healthcare settings. That’s how Point of Care technologies are useful in adding value for healthcare service.
- Increase reimbursements with more accurate and complete collection of care service information
- Save time and avoid errors by automatically pre-populating MDS and other assessments
- Reduce copy-cat charting with information controls
- Free up staff to devote more time to resident care and provide relevant and timely information for front-line care workers
- Ensure documentation compliance
- Distribute tasks to care workers based on role or shift.
- Information captured in POC flows to downstream processes/functions, eliminating duplication of work.
- Real-time updates within the resident record and management dashboards.
- Enables clinical staff to access existing patient information and capture new information at/near the place of care through a modern and intuitive interface
Using Point of Care Technologies
Primary Care
Primary care needs that will drive innovation in POC testing are to improve (a) quality of care, (b) health outcomes, and (c) the financial feasibility of such practices. Improved POC testing offers the potential to expand the scope of practice of primary care providers and thereby bring care closer to the 1st point of contact in both temporal and organizational dimensions.
Home care
Although institution-based care accounts for a considerable amount of the investment in health services, the past 20 years of transition to shortened stays means that individuals face most of their healthcare concerns at home and in the community. There are a variety of home healthcare processes and models.
Self Management.
Self-management involves measurement of temperature, body weight, blood pressure, pregnancy, and blood glucose. Results are interpreted by the user or family members, and occasionally the results may be transmitted (e.g., by telephone) to people outside the home for interpretation. This management is predominantly paper-based, but it is becoming increasingly electronic in the form of personal or electronic health records (EHRs). Home monitoring is explicitly included as one data source that should be supported by personal health records.
Remote Familial Care
Remote familial care by grown children provides a way to “check in” on remote parents that may involve POC testing and/or remote monitoring technologies.
Home Nursing
Home nursing commonly uses POC testing devices, including glucose meters, blood pressure monitors, scales, coagulation meters, spirometers, and thermometers. Home telemedicine devices, often combining videoconferencing and POC testing, are being used to replace a fraction of home nursing visits, while also avoiding costly hospital referrals.
Disease Management Organizations
Disease management organizations (DMOs) operate programs designed to achieve the 6 Institute of Medicine objectives for care, namely safe, effective, equitable, patient-centered, timely, and efficient. They offer support for the primary care/patient relationship; a patient-centered plan of care; prevention of exacerbations and complications utilizing risk assessment and evidence-based practice guidelines; interdisciplinary collaboration and feedback loops; patient empowerment strategies; as well as a robust evaluation program. DMO programs encompass both prevalent (e.g., diabetes and heart failure) and complex diseases (e.g., multiple sclerosis) for which opportunities exist for improvement in the quality of care.
Chronic care model.
The chronic care model relies on extension of the capabilities of existing clinicians through the development of multidisciplinary teams, rather than through contracts to 3rd-party DMOs. The chronic care model approach is similar to DMOs in using POC testing (patients trained to monitor their own medical conditions, interpret the results, and change therapy) and remote monitoring for earlier detection of changes in the patients’ conditions.
Remote Consultation
An often-cited future for home POC testing is the “electronic house call.” For this vision to become reality, POC testing devices will need to be developed to support it. These methods will differ from most POC testing devices because they will be used very rarely, and will probably need to cover a large panel of commonly needed diagnostic targets.
Emergency Medical Services
The level of an emergency medical services (EMS) provider determines the capability and equipment they are able to use. The 1st responder is able to provide an initial level of care that includes simple airway control with positioning maneuvers, bag-valve-mask breathing support, simple splinting and bleeding control, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and automatic external defibrillation.
Summary
Many procedures were considered to be valuable in the healthcare settings discussed. Technological solutions were proposed to meet the needs, as well as the practical requirements around healthcare change and regulation. From these considerations, a series of questions can be aroused for development of POC technologies based on input from the symposium attendees.
- What is the medical benefit to having the device available at POC settings?
- Does the reduced turnaround time enable earlier intervention and treatment?
- Do test results encourage lay users to seek medical attention when it is needed?
- What is the impact of incorrect usage or device failure, or if performance is borderline?
- What is the consequence of a false-positive or false-negative result?
- Are patients unnecessarily admitted to the hospital?
- Do they receive extraneous treatments that may harm them?
- Can patients be discharged from the hospital when they have a life-threatening condition?
- What happens if treatment is delayed?
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