Medical and Technological Advancements in Present Day Healthcare: Challenges for Healthcare Leaders

This presentation discusses the challenges faced by healthcare leaders in managing the advancements in medicine and technology in present day healthcare. It explores the impact on healthcare professionals, patients, and the environment. The presentation also provides strategic responses and recommendations for overcoming these challenges.

Medical and technological advancements in
present day healthcare: challenges for
healthcare leaders

Overview:
• advancement of medicine and technology had helped in increasing the life
expectancy of people
• because of the result of significant improvement in the healthcare services
as well as investment in medical researchers
• However, the quality of life led by the people is poor as they are seen to
suffer from huge number of chronic ailments (Nelson and Straggers 2016)
• number of patients requiring care services from the healthcare sector had
increased massively
• created an intense pressure on the primary healthcare services

Issue
•United States is facing a massive shortage of healthcare professionals
•handling huge inflow of patients had become difficult for the different
healthcare organizations as human resources have become restricted
•huge allocation of funds and resources are also found to be necessary
to tackle demands and care needs (Silva et al. 2015)
•to find a proper alternative that can help every healthcare organization
to overcome such crisis, healthcare leaders have proposed the
utilization of mobile health technologies
•to overcome the mentioned crisis, leaders proposed the use of mobile
healthcare technologies like that of tele-health, tele-medicines, video-
conferencing and many others
•it is associated with many issues

Issue: challenges identified
• data security issues and data protection issues
• Loss of confidentiality
• huge investment and allocation of funds required for implementation of
the project
• not all the working members of the healthcare organizations may feel
comfortable with the changes and might try to rebel against them (Kazdin
et al. 2018)
• allocating training sessions require expenditure of resources and wastage
of practice times of professionals in the busy working schedules of the
hospitals

Stakeholder groups and their perspectives on the issue: working healthcare professionals.
• they might not feel comfortable
• may not have the expertise required for caring patients through monitors,
mobile applications, emails and similar others methods (Islam et al. 2015)
• require specialized training and dedication to which such professionals
might not be ready to contribute to the recent advancement

Stakeholder groups
higher healthcare authorities:
• The main concern for the higher authorities would be the huge amount of
healthcare resources and funding
• Arranging for training sessions of the healthcare professionals, recruiting
trainers for them, allocating places for the training workshops are some of
the areas where healthcare authorities might face issues (Sneha and
straub 2017)
• huge amount of resources for development of an expert IT teams for
managing the e-health services
• Allocations of funds for purchasing the machines, developing new
departments and rooms, setting procedures of the technological services

Stakeholder groups:
IT department:
• already remain booked with the huge amount of responsibilities of
managing the machines, equipments, technological activities, data
protection of the patients and the healthcare organizations and many
others
• Implementation of e-health services would add to their efforts resulting in
the increase of their work burden (Krann et al. 2015)
• additional research work on the new project for which recruitment of new
members might be required for sharing the burden

Stakeholder groups:
Patients:
• patients who do not have health literacy or those who do not have skills
and knowledge might not feel comfortable with this mode of treatment
process
• they might not want to get treatment in e-health procedures (Dzau et al.
2017)

Challenges and opportunities presented by the environmental factor:
• rapid change would require the leaders in acquiring and developing
methods so that different private sessions and the data of patients can be
effectively maintained and accessed
• the rapidly advancing technology would require allocation of huge funds
for research for continuous betterment and removal of technological
glitches (Sligo et al. 2017)
• introduction of the system in to the main healthcare framework services
in the organizations would also require huge outflow of funds

Challenges:
• including the cyberworld in the healthcare system and ensuring legal
requirements for strict maintenance of privacy and security of the patients
requires effective planning and efficiency of experts
• a dedicated IT department and research teams should also be brought
into the system that would not only be expert in their skills but would also
understand and predict the behaviors of the systems (Kim et al. 2016)
• change of working style might affect the morale and confidence of the
present employees, resentment for the system

Benefits:
• help in controlling and reducing the office visits of patients
• help in saving huge amount of healthcare resources and would prevent
allocation of healthcare professionals apart from the main doctor
• Professionals required for management of patients, providing them
appointment, cash collection, and many others would not be required
(Laurenza et al. 2018)
• help in mitigating the issues of healthcare professional shortage
• help in controlling the huge expenditure of healthcare resources in the
present times

Ethical responsibilities: confidentiality, privacy, security
• ensure privacy and confidentiality as well as security of the data, acquired
through the technological aspect while communicating with the patients,
remains high chance of data theft by dishonest people (Scantlebury et al.
2017)
• healthcare professionals have an additional duty to maintain their
confidentiality and privacy by not leaking the information and preserving
the information through proper data protection procedures with the help
of IT departments

