Patient Safety and Medical Tourism

The common question asked about medical tourism is whether or not it’s safe. What is patient safety? How does one gauge whether or not policies, procedures and techniques offered in a variety of medical fields are safe?

 

Even more perplexing, how is patient safety defined in different countries?

The Joint Commission Perspective on Patient Safety
The Joint Commission is a hospital and medical facility accreditation organization based in the United States.  The Joint Commission International is similar and focused on providing quality care and safety for medical practices around the world. A facility accredited by the Joint Commission International is one that:

 

Measures up to quality benchmarked standards
Employs risk reduction strategies
Offers procedures and techniques and treatments in all world regions
Is focused on patient safety standards

 

The Joint Commission International creates International Standards for Hospitals, International Clinical Lab Standards, International Standards For Care Continuum’s or providing quality care across multiple settings such as private homes, long-term care, rehabilitation, assisted living and end of life care, as well as International Standards For Medical Transport Organizations.

The Joint Commission International is client focused and provides guidelines regarding patient safety in domestic and foreign destinations. The basic focus of the Joint Commission’s Perspectives on Patient Safety is to teach and instruct healthcare organizations how to reduce and prevent errors and to continuously follow standards of quality and efficient patient care.

Creating A Safe Environment
Due to an increase in global healthcare, options and availability, tens of thousands of medical travelers leave their country to seek medical treatment in foreign destinations. In some cases, contributing factors to such the citizens involve affordability while for others it’s a matter of availability.

As many as six million Americans are estimated to seek medical attention in international destinations in coming years, and the number of international medical travelers from other countries such as South Africa, Europe, and Canada as well as travelers from countries like Iraq, Nigeria, Turkey and Croatia are seeking available and affordable medical care across their borders. 

Patients traveling across borders need to take the time to research and understand the capabilities and quality of foreign physicians, surgeons and medical facilities. Quality medical institutions are certified or accredited by domestic accrediting organizations or by international accreditation organizations such as the JCI, WHO, Trent Accreditation Scheme, the Australian ACHSI, or  Quality Health New Zealand, just to name a few.

The International Society for quality in Health Care (ISQua) as well as the USA and Canadian Council on Health Services accreditation also offer certification and accreditations in many global facilities.

What Should Patients Know?
In addition to knowing whether or not a facility or physician is certified or accredited, international medical travelers should also ask a variety of basic questions regarding patient safety and care in any destination.  The American Medical Association recently offered guidelines for medical tourists that include factors such as:

 

Selecting facilities that have been accredited by recognized international accrediting bodies
Follow-up care should be arranged prior to departure to ensure continuity of care
International patients should have access to physician licensure, accreditation of facilities, as well as data or information regarding outcomes of procedures or techniques performed by a specific surgeon or hospital
Transfer and sharing of patient medical records should coincide with HIPAA guidelines

 

Seeking international medical care is a personal decision that every individual must make on their own. However, any foreign facility should offer individual rights, management of information, quality leadership, infection control measures, and access to as well as continuity of care, regardless of procedure or destination.

Kidney Removal Surgery in India at Pocket Friendly Cost

 

India is gaining popularity internationally due to available of robotic kidney removal surgery in India at pocket friendly cost. The private sector which was very modest in the early stages has now become a flourishing industry equipped with the most modern state-of-the-art technology at its disposal. It is estimated that 75-80% of health care services and investments in India are now provided by the private sector. You have two kidneys, which help to make urine. They lie deep in your back just in front of your lowest ribs. One of your kidneys is diseased and needs to be taken out. After your operation, the other kidney will make enough urine for your needs. Hospitals of kidney removal surgery in India are located at Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore which are having world class medical healthcare facilities and special wards for international patients.

