Healthcare Technologies: An Important Investment
By Paul Constantine, president of ScanSource POS and Barcode
The demand for medical services is present across all geographies. Hospitals in both big cities and rural communities are constantly striving to improve population health, patient safety, efficiency of staff, and the accuracy of diagnoses. This is where IT comes into play. IT plays a critical role in the healthcare industry through direct patient care, within labs, and throughout medical facilities.
In the U.S., the healthcare market represents a significant portion of the nation’s economy, thus providing resellers a large opportunity to enter the space. Although selling healthcare IT solutions can be complex, there are some trends emerging resellers can capitalize on in the short term.
Traditional hardware, like barcode scanners and label printers, has proven valuable in the market to assist with tagging patient admissions and printing labels. Now, resellers can look to solve issues they may have not been able to previously.
Eliminating human error and increasing patient satisfaction is becoming increasingly important, especially when it comes to situations such as gathering specimens, tracking patient movement or tracking blood vials as they are drawn. Beacons provide another opportunity to track important assets, such as expensive equipment and patient beds. To help eliminate human errors, operating systems and platforms used to manage equipment need to be upgraded. These technology upgrades can enhance tracking capabilities and help mitigate the potential for errors.
The Internet of Things is also starting to become a factor in the healthcare market. Automatically gathering and tracking actionable data allows healthcare practitioners to capture, analyze and act on a data set, all without human interaction. Intelligent enterprise and smarter systems allow healthcare professionals to focus more on patient experience while driving efficiency and reducing costs.
In order to capitalize on the business opportunities these critically important technologies represent, resellers need to engage in problem-finding conversations with medical professionals to uncover the challenges they are facing, and design solutions with the products and resources at their disposal.
However, it’s important to remember healthcare professionals are not necessarily technicians. This means it is vital for resellers to provide easy access to not only solutions, but also services and education. In offering new products, resellers should consider those who will actually use the technology on a daily basis. Encourage end users to think big and invest in the hardware and software that will effectively serve the needs of their facility. Once all of the necessary products and trainings are in place, these healthcare solutions can help improve the field, and ultimately save lives.