healthcare close to home. Healthcare can be accessed without having to visit a hospital, which is a more full-service medical facility. Ambulatory care providers may be single branch offices, or they may offer integrated services like inpatient and outpatient care, laboratory or radiology services, and even more specialized healthcare.”
In a robust healthcare sector, where hospitals are thriving due to the increased number of patients that they receive as a result of greater awareness among people, ambulatory care and outpatient departments have also been on the rise. This is because hospitals have found various ways to outsource the services offered by an Ambulatory Care department in order to reduce their cost burden since their profit margin lies in inpatient care. OPDs and Ambulatory care offer various economic benefits owing to which they are preferred over conventional healthcare, a reason being the reduced cost incurred by the patients related to treatment as well as surgery.
Due to the rise of the OPD patients, the expanded operations of Ambulatory care providers by using the traditional paperwork, or even local digitized methods is slow and always at a risk of security breach or data loss. Especially due to the ongoing pandemic people have become vary of going into Hospital buildings and clinics. This is where we see the need of Electronic Medical Records and TeleHealth. Both of these are the latest advancement in the field of Ambulatory Care industry.
EMR is basically a digital medical record that is connected to all concerned parties i.e. Doctors, Patient, laboratories and Insurance providers. This means that all medical data regarding a particular patient can be found at a single point and can be accessed at anytime and from anywhere
teleHealth is the provision of medical assistance from a distance. It can be through an audio or video call or an Online portal that is updated by all concerned parties as the need arises e.g. A patient can point out their symptoms, a doctor could recommend tests, the test results from the laboratory can be viewed by the doctor and medication or treatment can be prescribed. Pharmacy can send the prescription to the address of the patient and Insurance providers can keep a track of all this. The whole process becomes, efficient, biosecure and streamlined due to the implementation of a cloud based Ambulatory Care platform
“A study done by Alams Global found out that Hospitals and Clinics that deployed Alams’ Cloud based Ambulatory care platform have shown up to 48% increase in the efficiency of their operations” Quoted Muhammad Shazain, the Head of Operations at Alams Global.
To conclude, the benefits of cloud based ambulatory care are apparent. Cloud based Ambulatory Care platforms, can provide physicians with a proven and reliable system that is flexible, reliable, secure, and can easily be accessed from anywhere. The industry is moving towards more patient-centric care as opposed to the traditional physician-patient model. I want to see this trend continue because it will result in more efficient healthcare which will lower costs and improve outcomes for patients. For this to happen though there needs to be fundamental shifts in the way the industry delivers care.
