Healthcare Sector and Healthcare

Healthcare Tech

For most industries, the advancement and implementation of technology is moving at a fairly quick pace. However, healthcare has been and remains one of the exceptions and outliers to this trend. There is some debate as to why this is the case. However, there are also some clear clues and signs that indicate why precisely this has and continues to happen. The reasons for this lagging implementation and adoption of technology will be explained in this report. The reasons run the gamut from compliance hurdles to uneven adoption practices and change management miscues. While advancements in technology and the related practice is certainly the future for effective healthcare technology management, there are some kinks that need to be worked out to put it lightly.

Analysis

A major reason that technology adoption in the healthcare sector is slow is resistance from the personnel within that sector. Indeed, even when there is a clear benefit and better outcome for the patients involved, there are a lot of people and managers in the sector that do the wrong thing and resist the changes that could and should be coming. A good example would be comparing how the mobile revolution, inclusive of smartphones, tablets and the internet of things (IoT), run rampant in some sectors while healthcare sector workers are still commonly using fax machines and pagers. Even with the keen awareness of this problem, the changes that are seen to the hardware and software in the healthcare industry is agonizingly slow. One thing that has to happen for this stalemate to be loosened is for leadership to show the way, insist that updates and advances will be embraced and that anyone resisting such change will be coached and nudged (or worse) in the right direction. This is clearly the categorical and ethical imperative given that these advances will clearly benefit and help patients in terms of customer service, healthcare outcomes and quality of care (Kandel, 2017).

At least one of the barriers to healthcare technology advancements and changes, however, is due to the unique complexity and compliance factors involved. Even with people and departments that know full well that technological advancement is the right thing, doing so in a way that insures both compliance with the law as well as patient safety is easier said than done as compared to other industries where the laws and proverbial stakes are much less oppressive and hard to navigate. In general terms, it is clear that there are both technological and organiztaoinal factors that inhibit growth even when there are clear paths to navigate the growth in a legal and ethical way. Even so, there are localized information technology (IT) and similar solutions that can and should be implemented in a way that allows for better quality of care while at the same time lowering costs and making things more efficient. There is indeed a way for an ethical healthcare leader to implement technological solutions that benefit both the bottom line and the outcomes for patients that come through a practice. There is indeed the high-level concern that the duality of patient outcomes and costs is a zero-sum game and that choosing one means forsaking the other. While there are choices and outcomes that do fit that narrative in some way, there are plenty of others that hurt both or that benefit both (England, 2000).