How Telemedicine Can Benefit the Healthcare Industry Essay

Healthcare is currently undergoing fundamental change. First, baby boomers continue to utilize services at an alarming rate. The overall population is aging and as such, the healthcare infrastructure will need to change to accommodate changing dynamics within the industry. An older baby boomer generation is living much longer and utilizing more services than expected. Currently, 18% of the United States Gross Domestic Product is consumer by healthcare expenditures. In other words, 1 out of every 5 dollars spend in America is related to healthcare and baby boomers are a large reason for it. In addition to these changes, COVID-19 has exposed many of the inequities in the system as it relates to treatment and quality of care. A large-scale pandemic essentially overwhelmed the healthcare system causing unnecessary death and maltreatment. This has created the need for unprecedented stimulus on the part of many of the developed nations as it relates to health care treatment (Abney, 2004).

As of result of the two influences described above, changes will need to be made in the future as it relates to healthcare delivery and quality of service. For one, infrastructure must be in place to help take on excess patient capacity when a pandemic occurs. Second, healthcare institutions need to be ready to mobilize in order to expedite vaccines and other approval methods needed to mitigate the impacts of future health care problems and pandemics. In addition, the quality of care must aim for preventative measures to keep the overall public abreast of underlying circumstances related to pandemics. It is important to focus of health, obesity, and other individual concerns as a means of mitigating the impacts of disease on society overall (Aoki, 2003).

From an economic perspective, standardization of the transfer and admission process is imperative, as an organization continues to look for ways to grow the volumes and revenues in all service lines. I personally work in the healthcare industry and witness daily inefficiencies that occur. The inefficient practices not only sacrifice quality of care but also lowers the profitability of the enterprise. Lower profitability has ramifications for many stakeholders involved. This includes a lower ability to attract and retain high quality employees. It also lowers the ability of the company to invest in innovative new technologies that can further increase quality of care or expedite treatment procedures. The current transfer and admission processes within the organization that I currently work for is fragmented, with the East and West side locations following different algorithms. Currently, the organization is not able to accurately track patients that are being transferred to other facilities within and to outside organizations. In order to grow our volumes and develop the right services lines, it is imperative to have a consistent, defined admission and transfer process.

To accomplish the above…

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…investment will require a large amount of cash a resources that will be tied up for years to come.

As it relates to the role of the leader on this project, the leader will have a very diversified role. The leader must first be a project manager as many disparate and divergent tasks are required for success. These tasks include collaboration with teams such as IT, Marketing, Finance, Human Resource, and Law. The leader must be able to delegate tasks in a manner that allows them to process responsibilities in a reasonable manner. In addition, the leader must be a strong communicator. He or she must be able to articulate a compelling value proposition for the entire team to implement. Through the vision the leader can better incentivize activities related to the overall vision. These incentives could be increase pay for making predetermined milestones for example. In each case the leader must be able to help deliver the telemedicine project on time and under budget. This can be very complicated considering the many variable involved in the process. As a result, the leader must be multifaceted and able to multitask under various economic and business conditions. The leader must have experience dealing with very stressful and contentious jobs that have a large amount of uncertainty. In addition, the leader must be able to rely on experts who are often smarter and mor knowledgeable than…