21st Century Healthcare
Modern healthcare has become so sophisticated and complex that serious errors - even leading to a patient’s death - can occur if crucial patient data between different hospital departments cannot be exchanged accurately. Director’s Thomas Schmid takes a look at 21st century healthcare solutions.
An estimated 7,000 patients die every year in the United States alone as a result of drug-related errors ranging from reactions to the wrong drugs being dispensed. This figure does not even take into account the number of patient deaths that may occur due to ignored allergies to certain substances, patients expiring on the operating table or because they acquired an infection in the hospital.
“One in 300 patients has a chance of being harmed while under medical treatment, while the odds that one would sustain any injury or even die during airplane travel are roughly one in a million,” says Patrick Downing, senior director of HIS Product, a Microsoft Corporation subsidiary involved in healthcare software solutions.
Comparisons such as this should make everybody think. Unfortunately, the vast majority of hospitals in Southeast Asia still keep patient records on paper instead of relying on much less error-prone computer software. While Microsoft is most renowned for its personal computer operating systems and other peripheral software, it is little known that the company has developed a software solution for the healthcare sector. Amalga HIS (Hospital Information System) and Amalga UIS (Unified Intelligence System) constitute software solutions that can not only be run independently from one another, but in fact complement each other for a safer, more efficient healthcare situation.
