Empowerment Through Information Sharing

Technology has dramatically advanced how people do things over the last century. From the inception of simple farming tools to electronic communications, our lifestyles changes to conform to this evolution. Much of these advancements are merited to people`s capacity to share knowledge and the pace of ones development depends on how fast people do. Many people mistake power with information monopoly and tries to withold as much as they can to obtain favors, wealth and influence when in fact it is the contrary.

KAINOS Health Management, a uniquely identified managed care company, strongly believes that empowerment begins through the spirit of sharing. Our company was firmly founded on that principle and will continue to influence others to follow suit beginning with the basic resources that we have - Information. KAINOS has been managing healthcare to companies of different sizes and industries and over the years we have garnered a good reputation on unwavering and excellent service towards our clientelle. On those years, health information were collected, processed, analyzed and secured in our database. Sound management and critical decisions were made based on these kept information.

Our situation of keeping information is never different from the rest of the healthcare institutions or the entire healthcare industry in the Philippines. Hospitals, privately-owned clinics, laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and brokers have their own electronic systems in place, managed and kept only for their own use. An enormous wealth of health information are kept in a vault of `steel and stone` which could have been shared to different entities in the healthcare industry. The entire local healthcare industry in itself is a cluster of unsynchronized subsystems focused almost entirely on profits generation than healthcare management. Structured information framework and information sharing takes a backseat as well.

KAINOS is separating from this mediocre and ‘old school’ practice and hopefully lead the pack towards healthcare information restructuring. Our goal is to empower people by implementing acceptable standards and sharing useful information among different entities within the entire healthcare industry. Doing this provides many advantages and the list below are just a few of them:

• Better health management through sustained monitoring.
  If your the type of person whovisits different doctors every so often like me, they will ask you the same questions about my medical history like: allergies, medications taken, previous operations, and after every consulations these records are kept in their big clunky cabinets for my next visit to them. Monitoring your health becomes a very tedious tasks for such a simple problem.
• Better decisions through comprehensive reports.
  There is really nothing like making sound decisions when all medical records are complete.health management is really about knowing history to understand present illnesses.
• Improved awareness through easy accessability of records.
  This simply means that medical records are portable and are readily accessible at their own convenient time. There will be no more lost drug prescriptions or laboratory results.

There are a host of advantages when you start empowering people by sharing. KAINOS is devicing a plan to approach this challenge and will soon be realized in the coming months. I will be discussing the overview in my next blog under Health Informatics category.