Introduction
Technology has been helping out people for many years now. Technological advancement enabled people to communicate better and faster over the Internet. With the use of Internet, people can gain more knowledge across different disciplines and one of which is the emergence of technology-based health care. Thus, the current trend in health care using the available technology makes it faster for medical practitioners to provide services and even gain more knowledge about new diseases as well as how it can be addressed and prevented in the future. This study will present the current health care trends that can affect the future of health care provision, including how people can benefit from such trends. We argue that health care services and innovation have better future in relation to the application and development of the health care industry current trends.
Future Health Care Trends
The future of health can be seen as a technology-based service based on the current trend in health care. During the old days, only the individuals who graduated from a medical school and only those who are medical practitioners know about medical knowledge. However, according to Jones (2000), such knowledge can be accessed through the help of internet. There is a great impact that the Internet has provided to many people in terms of acquiring medical knowledge. This only shows that the power of technology, specifically the Internet can change the future of health care. It is also safe to presume that medical professionals also use the technological advancements when it comes to providing their services.
Many doctors would turn to mobile-based applications in order to check communicate with their patients, health insurers, or even check the Internet about new diseases that may have been emerging in different countries. Technology can really help the medical professionals when it comes to providing health services to their patients. The reliability of technology-based health care also enable the professionals to perform various medical procedure, such as dialysis, x-ray, CT-scan, and many more. These are only the current trends in medical or health care. In the future, these trends could develop into more sophisticated procedures. Based on the presentation discussed by Mary Cummings, she said that automated healthcare could mean a surgery being done through a press of a button (tedmed.com). Therefore, there is a high possibility that the future medical trends that many people today think as impossible, could be the normal trend in the future.
Impact on Leadership and Strategic Thinking
The future trend that involves more technological advancement in health care may affect the leadership as well as the strategic thinking of many organizations. Primarily, once the technology-based health care has been in practice in the future, the leadership must also be based on the technological advancements being used in the medical field. The organizational leadership may no longer focus on the aspect of managing the staff and maintaining the operation, but the leadership must also ensure that the technology-based health care will not create any adverse effect on the quality of health care provision. As part of the strategic thinking, the strategy may no longer be revolving around the topic of how a certain disease can be treated and prevented, but the strategy will include how technological advancement can be used in achieving such goals. In fact it can be helpful to the whole organization to adopt current technological advancements as it help in increasing the competitiveness of the whole organization (National Research Council, 2000). Thus, any recommendations to the CEO must emphasize or highlight the essence of technology-based health care.
Possible Community Partnership
One of the possible community partnerships when it comes to technology-based health care is the community education development based on the available technology. The government could use the community’s health care access through various ways, such as using the power of social media, developing a mobile application that the community can use in order to increase health prevention and disease prevention. Technology-based health care is more than just using the available technology to treat diseases, but it can also be used in reaching out the public on how they can improve their health. Similar to what Uldrich (2015) said that people may download any mobile application that can monitor their heart rate and send the results straight to their attending physician’s mobile phone. In fact, there are at least 9,000 mobile applications that can be downloaded, which are all healthcare-related (Cognizant, 2012).
Conclusion
The emergence of technological advancement could be one of the most important turning of the history. Technology was able to create trends that improved the provision of health care. These current trends in health care, especially the ones that are technology-based, have better potentials to evolve in the future. Medical procedures of the future, such as operations can be done by surgeons remotely, or, seeking for medical advice can be done through video calling or any new methods in the future. The leadership of the medical institutions must also be able to adopt these technological trends in order to provide better quality service. Thus, it will help leaders guide the organizations towards being more competitive.
References
Automated healthcare is the future of healing - TEDMED BlogTEDMED Blog [Video file]. (2012). Retrieved from http://blog.tedmed.com/automated-healthcare-is-the-future-of-healing/
Cognizant. (2012). Five Key Trends Reshaping the Future of Healthcare. Retrieved from https://www.cognizant.com/InsightsWhitepapers/Five-Key-Trends-Reshaping-the-Future-of-Healthcare.pdf
National Research Council (U.S.). (2000). Networking health: Prescriptions for the Internet. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Uldrich, J. (2015). Jack Uldrich: Future Trends in Health Care [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS574gZ_Pvw
