How has hybrid technology transformed acute hospital care?

Posted by KBV Research on November 26th, 2019

Acute hospital care setting is a dynamic environment with practice and safety protocols and standards that may not apply to several other health care delivery areas, including an outpatient clinic or school system. Hospitals have been designed to meet a wide range of routine, urgent, or emerging needs for patient care.

These needs are addressed in the medical expertise of the staff and the medical-surgical equipment used within an acute care setting. The hospital setting provides 24-hour care; therefore, the patient, family, and caregivers face the physical, mental, and emotional sequelae of disease and hospitalization. This may include the response(s) to a routine change; a lack of privacy and independence; or maybe a response to a potential change in lifestyle, critical illness, medical crisis, or long-term illness.

Acute cases and expanding acute care setups & services

Standard acuity medical definitions illustrate the unique time pressure attribute. Acute services include all preventive, curative, rehabilitative or palliative actions (whether focused towards individuals or populations). Their main purpose is to improve health and whose effectiveness largely depends on time-sensitive and often rapid response.

As populations continue to expand and age, the demand for acute curative services will increase. These services respond to acute exacerbation of chronic diseases, life-threatening emergencies, and several routine health issues that require prompt action. To finalize and enhance health systems, emergency interventions and services must be incorporated with primary care and public health measures.

What is acute hospital care?

Acute care is a secondary health care branch in which a patient receives active but short-term treatment for a serious injury or disease episode, an emergency medical condition, or surgical recovery. In medical terms, chronic care or longer-term care is the opposite of acute health conditions.

Acute care services are usually provided from a variety of medical and surgical specialties by teams of health care professionals. Acute care may involve a stay in a hospital emergency department, an emergency care center, an outpatient surgery center, or another facility for short-term stays, along with community diagnostic services, surgery, or outpatient follow-up.

Typically, hospital-based acute hospital care is intended to discharge patients as soon as they are considered healthy and stable. Acute treatment settings include intensive treatment, cardiology, emergency department, coronary care, intensive care for the newborns and many general areas. In these settings, the patient could require stabilization and a further transfer to another higher addiction unit for treatment.

Disruptive and hybrid technologies in acute care

Enabled technology, telemonitoring and remote management of healthcare services for acute and critically ill patients have effectively destroyed the walls that fenced conventional acute care areas in hospitals (ICUs, HDUs, post-operative units, etc.).

As a consequence, there is a growing demand for many forms of acute care-hospital & community-based services, hence for specialized staff and new, complex clinical routines. At the same time, this highly stressful and dynamic schedule of ICU/HDU, demanding profession and socially poor lifestyle, leads to chronic fatigue/burnout, making the young generation unappealing to the acute medicine/healthcare specialties.

An interdisciplinary approach to challenges, as opposed to multidisciplinary, came through 4IR and will remain with us. Acute, emergency, and intensive care are an exception, but perhaps a wonderful example to use and expand on this idea. It is time to start thinking big and help in this particularly difficult project where people's lives are at stake.

In addition to the ICU team's traditional members, simple life science scientists, engineers, psychologists, architects, and bioinformaticians should find their place in our routines. It is anticipated that the working environment in clinical areas, in particular, EHR infrastructure, will facilitate and provide organized yet versatile approaches to this interdisciplinary interaction to maximize its impact on patient outcomes.

Clinical education at all levels and for all students and health care staff involved in acute, emergency and intensive care (physicians, nurses, physiotherapists, clinical dietitians, clinical pharmacists, clinical psychologists, etc.) has become a top priority due to the complexity of the work environment and the necessary skills.

Currently, the medical industry is entering a new era, as time and physical presence parameters are dissolving, expertise gaps can be bridged, data access has become even easier, and use of the internet, telemedicine, and virtual/augmented reality technologies are revolutionizing modeling of diseases/procedures. Globalization and free movement of healthcare staff and high demand for standardization of competence and specialization have made international curricula and the role of scientific societies very crucial as eLearning is booming all over the world.

To conclude

To prevent death and disability, acute care plays a vital role. Primary care is not positioned to take this level of responsibility. Furthermore, acute care serves as an entry point for health care for people with emerging and urgent conditions within health systems.

Healthcare participants will work together to improve the health of individuals and populations, according to research predictions. Health research, like privacy, is of great value to society. It could provide crucial information on trends in disease and risk factors, treatment results or interventions in public health, functional skills, care patterns, and expense and use of health care.

Hospital systems should consider setting up one point of leadership overall critical care services. This must include services and sub-specialized critical care units such as cardiac surgery, neurosurgery, and burns. Integrated operational and financial reporting should support this leadership in monitoring and managing the performance of these services as well as understanding the drivers of demand for them. This can help optimize the institution as a whole's balance of critical care priorities against those for each unit and service. In the critical-care service of the future, healthcare systems administrators must take into account such strategies.

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KBV Research

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KBV Research
Joined: January 15th, 2019
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