Public Healthcare Application Experience: Data Collection For Better Quality Care

ICT systems always require some aspect of adaptation by the user to the system as well as, hopefully, the modelling of the system to the users and their tasks. For ICT software to provide genuine support to healthcare environments, an obvious but fairly awkward challenge must be overcome: In a working environment like primary healthcare that relies on empathetic dialogue with patients, it is challenging to interweave into consultations sessions tasks that must be data-logged to facilitate overall public health. The devil, as they say, is in the detail as improving global healthcare by providing in-situ data for evaluation and service improvement must somehow harmonise with what constitutes a proper consultation in an individual patient-clinician contact and efficiency in delivering the maximum number of what constitutes an appropriate session in each unique clinical and administrative context.

Factors such as the above – the human factors – can, and some might say, are omitted often from consideration during the design of health-related software. Like Icarus, it is possible to skip due regard that one’s destination is unable to be arrived at by limited consideration of the mechanical solution to reach there, or a statistician who ignores the denominators to focus alone on the numerators. Quality healthcare improvement is not achieved by adding additional data-entry workload on clinicians without consideration of how such additional data-entry will affect the quality and efficacy of delivering care – the primary objective. The old, and still often relied upon way as could be said is somewhat human nature, is to focus on the information points required, presume identification and knowledge of the data-points to be the solution, and then consider the job done. However, the data points are merely part of the broader and more crucial motivating force of understanding the touch-points that determine and improve a successful consultation, and it’s outcomes for the individual and overall quality of public healthcare.