The following is a guest article by Ravi Pratap, Co-Founder and CTO at Beaconstac
Technology provides the foundation of modern healthcare, with the potential to generate $410 billion in annual revenue by 2025. Efficient IT solutions in healthcare organizations ensure optimal patient care and seamless operational functionality.
One such technology professionals often overlook is the QR code. And in an era where over six billion people have smartphones, incorporating the tool in healthcare makes sense. The following article shows four practical use cases for QR codes within the healthcare IT landscape.
Managing Medical Equipment
Healthcare facilities use a diverse range of equipment to deliver effective care to patients. Staff can add QR codes on equipment to help track, monitor, and record maintenance.
IT professionals use an app or smartphone to scan the code and access a landing page. There, operators find manuals, operating instructions, and videos on equipment set-up. This digital option eliminates the need to search for information and assets in the physical world and reduces the time required to solve technical issues. In addition, QR codes can alert doctors or nurses to a malfunction once scanned and give an option to open an IT service request.
Enhancing Patient Safety
The healthcare industry faces a significant barrier to interoperability: data siloes. Historically, healthcare systems haven’t shared patient data uniformly. Data siloes present an increased risk for misidentification, leading to medication errors, improper diagnosis, and even death.
Patient identification information is vital for all healthcare systems. IT specialists build, implement, and support electronic health records (EHRs) and other systems that capture, manage, and store patient data. These duties enhance patient care and improve the efficiency of healthcare delivery.
To facilitate easier medical record access across organizations, IT professionals can add QR codes to patient medical bracelets or charts. Healthcare employees, from check-in to check-out, scan the QR code to retrieve patient information, reducing the risk of medical errors.
Tracking IT Assets Efficiently
Healthcare organizations handle numerous IT assets, including laptops, servers, network equipment, workstations, and portable medical devices. Managing and tracking those thousands of assets is challenging at best.
Traditional asset management approaches are time-consuming and laborious — and have higher incidences of human error. When attached to each asset, QR codes enable IT professionals to keep tabs on assets in real-time, update numbers, alert operators in case of emergency and send feedback. All that’s needed to scan a code is a phone, eliminating the use of expensive scanning devices.
Augmenting Patient Engagement and Information Access
While not patient-facing, healthcare IT professionals play an essential role behind the scenes in patient engagement. By establishing and maintaining EHRs and patient portals, IT professionals provide swift access to health records to both doctors and patients. A portal, accessed easily with the help of QR codes, empowers patients to be more involved in their healthcare journey.
IT staff can place QR codes on leaflets, post-treatment booklets, facility signs, and business cards. With a quick scan, patients can communicate with a provider, view medical records and test results, and request appointments and prescription refills.
QR code generation has the potential to transform the healthcare industry. And it’s finding success by keeping up with the smartphone era, where Americans spend over four hours on their phones daily. Only requiring a phone for use, QR codes offer a powerful solution for improving IT operations and communication, thus improving patient care.
About Ravi Pratap
Ravi Pratap is the Co-Founder and CTO at Beaconstac, responsible for all technology strategy, product innovation, and engineering execution. Ravi likes to describe himself as a compulsive technologist with roots in the Linux/open-source world. Ravi holds a master’s degree in computer science from Washington University in St. Louis and a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.
