"Doctors are reluctant to issue digital prescriptions due to the slowness of the system," says Gonzalo Vecina, the hospital superintendent.
Hospital management is perhaps one of the most complex of logistics and organizational disciplines. A Hospital is the only "company" that works seven days a week, 24 hours a day, with a wide range of professional staff - more than 14 different disciplines in the health care area alone - including engineers, managers, and human resources professionals, besides having to reconcile economic interests with the vital necessities of the population.
According to the superintendent of Syrian-Lebanese Hospital, clinical and administrative management is among the main bottlenecks in the sector. Due to the highly complex software, Hospitals have much progress to make, according Vecina; "There is no demand for efficiency".
For example, at the Syrian-Lebanese Hospital, physicians are reluctant to fill out electronic prescriptions. For each prescribed drug, the doctor must open a series of windows and fill in various fields. "It takes about twenty minutes and doctors don't want to do it. So we hire one person just to scan the prescriptions: the transcriber," says Vecina.
