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Thursday, December 12, 2013

Ambulatory Services And The Reason Behind Their Popularity

By Cornelia White


Many healthcare organizations worldwide provide their services to patients as inpatient or outpatients. While inpatient is term reserved for patients who stays within the premises on the duration of treatment, out patients not need to stay in such health institutions. Ambulatory services are those services that are usually given to the outpatients. Ambulatory care is defined by most medical journals as those treatment or even acute care provided on outpatient basis.

Such services are normally available for both the adults and children and will depend on several factors the most important being the nature of medical complication and general health status. Medical facilities are now setting aside special clinics for this purpose with all the departments and specialties including rehabilitation, rheumatology, neurology and gynecology among others.

In the majority of advanced ambulatory care clinics, patients will normally be assigned to a special nurse who will coordinate his entire treatment program. In addition of answering the questions from the patient, this primary nursed plan all the treatment in all other visits, link with the doctors and other specialists in charge of that patient, keep all the records related to that patient and keep in touch with their patient to update his/her medical records. These nurses are basically charged with the responsibly of successful recovery of the patient.

In such clinics, the ambulatory services will be provided is a team approach where professional from all departments make a team to take care of the patients. Just like it happens in surgery, the best practice involves a team of experienced and specialized doctors from different specialties, nurses, both the occupational and the physical therapists, social workers and all other related personnel combining efforts in patient treatment. In such an environment, the patient is always assured of best of treatments that he can get.

With the popularity ambulatory services, insurance companies are readily offering covers in this area. Many employee benefits also include medical covers in this category, the result of which has seen these programs offered in highly subsidized costs particularly depending on the type of cover. In fact, the determinant of whether treatment is to be through in patient or outpatient process is normally the existing medical condition and the insurance cover.

Other than the normal treatments, many treatments that are now being provided through outpatient means include physical rehabilitation, orthotic, sport related injuries, chronic back pains (both acute and chronic), arthritis, neurology, oncology (polio, stroke, and nerve impairment), orthopedics (skeletal related disorders), osteoporosis (evaluation treatment), genetics and hereditary diseases, wound healing, rheumatology, and scoliosis among other support procedures.

The success of outpatient medical care requires that the nurse in charge keep a close contact with patients in form of close monitoring. Health institutions are focusing their development and expansion plans in the outpatient sector with the construction of several clinics closers to the residents of their clients for taster access. Some other doctors are tasked with periodic visits to regional centers to reach patients in their localities. These are just some of the options medical institutions are exploiting to take advantage of this rapidly expanding market gap.

Ambulatory services have contributed immensely in reducing the operational costs of medical institutions while increasing public access to medical facilities. It has revolutionized medical sector making it much more efficient and effective as it is impractical to host all patients within medical premises.




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