This is how to make devices and software location-independent.
During the pandemic, many medical workers have been working from home in order to protect themselves and others from infection. Unfortunately, this approach brought with it one major challenge – in most situations, devices and software are located and hosted in hospitals and clinics, not in workers’ homes. However, help is available.
During the pandemic, various health conditions, including pregnancy, led to many healthcare staff being asked to work from home or in shielding. A survey carried out for the NHS showed that 79% of staff were able to work from home, 21% of whom did not have adequate resources to enable them to work at their optimal level. Meanwhile, 14% stated that they were willing to work from home if they had access to the appropriate resources, and the remaining 7% were not working and either did not have access to resources for WFH or preferred not to use them.
This survey, conducted in 2020 and predominantly among physicians, also revealed that the nature of the duties executed from home encompassed most clinical tasks. They included carrying out “telephone clinics, providing clinical advice, participating in meetings, doing rotas, carrying out virtual triage, undertaking leadership roles, planning departmental activities, preparing educational materials and delivering online training, carrying out quality improvement projects and research, online prescribing” and more. The overall message from respondents was that “the full potential of this workforce had not been utilized due to inadequate availability or provision of resources.”
Making resources available for remote work
In the same year, the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Hospital Association (AHA) praised telemedicine as a “powerful tool that spans a continuum of technologies and offers new ways to deliver care.” This message continues, “many electronic health record systems allow you to connect over the Internet just as if you were in the clinic.”
For physicians who have, or would like to have, the opportunity to work from home, devices and software are mostly located on company premises, in the workplace. There are solutions which provide support – in the U.S., the UK, and beyond. For example, the authors of the paper from AMA and AHA include cloud offerings in their technology recommendations for work-from-home scenarios. As another example, there are solutions which facilitate the long-term monitoring of patients through artificial intelligence and telehealth.
Bringing physicians working from home together with their patients at home
The pandemic didn’t only make doctors worry about the risks of working in hospitals – patients, too, avoided visits to care providers. “Many older adults who receive cardiology care at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center started worrying about their doctors’ appointments”, states a 2021 paper from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in the U.S. Physicians asked themselves how they could diagnose their patients without touching them: “To the doctors’ amazement, the patients soon became tech wizards, communicating through telemedicine services and recording important patient information with wearable devices.” Cardiology is a prime example of where location-independent solutions for remote monitoring can be used to support both physicians and patients.
Anytime. Anywhere. Cardiomatics.
An outstanding solution for this discipline comes from Cardiomatics. It allows doctors to analyze ECGs from any place and any device at any time, and it ensures a quick analysis. The automated ECG analysis is vetted by the analysis of millions of clinical cases. It saves clinicians valuable time while enabling precision in diagnosis and therapy – and it helps doctors and patients to avoid the risks associated with being in a hospital, and not only during a pandemic. Both health workers and patients benefit significantly from this solution.
Sources:
- https://www.rcpjournals.org/content/futurehosp/7/3/e572
- Working from home during COVID-19 pandemic (ama-assn.org)
- https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2021/home-monitoring-devices-tools-play-leading-role-patient-care-during-pandemic