How Physicians or Doctors Can Manage Chronic Disease With Technology?
December 5, 2020Chronic Diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular problems, and kidney-related diseases stay for a long time and need constant medical attention. Due to their persistent nature, they become highly resource-intensive and require the patients to visit their doctor quite often, for checkups and symptom management.
Chronic diseases have the highest patient populations around the world. As CDC denotes, the following stats provide an insight into the status of chronic diseases in the USA:
- 6 in 10 adults suffer from a chronic disease
- 4 in 10 adults suffer from two or more chronic diseases
- Chronic conditions and illnesses are the top reason for deaths
- Annually, they account for $3.5 trillion in healthcare costs
In the wake of this contentious issue that plagues millions of lives, new innovative techniques have surfaced that provide effective, low cost, and widely accessible solutions. Many of them are already in use by physicians and others are rapidly being adopted.
Let’s take a deep dive into tech tools that are reshaping Chronic Disease Management across the world. As a practicing physician or a healthcare IT stakeholder, you can directly benefit from the following technologies.
- Digital Medication Management
Multiple studies have found that non-adherence to the medication has become a contributing factor towards the ineffective treatment of chronic diseases.
Most chronic diseases demand a regular dosage of prescription drugs to control symptoms and to prepare the body to tackle the disease. But non-adherence due to high costs of medication and other challenges, prevent patients from proper recovery.
In fact, non-adherence to medication claimed as many as 125,000 deaths, denoted in the 2012 study by AIM.
Digital Medication Management offers software tools to physicians and clinicians for monitoring patient’s medicine intake, while recording adherence trends, and practices.
A growing number of Hospital Management Software solutions provide medication management as a component function. This helps doctors keep a track of admitted patients, as well as, patients seeking chronic care.
To add to it, studies have shown how Mobile Apps such as Dosecast, and MyMeds can boost medication management among patients.
These Apps provide medication schedules to the patients, and prompt them to take their medication on time, while also helping doctors track the intake.
- Remote Patient Monitoring
Remote Patient Monitoring consists of capturing patient health data in order to study the impacts of medication, as well as, create a digital record of patient’s chronic symptoms.
This is done via sensors and devices that closely interact with the patient. The most common examples include wearable devices; smartwatches, bluetooth blood pressure cuffs, heart rate sensors etc.
The devices serve three core purposes;
- Contribute to the patient’s Electronic Health Records (EHR)
- Help physicians pinpoint inflection points or anomalies in patient health
- Intervene in the current treatment in case it doesn’t meet standard results
Remote Health Monitoring is being popularized with the help of Telemedicine which is a form of remote healthcare delivery in itself. A number of healthcare providers have started shifting their interest to Telemedicine as it serves a cost-effective method for patient monitoring, and bringing down manual effort, which is a resource worth saving for physicians.
Steady EHR systems play an important role in the success of remote monitoring as the core value lies in responsibly collecting patient data and analyzing it for improved clinical decision making.
- Telehealth Solutions
Telehealth is an umbrella term given to healthcare support systems and other remote technologies that provide a gateway to chronic disease management.
It’s a fact that patients with chronic disease often need a quick checkup of body vitals and minimal physical examination. These can be carried out via telecalls, text messaging, and voice communication that Telehealth software solutions provide with ease.
This way, doctors can reach out to patients while incurring minimum costs, and increase the frequency of patient virtual visits. This goes a long way in keeping a track of chronic conditions while keeping the patient in close attention of the physician.
SoftClinic HIS and Telemedicine Software
SoftClinic provides an intelligent HIS, Clinic Software, and Telemedicine platform to physicians for managing chronic patients effectively. It fulfills EHR capturing needs, analysis of patient cases, and several automated workflows related to prescriptions. This empowers the physicians in a hospital or independent practitioners to administer patients facing chronic diseases in a much better way.
So far the SoftClinic hospital software has been implemented in more than 40 countries, improving the delivery of chronic disease health care with cost, and effort advantages.
Conclusion
Technological innovations such as medication monitoring, remote patient monitoring, and Telehealth are improving chronic disease management. Such innovations are pivotal for physicians in providing widely accessible healthcare at competitive costs, so that a vast number of patients who face chronic illnesses can receive appropriate medical attention.
Also Read: 10 Types of Healthcare Software that a Hospital needs in these times