Quality of care is the extent to which health care services provided to individuals and populations increase the likelihood of achieving desired health outcomes and are consistent with evidence-based professional knowledge. This definition of quality of care extends to health promotion, prevention, treatment, rehabilitation, and palliative care (Fong et al., 2020). It assumes that quality of care can be measured and continuously improved by ensuring that care is evidence-based and responsive to the needs and preferences of service users – patients, families, and communities.
Advances in technology have improved people’s quality of life in many social aspects, including medicine. One use of technology is to move some health care services to the Internet so that everyone can make an appointment with a doctor online and can better learn and understand a patient’s illness. Our project consists of translating pre-hospital services on the hospital website and into a mobile app. The expected cost will be about $20,000, including fees for developers, managers, and testers of the app. According to forecasts, digitization of some services can ease the load off hospitals from solving everyday issues related to issuing referrals and recording for tests. It will also allow patients to schedule their appointments in advance, which will reduce the number of queues in the hospital.
Nowadays, it is difficult to explain how modern technology works to people aged 50 and above, so the project takes young people as an audience. The target audience is the younger generation, people between the ages of 18 and 35, who best master modern technology. People master new technologies and further educate their parents and loved ones with chronic diseases. Nurses are vital employees in the health care system as they encounter many unique clinical cases every day, counsel patients, and perform a variety of procedures. For this reason, they can be used as consultants in software development. The nurse knows best which methods are the most popular, how long it takes to perform a procedure and get results, and the approximate cost of the service (Harris et al., 2020). Thanks to the nursing staff, our project can bring in the most basic necessary functions for patients so as not to delay the development of the project or make it more expensive. For example, a nurse is best placed to explain which tests need to be included in the project first so that patients have the incentive to use the service.
The art of being close to your target audience is what any competent marketing hinges on. As mentioned earlier, the target audience for our project is young people. It is essential for this age group that the interface of the app or website is intuitive, easy to use, and straightforward. The incorrectly made design will cause additional difficulties to the same appointment with the doctor, and it is worth noting that just going to the doctor is already stressful for most people because they are suffering from some illness or ailment. Therefore, the design should be minimalistic, and the font should be large enough so that visually impaired people can also comfortably use the application (Ting et al., 2020). In addition to the above factors, it is necessary to develop several design options, then gather several groups of users and find out their opinions regarding the design examples, what comments they have and what can be changed. Feedback will minimize the amount of discomfort for the target audience, which increases the chances of a successful and fast implementation of the project.
There are many essential changes in launching a project, which includes advertising management, beta testing the program, and training staff to use it. Nurses can act as both publicity for the project and activity for patients to use it. Given the large number of people the nursing staff comes into contact with each day, not all of whom are inpatients but outpatients, a nurse can promote the program to the latter group. For example, a patient who doesn’t have to be in the hospital all the time, but only visits occasionally, might find it easier to schedule his arrival in advance. That’s where our program can help him, and the nurse can teach him how to work with it.
Varying the nurse’s role in the development and implementation is high. During development, the nurse acts as a consultant to the developers, giving her ideas about medical services, which are the most relevant, which specialties have the highest discharge rates, and how best to organize appointments with them (Park & Han, 2018). During implementation, the nurse already acts as a full-fledged user of the program; her crucial role is to work with our project and educate patients to promote it. Then the nursing staff turns from consultant to mentor, which significantly modifies the nurse’s role in the project.
One of the key points of successful implementation of any project is the right staff. Each person involved in the project must carry a specific goal behind them, necessary to achieve so that the team looks like a single mechanism. In this case, our task is directly related to medicine, which means that it is necessary to have medical staff on the team. Since the project is directly related to the interaction of patients with the hospital in terms of making appointments and receiving referrals for highly specialized doctors, tests, or other procedures, the team needs a person who is directly or indirectly affected by each of these points. By analyzing the medical staff and their responsibilities, it is easy to conclude that the necessary specialist for the project is a member of the nursing staff.
A nurse encounters patient every day in the emergency room who want to both make an appointment and receive specific services. Such a specialist is best versed in such everyday moments of work, and constant contact with new people reinforces the nurse’s strong communication skills, which is also necessary to supply goals and possible adjustments for the development team. Because of her experience, the nurse knows best what procedures are most in demand and what times patients are most likely to visit doctors and laboratories, which will help coordinate logistics between patients and the hospital.
Information technology (IT) is used everywhere in the world today. Healthcare is no exception. Modern IT developments have a positive impact on the development of new ways to organize medical care for the population. Teleconsultations of patients and staff, exchange of information about patients between different institutions, remote recording of physiological parameters, and monitoring of operations in real-time – all these possibilities are offered by the introduction of information technology in medicine. A large number of countries have been actively using new technologies in health care for a long time. This brings healthcare informatization to a new level of development, positively affecting all aspects of its activities.
References
Fong, B., Fong, A. C. M., & Li, C. K. (2020). Telemedicine technologies : Information technologies in medicine and telehealth. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Harris, J. L., Roussel, L., Thomas, P. L., & Dearman, C. (2020). Project planning and management : a guide for nurses and interprofessional teams. Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Park, S. H., & Han, K. (2018). Methodologic guide for evaluating clinical performance and effect of artificial intelligence technology for medical diagnosis and prediction. Radiology, 286(3), 800–809. Web.
Ting, D. S. W., Carin, L., Dzau, V., & Wong, T. Y. (2020). Digital technology and Covid-19. Nature Medicine, 26(21), 1–3. Web.