By Edna Massuda *
The Health sector is one of those that most needs the personal data and history of its customers to offer a complete service. From routine exams to complex check-ups, patient information is essential for reaching an accurate diagnosis and defining the most appropriate treatment.
As the data is delicate, it is easy to understand why professionals in the field are so concerned with information security. In this sector, a slight carelessness is enough for a leak to expose the particularities of a patient. A recently approved project may represent a gain for healthcare. The General Data Privacy Law regulates the use, protection and transfer of personal data in the country, ensuring greater control over the use of this information.
However, even supported by the law, doubts about how to increase productivity using technology in a favorable way can still arise. It is possible to control access and application virtualization at the edge, ensuring security regardless of the devices that professionals are using.
For this, one of the solutions is to implement the smart card, a smart card that allows professionals to access medical information based on personal identification. The procedure can be done on the users' own mobile devices and also on the institution's devices, providing controlled and individual access. In this way, hospitals and clinics protect the privacy of patients, preventing, for example, the leakage of photos of victims of accidents by blocking the camera of smartphones when professionals are in sensitive perimeters, in addition to helping institutions to protect themselves from objectionable practices , such as the use of medical profiles by nurses.
With the use of these badges, hospitals and clinics also gain an increase in productivity, eliminating the gap of a professional who needs to access the system many times a day. Imagine how much time each employee will be able to save without having to enter a login and password every time they access it. Also consider that many work in several hospitals and are unable to memorize all access keys.
Technology also comes into discussion when it comes to speeding up care, as the time lost to fetch exams and histories can cost the patient's life. Today, when visiting the patient in a bed, it is necessary to search for the information on a desktop and decorate it until reaching the room. If the doctor chooses to take notes, he starts to depend on a paper stuck on the bed and that may be outdated or in an incomprehensible handwriting. Cell phones and tablets, in turn, allow doctors and nurses to care for the patient in a standardized and more humane way, with all the information at hand.
IT can also assist in the control of medicines, equipment and utensils. In this way, whenever it is necessary to remove some medicine from the stock, the responsible professional scans it before applying it, ensuring that the medicine is adequate. Currently, this operation is very manual and dependent on papers and labels, imposing on the professional the verification of the doctor's prescription, medicine and bracelet. In this confusion of information, he is more prone to errors.
The use of this technology also helps to prevent loss or theft of inputs. If an employee takes two catheters from the pharmacy and uses only one, it is possible to track the entire journey of this instrument and assign duties to those responsible for them.
These solutions are already beginning to be seen in Brazil, but they are still timid and isolated movements. So that the medical and hospital areas do not remain inertia and backward, there needs to be a re-reading of their processes, seeking more modern and technological solutions. We are experiencing a trend in the use of mobile devices and information in real time, transformations that can help not only patients, but also doctors, nurses and even the administrators of the institutions. So don't be afraid of the new, it can save lives!
* Edna Massuda, is director of the digital workspace area at VMware Latin America
Warning: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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