The Operation

You will have a general anesthetic, and will be asleep for the whole operation. A cut is made in your skin either in your tummy or in your back depending on your particular kidney disease. The surgeon will discuss the details with you. The kidney is taken out after tying off important blood vessels (the arteries that give blood to it and the veins that drain blood from it) and urine tubes (ureters) that drain the urine. The skin wound is then stitched up. You should plan to be in hospital for 10 days. You may well be home before this. Leaving things as they are will mean that your kidney problem will just get worse. For kidney stones shock wave treatment is usually a good way of getting stones out of the kidney, but in your case this will not help. For cystic kidneys, there are ways of draining the kidney using keyhole operations, but again these are not the best ways to solve your problem. Taking out the kidney with a keyhole surgical procedure is not always possible and it takes place only in some highly specialized centers. It would not be suitable for your kidney. You do not need a kidney transplant as your remaining kidney can produce the quantity and quality of urine that you need on daily basis so that you will be entirely healthy.

Possible Complications

As with any operation under general anesthetic, there is a very small risk of complications related to your heart and lungs. The tests that you will have before the operation will make sure that you can have the operation in the safest possible way and will bring the risk for such complications very close to zero. Complications are relatively unusual but are rapidly recognized and dealt with by the surgical staff. If you think that all is not well, please let the doctors and nurses know. Bruising of the wound can be troublesome but most of the time settles. There is a 2% chance of an infection of the wound which can be settled by taking antibiotics for a week or two 1-2 week.

India medical technology is growing day by day and it has marked new level of success. Kidney removal surgery in India at the most advanced cancer surgery hospitals of Delhi and Chennai is available more…at an affordable price. Medical tourism has helped many global patients to recover with a cost effective kidney surgery in India. Now you can get the robotic surgery for kidney removal in India at affordable price with the best medical treatment and facilities. Advanced methods for treatment are available in India at pocket friendly cost. India offers the best treatment for kidney removal with the best surgeons and the best hospitals in India. All our panels of hospitals are well equipped with latest medical facilities and equipments to keep pace with the technological advancements in the field of medical science. Robotic Surgery in the field of kidney removal surgery is one among all medical facilities we offer. All our panel doctors are highly qualified and have extremely high success ratio. For details on kidney removal surgery in India you can visit http://www.forerunnershealthcare.com and enquiry@forerunnershealthcare.com

Foreign Travelers Flocking To Turkey

In recent years, Turkey has developed a booming medical tourism industry offering quality healthcare at affordable prices, made accessible to Western Europeans and most especially inhabitants of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan as well as surrounding neighbors in Albania and Armenia and Georgia. Medical facilities within Turkey offer major surgical procedures and treatments for great savings (and availability of services) found in these countries.

Travelers from Central Europe and Russia take advantage of cosmetic and dental procedures, laser surgeries, eye treatment and cardio vascular research and health facilities in a country striving to take its place in the world economy and in the field of medical research and health care. Central locations such as Istanbul, Izmir and Kusadasi offer quality medical care for a multitude of treatments and procedures and offer higher quality service in modern and relaxed atmospheres.

With state of the art facilities, equipment and expertise, Turkey is building a medical tourism industry that attracts patients to Turkish clinics and some of the finest hospitals in Turkey, including the Florence Nightingale Hospital, internationally recognized for its outstanding orthopedics and vascular disease treatments. Fields of oncology and plastic surgery as well as the daVinci method of robotic heart and prostate surgeries are attracting world-wide attention to the growing reputation surrounding Turkey for the best service that still beats medical or health costs from throughout Europe and North America.

Turkey as a medical destination offer travelers from Russia, Middle Eastern and South African countries such as Nigeria, Egypt, and Iran and the “ikistan” countries quality healthcare that can’t be received at home. Turkmenistan has developed a five billion dollar medical health tourism project to create, grow and develop a unique center for health tourism including tourism facilities and accommodations, health centers, medical spas, and clinics to care for the influx of medical travelers seeking affordable, accessible, and quality care in a multitude of fields.

PlacidWay, a medical tourism portal, is dedicated to providing knowledge on the variety of medical treatments and procedures to be found in Turkey, as well as spread growing awareness on the excellent, accredited and certified training and experience of Turkish doctors, clinics, hospitals and other health care facilities.

