Revamping Healthcare Management

Covid-19 has brought to light many of the flaws of the healthcare systems. The crisis also calls for repairing the systems and make them more accessible to all. Colors has focused on the most urgent issue of the planet at the moment, in its first virtual Colors Town Hall, moderated by Ziaul Karim.

Leaders of the country’s healthcare services sector MD Quamrul Hassan (Business Director, ACI Limited), Aftab Mahmud Khurshid (Healthcare Brand Marketing Professional, Evercare Hospital Dhaka) and Dr. Siddhartha Deb Majumder (Assistant Manager of Medical Affairs Department, Labaid Hospital) joined the talk and shed light on the future of healthcare services.

Frontline fighters on the Field

Labaid Hospital and Dr. Siddhartha Deb Majumder have been on the frontline from the very beginning. The preparations for Covid-19 started as soon as the symptoms began to appear across places.  Given that this is a new experience, Labaid began training its staff because this was something never seen before. The ingrained fear made everyone worried. Training all the staff to be more careful and aware helped subdue this fear. The infectious control unit trained all the departments on how to control the environment they work in. Given the amount of exposure that they had day in and day out, it paved the way on how to track contact points and ensuring the safety of the doctors and the staff of the hospital. An expansion in testing capacity, preparedness, and creating differentiating zones like yellow for symptomatic and red for deteriorating. These create the foundation for how the future of healthcare management will shape up to be. Gate screening of patients, following protocols of testing only admitted patients, and creating general awareness for all.

Leading by example

Quamrul Hassan and ACI have taken the initiative to pave the way for a sufficient supply of new necessary goods and services. Creating greater awareness, ensuring the supply chain of hygiene products remains stable as much as possible, and building on the research for infectious diseases. All these will eventually contribute to lowering the curve and that can happen when maintaining the unprecedented rise in demand for previously niche products.

Shifting methods of health provision

Aftab Khurshid sees this entire phenomenon as a paradigm shift in how healthcare will develop. Covid-19 has not only pushed for radical changes in how healthcare services are to be provided, moreover, how these changes are more practical in nature. To maintain service provision and to ensure services are modernized, consultation has moved to the digital space. Utilization of online services and building digital capacity for the future would eventually force service providers and consumers to become technical. As traditional roles start to be made redundant and the absorption of certain workers into the system becomes vital, industries need to reevaluate and reinvest. Improving human capital, building multirole, and multi-skillset for individuals, and reading into what the new demand patterns require. The healthcare system is built on the premise of innovation, compassion, care, and adaption. Training, developing, capacity buildup, service marketing, service branding, maintaining international standards are the goals that healthcare management has to learn. Instilling consumer confidence and providing patients with tailor-made and dedicated treatment plans that ensure customers believe in the healthcare system.

Healthcare Field Rebuilding

The healthcare industry is at a cross-road in terms of how it goes forward. Facing unprecedented events have resulted into the members of the industry to take up niche goods and services that were otherwise secondary in priority. As time goes on, the niche becomes the new norm and digital infrastructure for healthcare management, become the new pillars. All these new additions stem from the sudden shock that no industry anticipated, especially the industry that is at the frontline of all things happening. Not because they opted for it, more from the responsibility that the healthcare industry placed them to take up.