Supporting Mobile Health Clinics: The Children’s Health Fund of New York City
Introduction
The case explains how the mobile clinics have helped children who come from humble and vulnerable backgrounds. Children in these states who are aged twenty four years and below experience shortages in obtaining medical services and have high chances of suffering from acute diseases. The mobile clinics are medium sized and are used to facilitate the programs meant to offer health services to children who could not access the medical care from the permanent hospitals. This could be due to distance or funds to cater for the medical services. Also, people living in interior rural areas where they have shortage of health care providers benefit from MMC (Martin, Brown, Hoffer, Perkins, & DeHayes, 1998). The programs backing the MMC in New York include, Children’s health fund. The payment for the medical care facilitated through children health fund comes from; general public willing to support the programs, corporate contributions, congressional support and government health policies which support children living in vulnerable conditions due to poverty. The state government signed bills that support children whose parents earn little or are unemployed and cannot cater for their children’s health.
Medical mobile clinics have been equipped with qualified, highly trained personnel and equipments to provide medical services efficiently. Medical services offered in the health mobile clinics include; vaccination of children against preventive illness, diagnosis for acute, chronic diseases, psychological and dental health. Additionally, these clinics offer education services to the needy people in schools and in community centers and also offer medical services in case of public health crises or an emergency. Challenges faced when implementing mobile clinics include interconnectivity among different clinics (martin et al., 1998). The requirement to keep patients data, which could be used during the next visit or in case of referral, is of great importance in a health center. The challenge has been caused by either lack of network or consistency of the available networks. In addition, lack of information technology specialists to assist in maintaining the equipments has been a major challenge since medical specialists do not have knowledge on networking. The costs involved in installing networking equipments ought to be minimal to lower the costs of MMC. Medical practitioners have also been missing patients’ data if they shift from one place to another and this movement is common among people living in poverty. To counter the above challenges, the issue of interconnectivity should be addressed to ensure professionals in the field of IT are employed to solve all the networking problems. Linking of information to a common data pool is recommendable. This would ensure that, even if a patient relocates, the medical providers can access his previous data and the same would be used in case of referral to the hospitals (martin et al., 1998).
The newer and low-priced network communication to solve the networking problems in MMC communication would be available. Satellite antennae technology could be used in securing connection to hospitals and other health providers. Federal government HITECH incentive standards would also contribute to the improved software integration solutions since it reduces both the costs of acquisition and training physicians for better utilization in EHS (martin et al., 1998). Increase in software applications would not affect physician staffs turnover. The software used would improve the integration of patients’ information, which is vital to obtain medical history of a patient. The MMC could be rendered absolute if the federal governments reduce its funding and withdrawal of corporate donations.
Conclusion
MMC have helped safe many lives of children who come from low earning families.This is because they can access medical care at their convenience hence improving general public health.
References
Martin, E. W., Brown, C. V., Hoffer, J. A., Perkins, W. C., & DeHayes, D. W. (1998). Managing information technology: What managers need to know. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall PTR.