“The right way to reign in healthcare costs is not by applying more government and more controls and making it more like the post office, it’s by making it more like a consumer-driven market.” – Mitt Romney
Modern healthcare has evolved into vast, complex, multi-dimensional processes that populate a complicated domain. The term, often defined as “the maintenance or improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, recovery, or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments“, continues to attract the attentions of policy makers and national governments worldwide. Some observers have stated that an efficient healthcare system can significantly contribute to a nation’s economy, human development, and levels of industrialization. Therefore, healthcare processes have become one of the centerpieces of the modern nation state – such processes typically attract large annual budgets but remain riven by government-sponsored healthcare programs and competitive spaces dominated by private industry. In such a scenario, it is incumbent on planners and strategists to analyze the moving parts of various healthcare processes and systems. Flowcharts and similar other diagrams have emerged as premier analytical devices that can spur such efforts.
The traditional outcomes of designing and implementing various healthcare processes can be analyzed through technological implementations that use massive amounts of information, also known as Big Data. In such a paradigm, analysts could deploy a variety of elements such as high-end computational packages, algorithms powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning technologies, digital storage and analytical tools, and web applications. The information that emerges from such combinations, when appropriately leveraged, help refine extant instances of medical and social infrastructure such as healthcare delivery systems and processes. A flowchart can assist the above venture by enabling the structures of analyses undertaken by developers and strategists. The spaces inside such a paradigm can also empower healthcare specialists to locate areas of dissonance, elements of which can be better aligned with stated policy objectives endorsed by policy makers, modern healthcare organizations, and governments.
The modern era of creating distinctive healthcare processes for mass populations hinges on the creation of accurate health records developed and stored in digital media. In line with this fact, healthcare professionals must drive efforts to capture, transmit, receive, store, link, and review multiple editions of digital health records emanating from the examination of patients. The benefits of such action include a definitive ability to access the healthcare records of a patient, seek reviews and recommendations from members of the international medical fraternity, review information related to the allergies of a patient, develop a clinical narrative as springboards for future analyses, interrogate the results obtained from a variety of laboratory tests, create an archive of a patient’s medical conditions, etc. Such healthcare processes and their various components and potential outcomes, when plotted inside a flowchart diagram, allow medical professionals to inject high levels of discipline and awareness in modern medication.
Technology-based innovation can help generate deeper meaning in the design and development of modern healthcare processes. In line with this, researchers in the domain of contemporary medicine are devising the contours of novel healthcare processes with a view to attain certain objectives. These include efforts to boost time and cost efficiencies that attend drug development processes, expanding the scope of clinical diagnoses, creating new paradigms for healthcare interventions, fashioning new systems to reinforce savings in the costs of medical treatment, harnessing the power of data-driven analytics to serve patients better, and improving the longevity of patients afflicted with medical conditions. These objectives, when positioned inside a flowchart illustration, empower researchers to gain a high-level view of modern healthcare. The subsequent imagery also acts as an enabler in terms of generating visibility into the scope of refining modern healthcare systems and processes.
Health emergencies, such as a global pandemic, bear potential to stress traditional modes of operation of modern healthcare processes across regions and nations. Policy makers, regulators, healthcare professionals, and medical organizations must design and create frameworks that promote a graded emergency response to cope with such situations. In line with this, healthcare providers must remain prepared to implement plans at short notice, lawmakers must put in place the outlines of action plans that pay hospitals to treat the uninsured, hospital operators could specify remote locations that provide high-quality emergency services; healthcare insurance agencies could activate contingency plans that heavily reimburse the costs of treatment, etc. In addition, medical billing and coding operators must devise adequate measures to process information emanating from potential outbreaks, while commercial suppliers could work to develop supply chain strategies that rush medicinal supplies and healthcare products to market. These actions, when designed inside a flowchart, can reinforce the efficacy of contemporary healthcare processes and empower national governments to respond to public health emergencies.
According to domain observers, the global healthcare market (including research and development, products, and services) should exceed US$ 2 trillion in the year 2020. In response, analysts and economists are working to investigate the elements and factors that animate such a massive market. Various factors such as ageing populations, rising wages in certain national economies, the impact of consumer sentiment, variations in personal disposable incomes, the variable costs of healthcare in large regions, reductions in unemployment numbers, seasonal changes that impact common afflictions, etc. play a key role in such analyses. In light of the above, we note the operation of healthcare processes remains subject to a large number of factors and variables. These, when designed into a flowchart, allow analysts to develop nuanced views and forge region-specific responses that could potentially elevate the quality of outcomes of medical treatment. In addition, legacy editions of such illustrations could help drive intelligent interventions at the policy level, thereby refining the impact of modern healthcare processes.
The creation of competent healthcare infrastructure must remain a core impulse that animates the design and implementation of healthcare processes. In this context, educators, public health officials, policy specialists, professors of medicine, nursing professionals, clinical technologists, frontline responders, and developers of curricula, and others must join forces to fashion protocols and build institutions that bolster, extend, and reinforce healthcare infrastructure in modern societies. Flowcharts represent the ideal platform to design and promote the planned creation of healthcare systems since these inter-connected illustrations allow designers and policy makers to develop and connect layers of public health infrastructure. In addition, the visual nature of such illustrations empowers said individuals to create effective interventions that promote disease control and prevention mechanisms within the limits imposed by prevailing infrastructure.
This exposition expands the scope of comprehension when lay readers view the multiple facets, topics, and dimensions that distinguish modern healthcare processes. The use of flowchart diagrams imparts direction and motive power to various ongoing initiatives that seek to develop and diversify public healthcare (systems and infrastructure) driven by taxpayer dollars and participation from private enterprises. However, such illustrations must allow significant scope for implementing revisions and corrections, in addition to framing persistent review mechanisms to evaluate the quality of healthcare services. Further, the sinews of modern healthcare delivery systems must be strengthened in light of emerging scenarios. Therefore, intelligent modifications of processes, the planning for which must be undertaken inside a blueprint, can assist federal machinery and policy structures to respond faster to evolving changes, demands, and challenges in the domain of healthcare. The flowchart, and its inherent mechanisms, continues to play a seminal role in charting the outlines of such actions and translating theory into actual practice.
