Question:
Describe the role of information technology in business or industry.
Information technology is a significant term that relates to every business and industry. Information technology is the latest application that is used by many industries to store, transmit, manipulate and retrieve information or data on various sectors. To simplify the meaning, we can even say that it deals with information process, store and communication. In general, it’s all about the research, designing, developing and implementing, managing or supporting of computer-based IS (information system) which do include hardware of systems and software applications. Moreover, innovation is the greatest way to get success in this present digital era. The information technology innovation is much related to business which means, that using innovation in business we can do some different and much better to provide and make a positive difference in productivity or quality and value. The impact of information technology in business is researched, and detailed information has been provided in this documentation.
Information technology is an essential partner in healthcare industry. The way information technology is obtained by hospitals has changed the phase of doing work in much better and faster way. The overall scenario of healthcare has been modified by the usage of information technology (Anthony et al. 2013). The below figure 1 shows how IT is related with healthcare.
Figure 1: Information Technology in Healthcare
There are particular requirements or needs of information technology for healthcare industries, and those conditions are mentioned below.
Information or data Storage and Protection: It is important to protect and store data or information for healthcare business. So information technology is required to store and protect the information of patients in a hospital. It is necessary the confidential information’s are needed to be protected and well stored so that it can only be accessed by the hospital employees itself.
Decision Making: The accuracy and speed are much required in business to increase its performance because its impact is much in making a correct decision for the patients for their treatments. They can use the technology to conduct various researches to help in the patient treatment and it will also help them to make the right thing to what needs to be done and what not.
Remotely access and communication: The technology does provide the tool to operate or access the patient data from any location in this world and as far as communication is a concern, the faster the communication is, the faster the growth of revenue, they also help to make the right decision that what is the right medicine and tools that will help the patient for their treatment.
The information technology for healthcare continuation and survival is critical. It is the most important application or tool for healthcare business that can provide some advantages. When it comes to resource management in healthcare business as it’s a very critical and significant part of it and things get too complicated. So to overcome such critical aspect for healthcare business survival, information technology does provide a user-friendly solution for automating such complex issues (Miriovsky et al. 2012). With the grace of information technology, it has been observed that the cloud technology along with the internet has to give the scope to the software engineers to create and introduce cloud base enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions in healthcare business as shown in figure 2.
Figure 2: Introducing Cloud solution in Healthcare
Moreover, it is required to reach the potential customers to increase the business relationship between the client and the business which will improve the morality and efficiency of the business. Customer (Patient) satisfaction and support is also important for any healthcare business to survive. High degree or level of customer satisfaction is required for any business to sustain properly in this competition market of health industry. It can only happen when the communication between the two entities that is doctor and the patient is right (Sultan 2014). Here information technology decreases the gap of communication by providing multiple channels of communication such as social media, websites, emails, other communication applications, etc.
Some requirements are needed to apply information technology to healthcare industry. The requirements are described below, they are
Costing: Proper implementation information technology in healthcare business needs a lot of investment because they deal with various applications and systems installation as per the hospital requirements (Ball et al. 2013)
Planning: Any healthcare industry that is looking to implement information technology in their organization needs to have proper and correct plan which includes, operation, strategic, risks management, etc. To increase the profit for any hospital, it is important to have a proper planning to decrease the cost and risks.
Designing: The structural design for implementing information technology is significant because it includes the workflow statement of IT (Information Technology).
Equipment: There are different equipment’s that are needed for having a successful integration of information technology in a hospital. The right choice of right equipment will help increase in performance to generate better revenues or leading towards success.
Installation: The installation needs to be done correctly with most care because this can result in future issues and will decrease the business performance. The healthcare industry needs to hire professional to complete such tasks.
Training: The hospital employees need to be trained properly or need to hire trained employees to maintain the information system correctly in the hospital.
There are many usages of information technology on business. They are described below.
Increase Efficiency of Treatment: With the help of information technology, it can be automated the task in some sections of hospital that will increase the output and will also help the patient to be served on time. So when the information technology is integrated into the production process, it will enhance the efficiency of treatment process towards the client at the right time (Bloom et al. 2014).
Enhancing communication: Communication is always an important aspect of any organization. It does help the information to flow within the firm. By utilization of technology, it can reduce the communication gap between the patients and the doctors and other staffs; they can use tools such as emails, text messaging, applications such as Skype or G-talk, etc.
