Innovation in Home Healthcare - Essay Example

"Innovation in Home Healthcare" is a great example of a paper on the health system.
The healthcare industry has flourished from the propagation of innovations, which aim at improving life expectancy, quality of life, diagnosis and treatment, and most importantly enhancing health care delivery. Information technology has played a vital and significant role in providing quality service delivery in health systems. Health care stakeholders such as patients, healthcare organizations, physicians, and other healthcare professionals have initiated most of the innovation in health care. The most notable technological advancement in-home healthcare has been the innovation of telehealth tools, which grants clinicians the ability to monitor and measure patient’s data and information over geographic, social, and cultural differences. This report seeks to explore the benefits and outcomes of using telehealth in-home health care, the challenges posed, and the need for a consumer-based innovation towards quality delivery in health organizations. 

One of the most used care-coordinating tools in-home care is telehealth. This significant technological advance allows for more convenient, consistent, and cost-effective monitoring of the health status of a patient as well as an early intervention to prevent a health crisis that requires a high-cost service. By using this technology, clinicians can assess changes and trends in patients in order to detect potential exacerbations before they reach a critical level, allowing immediate intervention to prevent a crisis and possible hospitalization or re-hospitalization (Simione, 2012).

Home telehealth encompasses a broad spectrum of technologies and services such as;

• Video capabilities that make it possible to communicate with the patient
• Remote biometric measurements for a pulse, weight, high blood pressure, temperature, pulse oximetry, electrocardiogram, and blood glucose
• Medical reminders together with motion and pulse detectors
• The device links clinical case managers via phone, satellite, and the internet.

The telepath programs conducted in-home health care delivery have recorded several benefits and outcomes. The use of home telehealth tool has derived the following benefits;

• Patients enrolled in the programs have noted a decrease in the hospital readmission rate thirty days after discharge.
• Home care use of telehealth has also consistently demonstrated improved efficiencies in care delivery.
• The programs have not only reduced costs but have also decreased the number and length of home visits. It is recorded that a nurse can visit and assess an average of 4.5 patients per day while the telehealth nurse can monitor assess 75 patients per day.  
• Tele-health use has improved medication and staff management. The clinical staff education has been well received consequently increasing competency in heart failure management (Williams & Wilkins, 2013).

The following challenges are associated with the use of telehealth in-home health care;

• It is difficult to compile and monitor data in order to evaluate the impact of the program by some implementers.
• There are cases where the patient’s census is limited to the number of telehealth units available (Simione, 2012).

Customer-based innovation in health care focuses on solving problems and optimizing opportunities, which have been presented by healthcare consumers. This approach has many applications in the home healthcare environment, as most health care consumers are managing their health status within the context of their busy lives. Customer-based innovation can prove handy to working and busy individuals by providing timely schedules and appointment reminders for easy check-ups on patients. This particular model can help consumers in self-managing chronic conditions, for example, by sending timely reminders on how and when to take their medication. Such simple customer-centered changes can prove easy and convenient to most healthcare consumers (Rosa et al., 2013).

The following are tools and strategies that home health care organization can use to create customer-based innovations;

• Engaging in customer journey mapping to identify perspectives of consumers

• Involvement of health consumers in the creation and design of new and innovative health products and services
• Conducting research projects to determine the expectation of healthcare customers
• Developing websites that allow patients with particular conditions to share lessons and provide other emotional guidance.

The specific steps to undertake in order to make customer-based innovation a reality

• Awareness

Healthcare organizations must first think about making their customers happy and satisfied.

• Investment in-home healthcare

Health organizations must be ready to invest in both technology and consumer experience. They can join to reduce expenses by sharing best practices and undertaking most of them at the practitioner level.

• Getting buy-in and participation

Participation from both people and processes before improvements are incorporated is crucial.

• Systematization of the Customer-based innovation

This is achievable through integrating the approach in activities at the health organization.

The central purpose shared by both models is to introduce new ideas and services that aim at improving medical devices, procedures, and treatment of patients. Tele-health is ineffective without the existence of a clinical model that plans and incorporates the needs of a patient. Consequently, there is a need for designing a customer-based model home that specifically meets the needs of consumers and one that is more effective in problem-solving while at the same time benefiting the health care system as a whole.