Drawing conclusions from the above reflection, it would be correct to attribute information overload as the major problem facing the healthcare sector. In itself, the healthcare sector is an information-driven sector that relies heavily on relevant information to create change (Kudyba, 2016). On a typical case, this information would be difficult to handle. Thus, information technology has been adopted by the sector as an initiative to control and coordinate the dissemination of information (Kudyba, 2016).
Carter (2014) argues that for the healthcare sector to work with utmost efficiency, it is essential to develop health information systems that would maintain and manage health information in electronic media. On the other hand, an overload of data without any management system would ideally bring about disorganization and inefficiency in the healthcare outcomes relative to the findings of Perez, Popadiuk, and Cesar (2017). Thus, the adoption of information technology is predominantly motivated by the larger problem of information overload.
In healthcare, a small fraction of the population can account for a significantly large fraction of total costs, in other words, hot spots, there is a need to eradicate these hot spots in order to make health care cost effective and reliable. Holzer and colleagues (2014) posit that health care facilities are incurring huge health care costs due to the presence of hot spots in the population. In essence, hot spots compel patients to keep returning to health care facilities which is a costly affair (Holzer et al, 2014).
Thus, in an attempt to eliminate these hot spots, significant life style changes are require. For instance, a patient who is discharged from a hospital to receive home care would be required to adopt a different lifestyle in order to ensure the effectiveness of care. If the patient was a drunkard for example, he or she would be required to forego the habit in order to pave way for home care. Failure to do this, the patient would be compelled to revisit the hospital and seek medical attention once again relative to the conclusions of Holzer, Canavan, Cherlin and Bradley (2014). Thus, necessary lifestyle changes are required to eliminate these hot spots.
Ideally, ‘older’ professionals may tend resist the major informatics upgrade. This is partly due to the fact that the nature of their job descriptions may change. However, a couple of strategies can be adopted in order to facilitate a smooth transition into the major informatics upgrade. In essence, the first step would be to train all the professionals and relevant stakeholders involved in healthcare (Oak, 2007). This is geared towards enhancing familiarity with the new system. Familiarity is bound to evoke the acceptability of the informatics upgrade. After training them, the next phase would be to launch a pilot program that would seek to test the efficacy of the informatics upgrade (Oak, 2007).
In so doing, this is expected to help the professionals and stakeholders acclimatize to the new system before it is fully launched, enhancing its appropriateness. Once the upgrade is fully instituted, all professionals and stakeholders should be directly involved in executing the new upgrade as a way of creating a sense of ownership. By doing so, all professionals would feel obliged to completely back the upgrade.
