What will you do in need to see a doctor five years back? The only possible thing was to visit the nearest hospital or make an appointment by telephone with the nearest doctor. What about now? We have health apps, tele-consultants, and many more facilities that replace the old way of medical treatments. This means digitization in healthcare is essential and inevitable. It also revolutionizes the way patients and healthcare professionals communicate with each other and treat medical conditions. It becomes a blessing for many, especially the people with chronic medical conditions or aging parents who cannot always get to the doctor. Consequently, they are turning to tele-health platforms such as Skype or Zoom for consultations. Now, let us see the benefits digitization brings to the healthcare sector in brief:

• The major benefit is that we can access the healthcare data of someone from anywhere.
• From a financial perspective, digitizing healthcare documentation works will make an institution free from paper files, and the cost of maintaining them.
• It reduces the storage space required to store physical data files and enforces a fast data transfer.
• Since the time required to deal with digital files is less, the efficiency of the entire healthcare system increase exponentially.
• Digitization enables to bring the entire medical data into a single operating system and thus helps organize the healthcare works on a large scale.

As we have already mentioned, it becomes a blessing for those who struggle to reach healthcare institutions in real-time. Also, it helps institutions that wish to improve their efficiency and productivity. At the same time, bringing all the data into the digital format and keeping it in an operating system raises some challenges in healthcare documentation that are unprecedented but essential to resolve. What are they, and how to get rid of them?

Challenges of digitization in healthcare

The major concern about healthcare data is its security. When millions of valuable information regarding the healthcare details of citizens are accumulated in an operating system, ensuring that they are safe is a matter of national security and transparency. The chances to hack or steal this data are high, and there need better security systems to prevent this. It does not end there:

• Since medical data gets piled up daily on mobile phones, websites, etc., sorting them out and separating the required from the unwanted becomes a headache.
• Documenting an enormous amount of data raises the chances of documentation errors in healthcare – must be avoided at any cost.
• Updated tools like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will improve productivity but lack quality.

But the most evident challenge in digitization is nothing but the effort to convert the existing physical documents into printed formats. Hence is a must-to-do thing in the present scenario, we need to train the youth in medical documentation to overcome the impending struggles of healthcare documentation.

How to improve the digitization process?

In this modern era, being literate means learning to handle digital tools too. When a doctor treats a patient and struggles to document the details of his findings in real-time, we now have the facilities to observe the treatment through digital channels like Google lenses and track them with the help of a medical documentation specialist or medical scribe. Unfortunately, the youth in our country are still incapable of doing it or not aware of the possibilities of medical scribing as a career option and a social responsibility. If they acquire the skills to do it successfully through consistent training and guidance, it will definitely boost the efficiency of the healthcare sector and save the doctors time. The students who find a future in the documentation system in healthcare can achieve a bright future with financial security. As it is more transparent and authentic, the security risks associated with collecting and storing medical documents can get avoided to a great extent too.

In a nutshell, it is high time to pay attention to medical documentation as a training program and the way in which you can master it. Familiarizing the software to handle medical data, healthcare issues around the globe, and diagnostic practices we follow opens doors to higher career possibilities for students too.