ICTpost Health IT Bureau
In India, patients receive roughly half of recommended preventive, acute and chronic illness care. By using preventive tools, doctors can improve quality scores and provide more of recommended care.
Preventive health technologies could help improve care and reduce costs. A web-based tool that extracts information from the electronic medical record can help physicians provide better care for patients with diabetes and heart disease.
While primary care physicians may see 20 or 30 patients a day, there are hundreds of patients they don?t see who often need preventive tests, medications and screenings. By using this population care tool, physicians can improve care for healthy patients as well as those with chronic disease. Harnessing the power of immediately available and complete patient information, these tools allows primary care providers to rapidly examine what is recommended for an individual patient, a group of patients with a specific condition, or their entire panel of patients.
The Panel Support Tool (PST), devised and implemented by doctors at Kaiser Permanente-US, is a Web-based tool that helps primary care physicians to manage care for individual patients, groups of patients or their entire panel. It does this by comparing the care the patient is receiving to the care that is recommended by national guidelines. For example, doctors can query the PST in advance of a patient visit to find out if that patient needs a screening test or vaccine. They can ask the PST to display a list of all of their patients who are overdue for a mammogram or colon cancer screening test, or a list of their diabetic patients whose blood sugar levels are too high, or those who need a foot or eye exam.
Advantages of Preventive Health Technologies
Consumers could establish healthier habits by using preventive tools and services such as:
- Patient education systems;
- Wellness programs; and
- Remote monitoring devices.
- ?An increased adoption of [preventive] technologies promoting healthier tendencies can help lower overall costs by decreasing the number of needed consumer health care services in the future.
Challenges Hindering Widespread Use
Despite the advantages of preventive health technologies, many physicians and patients are hesitant to adopt such tools because of:
The high initial investment required to purchase preventive health technologies;
A lack of reimbursement for implementing such tools;
Uncertainties about the cost-effectiveness and overall effectiveness of the technologies
