Importance of Assessment Tools in Healthcare

The growing importance and rapid technological development of healthcare assessment tools are aiding doctors in performing more accurate diagnoses in a more timely manner. Assessment tools aren't just limited to healthcare technology, though. They can also include patient surveys and patient self-assessment forms. The importance of these assessment tools can be broken down into four key categories.

Primary Care

• Primary care, often given to you as a patient by a doctor who serves as a general practitioner, relies on assessment tools to guide your recovery. Using surveys that are administered by the doctor, and surveys that are given directly to patients, they can use the process of elimination to determine which symptoms may be leading to medical problems. Just like troubleshooting car problems, the sooner the caregiver has a stronger handle on the symptoms and potential issues, the sooner they can issue a remedy.

Advanced Healthcare Diagnostics

• Technologically advanced healthcare assessment tools, such as CAT scans, X-ray machines, and MRI scanners, can help point care givers directly to internal body problems that are causing the patient to complain of symptoms. These types of tools are particularly important because of the speed at which they hasten the diagnostic process, thereby reducing the amount of time that the patient is in pain and without remedy.

General Condition Check-Ups

• Simple assessment tools such as short-form surveys given to patients prior to visiting their general practitioner are important because they save the doctor time in diagnosing the problem. By giving the patient a way to articulate how they're feeling and what they surmise the medical issue to be, the doctors can start to travel down alternate troubleshooting paths that would take a longer period of time to achieve if the patient did not provide a starting point for the diagnosis.

Monetary Importance

• As the cliche goes, "time is money," and it holds true when applied to the importance of healthcare assessment. One of the most important things that modern healthcare assessment tools does is save institutions and doctors money by avoiding misdiagnoses or by avoiding the need to perform unnecessary diagnostic tests altogether. Diagnostic testing can come at a high cost to consumers of healthcare and can have a huge time cost for the medical professionals administering the tests. Cost-savings is a largely important factor of modern healthcare assessment tools.