Patient empowerment is another key to consumerization, helping ensure patients get easy access to actionable data, a clear understanding of their treatment options and a care plan developed jointly with their healthcare provider. To effectively empower patients, healthcare organizations must leverage an integrated delivery network to easily provide tools like patient portals with secure messaging to their healthcare providers, open notes, online or app prescription refills.
It sounds simple, but it is an enormous undertaking due to how unstructured data is today. In fact, IDC predicts that 80% of all data will be unstructured by 2025.
Ricoh has worked with a large hospital that fills more than 1,000 prescription orders daily from roughly 40 nursing stations. They previously depended on paper-centric workflows which, among other challenges, resulted in incorrect prescription deliveries, inability to track statuses, and long wait times for medication. They needed a digital services solution to make the overall process more seamless.
With Ricoh’s assistance, the hospital now offers the ability to view every order online. With more time to devote to filling orders, pharmacists can now complete high priority orders within 12 minutes, assisting with overall patient care improvements. Each order is now also automatically archived in the patients’ records management systems.
Addressing these hurdles requires much more than just a technology fix -- they’re too complex and varied for a one-size-fits-all approach. Not every patient care experience is the same, not every hospital network is the same – why would the solution to their challenges be the same? To be effective, the right solution requires a combination of technology and expertise with a common goal of simplifying complexities and overcoming obstacles that are unique to each scenario.
