Rural Healthcare Clinic Technology

HR in Healthcare

Over time, everything changes. This is truer of some things as compared to others and healthcare is certainly one of those things. Indeed, the last ten years has marked some major changes for healthcare. Among other things, technology has significantly advanced, the Affordable Care Act has been passed and the financial workings of healthcare have become more and more complex and worrisome to many people. This report will discuss a theoretical clinic that will be set up in a rural setting. The overall factors and points that will be covered will include change in demography, change in disease, change in societal norms/values, changes in healthcare technology, financial pressures that are rendered upon healthcare professionals and cultural awareness/cultural diversity in work environments. While some things in healthcare and human resources have remained unchanged over the years, there are other things that changed significantly.

Analysis

There have been some massive swings in demographics and diseases over the recent years and decades. There has been a concerted effort to combat obesity, just as one example. These efforts have done well with most groups but the poor and minorities are still afflicted a lot. Further, the presence of people with high blood sugar up to and including those with diabetes has been on a huge upswing. Indeed, the amount of people that die due to cancer, heart disease and diabetes is becoming alarmingly high (McNeill, Hayes & Harley, 2015). Even with those developments, the management of those same disorders is constantly improving and the life expectancy of the average American is still on the rise. When it comes to demography, the Latino group in the United States is on the ascent it seems an eventuality when a majority of all American will be at least partially Latino in their lineage (Suro & Passel, 2003). This comes due to things like heavy immigration and less of a taboo on people of different races starting families together. This is just one examples of how societal norms and values have changed. Another example is the increasing acceptance of gay marriage and the recent Supreme Court ruling that extends the same civil rights to them as exists for heterosexual couples. Human resources professionals in a rural clinic will have to respond to this by, among other things, make sure that a Spanish-speaker (if not more than one) will be on-staff and that the nurses/doctors in the rural clinic know what the current trends and patterns are (Kamimura, Ashby, Myers, Nourian & Christensen, 2015).

Another massively changing thing is technology use in this country. Smartphones and tablet computers are becoming the norm and laptops/desktops are starting to plateau or are even fading a bit due to the increasing portability of technology. Healthcare is certainly part of that revolution given the massive shift towards electronic healthcare records (EHR) and the use of laptops or tablets by physicians and nurses instead of clipboards and notepads. A modern-day healthcare system is one that is centered on databases, security, backups, movement of data in real-time, electronic shifting of data from location to location and even prescriptions that are entirely electronic in nature rather than requiring the use of a pad of paper or a phone call. Even in a rural clinic, human resources professionals would be wise to securely do online transfers of record and prescriptions so as to avoid delays due to the rural location of the clinic (Stanmirovic & Vintar, 2015).

Even with all of the advances, there are indeed pressures that have been brought to bear on healthcare organizations. While the Affordable Care Act has accomplished one of its goals of getting more people insured, there are seemingly some major speed bumps in getting the law fully online and properly functioning. For example, the ostensible purpose of nixing the pre-existing condition waiting period, which was part of the Affordable Care Act, was that people would become or remain covered rather than losing coverage or having to wait for the same through no fault of their own. However, there are some that suggested in 2010 and still say now that this can be (but is not always) akin to allowing a person to buy an automobile insurance policy when the car is already wrecked and expecting the insurance company to not only accept that person as a customer but also fix the broken car despite the fact that the car was not covered at the time of the wreck and the person has just started paying premiums rather than doing so over recent months and years (Hall & Moore, 2012). This is just one example of financial pressures. Another example are people on Medicaid and Medicare that are having trouble affording their medical care and/or finding providers that will even accept such patients. Of course, doctors and such are not required to do so and it would seem that many are asserting that it is a net loss to do so given the way the program and its reimbursements are set up. Human resources people in a rural clinic setting will likely deal with a lot of poorer people with a lower standard of living. As such, familiarity with government assistance programs will be necessary (Burton & Walters, 2013).

However, not all of the pressures endured and experienced by the healthcare industry are bad. Many medical firms, even if it is sometime out of necessity rather than desire, are becoming much more inviting of people from diverse backgrounds including people of different national origin, different ethnicities, different upbringings and different races. For example, it is entirely possible that a new doctor in an office would be from a country like Lebanon or Indonesia. Of course, some people are culturally ignorant and/or they actively resist the cultural diversity that is manifesting itself in many doctors' offices around the country. Of course, this would be a mistake and people should be encouraged to be open to new experiences and perspectives. While a rural clinic would likely not have a ton of diversity, the clinic and its human resources staff would still need to be prepared (Fleming et al., 2015).