Digital Age of Healthcare
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Are You Ready to Manage the Coming Digital Age of Healthcare?
What Is Digital Healthcare?
For years, many people and businesses have envisioned digital healthcare records. With so many people travelling thousands of miles for business and pleasure every year, having health records available for medical personnel in times of emergency or need has finally become a top priority.
There is even a newer name with which managers and medical professionals will become familiar: Health Infomatics. Using health infomatics, hospitals will have the ability to access a national data base of digital information that will include medical histories, current and former prescription medicines, and other important patient information.
The final implementation date is 2015 for completion and accessibility of this national digital network. Recent Federal stimulus funds have included up to $19 billion dedicated to creating this health infomatics network. Most hospitals should now have the funds to create this important data base.
While it is obvious how critically important this new digital network will be to individuals and their medical treatment, how might it affect your professional career? Unlike some of the more recent economic and business events, health infomatics may prove to offer new, exciting opportunities to management and IT professionals.
Hospitals, Medical Personnel, and IT Professionals Take Note
Because of the stimulus offering, hospitals should now feel more confident that they will have the funding to create a digital healthcare network, but they also need professionals to physically design, code, input, maintain, and protect this digital network. Health infomatics offers some exciting new profitable career opportunities for many specialists and managers.
Hospitals and other medical providers should be looking for the best talent available now to begin this critical transition to digital healthcare. 2015 will be upon us quickly, and those hospitals and medical providers that design and implement their portion of the network promptly will have time to address and correct bugs and quirks in a timely fashion.
In addition to ensuring a seamless and successful transition to digital healthcare, completing the health infomatics implementation as soon as feasible may save some lives and bring additional public acclaim to your medical facility – possibly even some new well-respected medical talent. Unfortunately, recent studies show that less than 2% of hospitals have yet to install even the rudiments of a health infomatics network. While that is not welcome news for patients, it displays the strong need for IT professionals and managers in the medical arena.
Consulting with a top professional employment firm like Kelly Services, will give you access to premiere talent and a continuum of workforce solutions across the IT and healthcare spectrum. Top firms like Kelly Services, know their employer-clients well, have access to the best professional talent, and can help you make this big transition to the digital era of healthcare. You might even see a similar situation to the opportunities created by the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, where forensic and other accounting professionals were needed quickly and in volume to implement and ensure compliance with the new regulations.
The primary obstacle to date – sufficient funding – has been minimized by the funds from the stimulus plan. Hospitals and medical providers now need the professionals to actually make health infomatics a reality. Should you be stimulated by the challenge and understand the great need to access professional talent for digital healthcare, start your search now.
Don’t forget another important – to some, troubling – component of modern healthcare that needs to be addressed: patient privacy. The implementation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has brought patient privacy to a new level of protection. A nationwide network of the most intimate personal medical information is, at first glance, a formidable challenge to patient privacy concerns.
Consequently, the security of the digital network and the data therein contained is a high priority for medical providers. This condition may generate even more job opportunities for medical professionals, like RNs and others, who also have good IT knowledge. Even non-healthcare certified staff such as experienced corporate and compliance managers should be needed to protect the sensitive information resident in this digital network.
While all managers, not just HR personnel, should become familiar with the coming digital healthcare realities, those professionals wishing to become directly involved on a career basis face many new exciting opportunities. As this digital healthcare network gets closer to reality, your staff will have more questions and comments about this system. Become a resource of knowledge to help your employees become comfortable with health infomatics to improve their quality of work and life. Also, consider investigating the opportunities in this dynamic, groundbreaking new career field.
- This article was brought to you by Kelly Healthcare Resources, provider of comprehensive solutions for health informatics.