Benefits of ICT in Healthcare: A Comprehensive Report

This booklet examines the significant advantages of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the healthcare sector. It highlights how ICT improves healthcare standards, patient-centered care, and staff training. The report delves into the types of ICT used, including electronic medical records, imaging technologies, and various software applications. It emphasizes the benefits for healthcare professionals, such as reduced malpractice, faster lab results, and time savings. For care receivers, the report discusses the importance of electronic health records, easy access to medical information, and the ability to track progress. Additionally, the report addresses how ICT can lower healthcare costs, expand service access, and reduce malfunctions for healthcare facilities. Finally, the report covers the legal considerations and guidelines related to data protection and patient rights within the healthcare system, ensuring quality care and ethical conduct.

INFORMATION COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY BOOKLET
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INFORMATION COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY BOOKLET
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is of great advantage for healthcare professionals as using
these they can achieve healthcare standard improvement, patient centric care process and further helps the
healthcare organizations to provide their fresh healthcare employees to train and gain experience from real time
examples (Pratt et al. 2012(. However there are several changes that need to be made prior to implementation of
these ICTs in the healthcare system (Bryde et al. 2013). Using the ICT systems the healthcare of any country can
spread to remote locations so that equal distribution of healthcare can be achieved. Further usage of ICT
throughout the healthcare organization and its process, helps to empower the patient as well as the healthcare
providers in healthcare delivery and outcome. In this booklet several benefits of ICTs used in healthcare sector
will be described with the advantages of these technologies to the healthcare professionals, care receivers and the
healthcare organizations.
While discussing the Information Communication Technologies, the type of different ICTs should be
mentioned. The type of ICTs which are used in healthcare settings are associated with either health or social
care education, hospital management system, management of healthcare related data and finally to the stream of
health research. Several examples are Electronic medical records, MRI, nuclear imaging technology, usage of
simpler software such as word, PowerPoint excel, emails, databases, and several universal EMR based
technologies (Bryde et al. 2013). Further, according to the World Health Organization’s data, the world wide
=web is used by almost 80% of the population throughout the world and within that 40% uses it for healthcare
purposes. Thereby internet established itself as one of the best information and communication tool for
healthcare purposes (Pratt et al. 2012).

While discussing the benefits of ICT in healthcare for care receivers, there are two primary advantages that
should be mentioned here.
 The primary benefit for care receiver is the maintenance of their health record. There are several
diseases where maintenance of paper logs are important. For example in case of diabetes, the healthcare
professionals need to log the informations of insulin and glucose level of the patient and hence, ICT
helps in maintaining an electronic data of the logs. As per the Kellermann and Jones (2013), this method
of data maintenance is more interactive and easy.
 Further, due to ease of access, maximum number of patients are able to access their medical health
records in adverse conditions. Furthermore, using these, they are able to change their food and diet
habit, medicational precautions and other informations related to their disease. Thereby, using these
information and communication technology tools, the care receivers or patients are able to track their
progress and also utilize the healthcare informations to improve their condition.
Benefits of Information and Communication Technology to care providers or healthcare professionals are
as follows:
 The first benefit of using ICT in healthcare will be decrease in the number of malpractice counts,
as using electrical data recorder and systems will be able to read the accurate reading of each
process. Thereby, the number of malpractice will decrease after implementation of these ICT
technologies in the healthcare organization. Further besides malpractice, the ICT technology
helps to generate lab results 75% faster than the traditional lab report timing and therefore, helps
patients
 Further using healthcare ICT helps the healthcare professionals to save their time while working
in the healthcare facility and it is reported by more than 82% healthcare professionals as the ICT
has saved their time while working with multiple patients. Further while auditing their process in
different or home healthcare organization, healthcare professionals are able to scrutinize the
process properly. This is because paper auditing used to take 3 to 4 days to complete, whereas
using ICT takes 4 to 5 hours to complete the entire audit process.

Finally, while discussing the benefits that the healthcare facility receives after implementation of the
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are as follows:
 In a research conducted by Gagnon et al. (2012), determines that healthcare facility related issues are
and processes are responsible for more than 35% of the healthcare expenses which could be avoided
are due to inefficient process and data recordings. Therefore, usage of ICTs can be helpful in
decreasing the cost of healthcare related financial expenses. For example, if any hospital has to spend
$50 Million for its patient’s data recording, healthcare facilities with EMR can store those data and
many others in just $37 Million.
 Further by providing electrical data storage and other ICT related advancements, the healthcare
facility is able to helps maximum number of patients to improve their health condition. Besides this, it
helps them to expand their services from metropolitan cities to rural towns and areas so that majority
of the healthcare interventions can be provided to remote sections of the society. Further, using this
also decreased the number of healthcare malfunctions, as discussed in the previous section, which is
beneficial for the healthcare organization (Moorhead et al. 2013).
Legal consideration
While discussing the legal considerations, it should be mentioned that there are several acts and
provisions that the healthcare facilities follows while determining quality care for the patients. Breaching of
these policies can be punishable for the healthcare professionals as according to the laws, it is the right of
healthcare receivers to be able to receive quality healthcare without any ethical or professionals breaching of
the codes of conduct (Cresswell and Sheikh 2013). Therefore, these are several guidelines that has been
prepared by the United Kingdom government so that these legal considerations can be protected and the
health care can be provided to each of the member of the society (Gagnon et al. 2012).
 Firstly, the NMC or Nurisng Midwifery Council prepared the data protection related
guidelines and according to that the healthcare facility should be compatible to each of the
processes so that no one can breach the patient security and data protection may create
adverse effect on the person (Chourabi et al. 2012).
 Further these are rules such as using the healthcare reports, access to healthcare service that

should be properly maintained as it decreases the security of the patients within healthcare
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