Turkey is fast gaining a reputation of providing superlative medical and health care in many fields, including cosmetic and plastic surgery, cardiac care and procedures, vision, LASIK technology and orthopedics and dentistry, just to name a few. With state-of-the-art facilities located not only in her major cities such as Istanbul and Ankara, but scattered along the southern portion of the state along the Mediterranean, Turkish physicians and surgeons offer high class care and expertise to natives and international travelers. The majority of Turkish physicians and surgeons are trained in Europe or the United States, and offer experience and knowledge in new technologies and techniques.

In addition, medical costs for procedures and surgeries in Turkey offer international medical traveler’s huge savings that generally amount to as much as 50% to 75% on costs for the same surgeries and procedures in the U.S.

As today’s consumers demand more choices in medical care, locations such as Turkey and Croatia are bound to see a growth in the development of healthcare protocols, accreditations, facilities, and medical services provided for global travelers as well as those from central, western and Eastern Europe.

Issues For Building E-Solution: The Boon For The Future?health!

Abstract

The health care management is a critique for the coming phase of era, where every time a new decease, new viruses, high pollution, high food adulteration and new chemicals make the environment very critical to survive a human being. In this type of situation only the fast growing technology of IT and booming of internet with the medical technology can definitely helps to both normal persons and patients for taking care of health.

This article includes all the necessary aspects, which should be considered when we are going to build E- commerce solutions for ehealth care system e.g. selecting the best technology, business model , application model and software engineering issues  etc. This also deals with, how this E-health care system can adopt the innovation in health care world? This  also deals with the aspects of health care management where E-commerce must be used which can change the ratio of perfect treatment e.g. taking health care of newly discharged patients who are not able to come regularly until his/her fitness. They can online check their health statistics, consults with his/her doctor and order the medicines etc.

The topics which are included this article focusing on:

1) Choosing the best suitable technology and tools.

2) Considering the different health care issues and managing techniques.

3) Updating with the new information of medical world.

4) Connecting the patients with the consultants and hospitals.

5) Tacking feedback for improvement.

6) E-Solution building blocks.

7) Management of E solution.

1. Introduction

The patient safety highly depended on the community of care. Informational continuity, management continuity, and relational continuity were raised to categorize different sort of needs on continuity. In the case of our discussion only the issues for development and management are considered. As an important component of social security system, health care system plays a vital role in promoting social stability and reflecting the fairness of the system.

Diverse and typical health care systems are formed in different countries, based on different national conditions and human rights situation, as well as historical and cultural differences. Health care system seems most complicate and difficult to control among all social security systems, and its setting and performance concerns all of us. Health care system includes free medical services, medical insurances, medical assistance, and so on. In many countries across the world, it becomes a basic social and economic system.Professionals still need to address the issue of efficient electronic medical records. Thus, real-time information presents a persistent challenge to the emergency response community. In emergency situations, particularly with unconscious, incoherent and unaccompanied patients, providing emergency physicians with a patient’s accurate medical history could be the difference between life and death.

2. Technological and Managerial Issues

When, we are going to develop the e-solution for health care system then we choose any according to the requirement. we can select the suitable technology from available e.g. for development of e-solutions the Ms.NET platform is best for care management but when we concern about more security and overload, we can go for j2ee technologies, for the automatic equipment we can use advanced technologies of robotics and neural networks.   Some available tools and technologies are described bellow:

Defined technological issues in Wikipedia:

Electronic Healthcare Records : enable easy communication of patient data between different healthcare professionals (GPs, specialists, care team, pharmacy).

Telemedicine: includes all types of physical and psychological measurements that do not require a patient to travel to a specialist. When this service works, patients need to travel less to a specialist or conversely the specialist has a larger catchment area.

Consumer Health Informatics: (or citizen-oriented information provision): both healthy individuals and patients want to be informed on medical topics.

Health knowledge management (or specialist-oriented information provision): e.g. in an overview of latest medical journals, best practice guidelines or epidemiological tracking. Examples include physician resources such as Medscape and MDLinx.

Virtual healthcare teams: consist of healthcare professionals who collaborate and share information on patients through digital equipment (for transmural care).

mHealth or m-Health: includes the use of mobile devices in collecting aggregate and patient level health data, providing healthcare information to practitioners, researchers, and patients, real-time monitoring of patient vitals, and direct provision of care (via mobile telemedicine).