Improving Marketing: Technology does provide the right tools for a healthcare business to do the right kind of marketing at a better speed where they target the right and potential customers for their business. They can have a website; can utilize social media pages, PPC, Google campaigning, etc. for marketing their respective products and services.
Increase economic efficiency: The healthcare companies can obtain information technology resources to reduce the cost. The economic efficiency can be improved by transmitting the high end functionalities or services to the online environment such as cloud computing. Health industries can decrease the cost by developing the efficiency of the treatment, patient call support and etc. The businesses can also obtain for remote work options that will lower the cost for the healthcare industries.
There are various advantages and disadvantages of information technology in business that are mentioned below.
Improve production and save time: The information technology has been used in the hospital to perform the task automatically. The best example is that when the cake is baked in a bakery, then it uses an automatic temperature in a bakery to bake the cake. The sensors send information about the cake directly to the operator and provide the report for any change in temperature (Hasson et al. 2013). It saves a lot of time in the bakery and which outputs a quality product at the end.
Communication technology to enhance communication: With the help of various device available today the communication level has been increased, tools such as email, phones, video conferencing, etc. The doctors can easily pass on the information from one department to another without any hurdles or interruptions to increase the quality of service.
Improve on RIO and Cost cutting in operation: Social tech and communication technology have provided a low cost service launching platform for promotion. Moreover, many healthcare industries are using social media platform for their business branding and generating leads at a very low cost. The operational cost in any healthcare industry always necessary so using IT provides low operation cost and ROI will increase which will lead to growing in business.
High Implementation Cost: When it comes to implementation big hospitals can easily afford the cost of application even though it is a bit expensive but when it comes to small hospitals they fail to provide the application of expensive information technology, so they end up losing their customer.
Replacing Humans: The information technology has fulfilled many positions in a hospital for example accounting is now being done using software, and therefore, accountants are out of the job, records are been maintained by computers and there is no need of record room and its relevant position staff.
Security Breaches: All the critical data is stored in the cloud server, so there is always a chance of hacking or virus attack that will lead to losing the aggregate confidential data.
There are some types of information technology risk in healthcare business. They are mentioned below.
Operational Risk: The procedure of operation in a healthcare infrastructure is a long process, so it is very tough to operate. This risk involves maintaining the structure of information technology (Abdelhak et al. 2014).
Security Risk: The most critical aspect of any healthcare business is data security. There are always security threats when using a computer due to virus attack, hacking or any other issues that can affect the security.
Financial Risk: There is always a danger of misusing the power of information technology for maintaining financial records.
Information technology plays a critical role in healthcare business, and they do need good maintenance and monitoring. Monitoring and maintaining the case history of the patients and the database of the management system. The healthcare business needs to maintain the patient’s records or case history’s to be reviewed easily whenever needed. They need to hire professionals who can manage their entire IT task without any service interruption.
Some suggestions are been recommended below.
10. Conclusion
The report presented above describes the healthcare business needs on information technology. There is various aspect of IT when it is implemented in an organization. Various factors such as benefits and disadvantages, risks, survival of business, utilization of IT, monitoring and maintaining of IT are discussed in detail in this report. The overall idea of presented the report is to understand how information technology fulfills the need of business.
References
Bloom, N., Garicano, L., Sadun, R. and Van Reenen, J., 2014. The distinct effects of information technology and communication technology on firm organization. Management Science, 60(12), pp.2859-2885.
Hasson, F., McKenna, H.P. and Keeney, S., 2013. A qualitative study exploring the impact of student nurses working part time as a health care assistant. Nurse education today, 33(8), pp.873-879.
Sultan, N., 2014. Making use of cloud computing for healthcare provision: Opportunities and challenges. International Journal of Information Management, 34(2), pp.177-184.Marchewka, J.T., 2014. Information technology project management. John Wiley & Sons.
Abdelhak, M., Grostick, S. and Hanken, M.A., 2014. Health information: management of a strategic resource. Elsevier Health Sciences.
Yang, Y., Kankanhalli, A. and Chandran, S., 2015. A stage model of information technology in healthcare. Health and Technology, 5(1), pp.1-11.
Ball, M., Weaver, C. and Kiel, J. eds., 2013. Healthcare information management systems: Cases, strategies, and solutions. Springer Science & Business Media.
Anthony, D., Campbell, A.T., Candon, T., Gettinger, A., Kotz, D., Marsch, L.A., Molina-Markham, A., Page, K., Smith, S.W., Gunter, C.A. and Johnson, M.E., 2013. Securing information technology in healthcare. IEEE security & privacy, 11(6), p.25.
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