Ethical responsibilities :informed consent
• ensuring informed consent from the patients
• healthcare professional have the ethical responsibility of communicating
the detailed information (Bellio et al. 2017)
• ways by which the personal data would be collected, shared as well as
utilized by the healthcare organization should be told to patients

Ethical responsibilities: honesty and quality
• ensuring honesty as well as quality
• ethical responsibility of the professional to maintain their healthcare
philosophies and ethics and thereby ensure honesty in their approach
(Serrano et al. 2018)
• Being truthful and not deceptive should be the ethical foundation of
people
• maintaining the quality is extremely important where they need to
provide information that is accurate, easier to understand and are up-to-
date

Recommendations for strategic responses:
• authority might not be able to allocate the entire amount of funds that
can be possible to ensure implementation and uninterrupted service of
the e-health department
• A report based on the needs of the e-health service would be prepared
along with the budgets required should be developed and then
approached to the health department and charitable organizations for
support (Hamine et al. 2015)

Recommendations for strategic responses:
• working healthcare professionals as well as the members of the IT
department might show resentment about the new change and they may
also not feel comfortable
• healthcare leaders need to exhibit their transformational leadership styles
• would also “Walk the talk” and become examples or roles models about
how the members can adopt to the new additional roles they would need
to develop

Recommendations for strategic responses:
• Communication workshops need to be developed by the healthcare
leaders for the healthcare members
• communication skill development of the members over the internet and
help them to solve queries of patients (Obama 2016)
• encourage the patients with proper communication skills and teach them
the right measures of handling the internet sites, apps and e-health
instruments
• help the patients in overcoming their discomfort and fear of availing such
services

References:
• Bellio, E., Mazzola, M. and Solinas, E., 2017. Technology Innovation, New Patient’s Behaviors, And New Health Service Paradigms. IAC Online Journal
CIO and Digital Innovation, p.61.
• Dzau, V.J., McClellan, M.B., McGinnis, J.M., Burke, S.P., Coye, M.J., Diaz, A., Daschle, T.A., Frist, W.H., Gaines, M., Hamburg, M.A. and Henney, J.E., 2017.
Vital directions for health and health care: priorities from a National Academy of Medicine initiative. Jama, 317(14), pp.1461-1470.
• Hamine, S., Gerth-Guyette, E., Faulx, D., Green, B.B. and Ginsburg, A.S., 2015. Impact of mHealth chronic disease management on treatment adherence
and patient outcomes: a systematic review. Journal of medical Internet research, 17(2).
• Islam, S.R., Kwak, D., Kabir, M.H., Hossain, M. and Kwak, K.S., 2015. The internet of things for health care: a comprehensive survey. IEEE Access, 3,
pp.678-708.
• Kazdin, A.E., 2018. Expanding mental health services through novel models of intervention delivery. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
• Kim, K., Seok, H. and Proctor, R.W., 2016. Comparison of national e health implementation in the United States and South Korea. ‐ Human Factors and
Ergonomics in Manufacturing & Service Industries, 26(6), pp.692-699.
• Kraan, C.W., Piggott, J.J.H., van der Vegt, F. and Wisse, L., 2015. Personal Health Records: Solving barriers to enhance adoption. E-health strategies.
• Laurenza, E., Quintano, M., Schiavone, F. and Vrontis, D., 2018. The effect of digital technologies adoption in healthcare industry: a case based
analysis. Business Process Management Journal, 24(5), pp.1124-1144.
• Nelson, R. and Staggers, N., 2016. Health Informatics-E-Book: An Interprofessional Approach. Elsevier Health Sciences.
• Obama, B., 2016. United States health care reform: progress to date and next steps. Jama, 316(5), pp.525-532.
• Scantlebury, A., Booth, A. and Hanley, B., 2017. Experiences, practices and barriers to accessing health information: a qualitative study. International
journal of medical informatics, 103, pp.103-108.
• Serrano, A., Garcia-Guzman, J., Xydopoulos, G. and Tarhini, A., 2018. Analysis of Barriers to the Deployment of Health Information Systems: a
Stakeholder Perspective. Information Systems Frontiers, pp.1-20.
• Silva, B.M., Rodrigues, J.J., de la Torre Díez, I., López-Coronado, M. and Saleem, K., 2015. Mobile-health: A review of current state in 2015. Journal of
biomedical informatics, 56, pp.265-272.
• Sligo, J., Gauld, R., Roberts, V. and Villa, L., 2017. A literature review for large-scale health information system project planning, implementation and
evaluation. International journal of medical informatics, 97, pp.86-97.
• Sneha, S. and Straub, D., 2017. E-Health: Value Proposition and Technologies Enabling Collaborative Healthcare.

Thank you