Medical research uses eHealth Grids that provide powerful computing and data management capabilities to handle large amounts of heterogeneous data.

Healthcare Information Systems: also often refer to software solutions for appointment scheduling, patient data management, work schedule management and other administrative tasks surrounding health. Whether these tasks are part of eHealth depends on the chosen definition, they do, however, interface with most eHealth implementations due to the complex relationship between administration and healthcare at Health Care Providers.

RAFID:The RFID technology has penetrated the healthcare sector due to its increased functionality, low cost, high reliability and easy-to-use capabilities.RFID-based system architecture and data model that would provide efficient means to perform essential information management for emergency care across hospital and country boundaries.

Wireless sensor networks by JTH: The purpose of this project is to integrate the technologies of wireless sensor networks and public communication networks to construct a healthcare system for senior citizens at home without interfering their daily activities.

3. Connecting People with Innovation

First thing is to make people known with the technologies and promoting the e-solutions. So that we can facilitate people and can change the system of medical science for the best support for the health of people. In India there are so many rural areas that are not aware of these innovations. If we pay attention then we can see if field of medical science and hospitality there is no very good services and also the patients have to pay lot of money (or fee).

Defiantly when we will use the IT technologies in this field we can provide the drastic change in health of people.

4. Management Activities in Health Care

The major concerns of the management in health care are patient safety, service quality and risk management. When, we are going to develop an e-solution for health care first we have to categories the field and type of services. The system may be for: Home health care application, use of health smart card system, An RFID-based System for Emergency Health Care Services, Cross-Domain Communication of Health Care Units and Climate Impact of Material Consumption in the Health etc.

Major management concerns are:

Managing unwell patients (with particular

emphasis on managing chronic conditions,

implants, embedded medication).

Managing the health of well patients (“wellness management”).
Clinical support (from primary service to acute one and managing the interface among other.
Support services, social services, accommodation, education).
Proper knowledge management in health care system.
Proactive Health Care management.

5. E-Solution Building concerns

The e-solutions building blocks for any type of system must have the following blocks:

The system architecture must be flexible and reliable. For this purpose we can use the layered approach p as proposed by Lillian Rostad, Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Best research method should be included.
Security and safety are the major concern for this purpose we can adapt the security architecture:
Discussion for future challenge.
Using of good decision system based on heuristic and meta knowledge. As
Clinical Process Intelligence Using Process and Workflow Mining..
Clinical Process Execution and Monitoring.
Query-Based Requirements Engineering for Health Care Information.
System must include the health education facilities.
Smart Environments for Elderly and  patient Care

6. Concluding remark

Today we see an increasing interest in developing technical solutions, by academics and industry alike, to problems associated with healthcare delivery. The

problem is technically challenging and socially important. A fundamental challenge for work in this

area is the scale of the undertaking: in order to  develop realistic solutions an interdisciplinary team is required. Furthermore, in the case of developing integrated home-care solutions (as our Smart Condo project aims to be), substantial physical resources are required. This requirement for substantial up-front investment makes the need for systematic software-engineering methods, tailored to the area, even more pressing.

7. Future Scope

Now this time of age many developed countries uses the EHR (Electronic Hospital Report)and EMR(Electronic Medical Reports), no hand written report is allowed but they are facing personal issues of doctor and patients etc. but this system will definitely change the scenario of health care  and make the perfect treating and cure very fast in very effective way.

10. References

[1]       E-commerce Systems Architecture and applications By: Rajput, Wasim
Published By: Artech House

[2]           E-Health care information system

By Joseph K. H. Tan

[ 3 ]         IEEE: http://www.computer.org

[ 4 ]         E-learning for health care:www.e-lfh.org.uk” target=”_blank” title=”E learning for Health care”> www.ebenefitsinc.com.” target=”_blank” title=”ehealth care”>

Mohammad Azam

MCA, BCA

contact 9911937244

Android IT services, sector-11, noida