Impact of technology on health
The health sector ranks among the most revolutionary sectors as far as technology is concerned. In the last thirty years, the impacts of technology in the sector stretch to all departments as work done in the sector eases with time. However, technology has more of the positive than negative impacts in the field (Mcgregor & James 263). Many people identify that the health sector relates with technology because it merges well with the technology. Medical technology refers to the modernized attention deployed in the process of diagnosis and treatment administration. Technology in the medical sector presents through the pharmaceuticals, the devices, the procedures, and the organizational systems. The paper analyzes the effects of technology to the health sector with the view of exploring whether or not these effects are desirable.
Technical advancement in the field of health enables crunching of data, which eases the diagnosis and treatment of patients. Most of the doctors and health practitioners want to keep track of patients with the view of giving them the best Medicare. However, it is difficult to keep such data because no certainty exists as to when the patient will surface with identical problem (Thumé et al. 869). Doctors also attend to very many patients; thus, it becomes hard for them to acquaint with particular patients unless the patient initiates the acquaintance. However, with the advancement in technology, doctors and practitioners can keep track of patients without much reliance on their own memory. One such advancement presents through the Watson computer invented by Dr. Watson, which enables the doctors to keep data and monitor the progress of the patient from time to time when they visit them (Mcgregor & James 263). Apart from simple monitoring, data crunching enables the doctors to give the correct diagnosis to the patients all the time.
In medical practice, communication with the patient can help doctors diagnose sophisticated conditions. Communication helps doctors to track the progress of patients with the view of improving their conditions and making further recommendations not made on diagnosis. McCullough et al. (647) argues that a patient relies on communication in order to brief the doctor on their progress with the view of getting further advice on how to undertake medication. Technology has significantly enhanced the communication between patients and doctors. Furthermore, the Omni fluent health program, which the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) introduced, provides effective ground for communication with patients. The model enables doctors to receive information from a patient in a convenient language and ask it to translate to the language convenient to the patient.
Social networking must exist between people at the same level because they associate in many ways. Often, people may need to consult with each other, but the channel for executing this may be lacking. For the doctors, treatment and consultation has become easier due to effective networking. Technology has enable doctors to liaise with each other when need arises (Graham-Jones et al. 484). Some instances appear in the profession that require the doctor to undertake high-level consultations with other doctors to establish the best technique of handling the condition. Doctors might need to link up with the counterpart in order to get advice on how to a fix a particular case.
According to Garber (116), the patients need the best medical attention any time they fall sick and may need to sieve out in order to know the best doctor available to deal with their cases. This implies that they must get some way of knowing about all the doctors so that they can get the threshold against which to sieve. Technology presents the best way that patients can keep track on the doctors in order to know the ones that are best suited. Most of the doctors have groups to which they surrender their full details so that they can optimize on them for easy location by the customers. When a patient wants to access services from a specialised doctor, they can simply search them on the sites where they optimize and select the ones they find satisfactory. The ease with which the patients access the doctors provide the ultimate advantage to the medical field as treatment comes easier and more efficient (Gallego et al. 524). Some devices and systems ease the link between patients and the doctors by providing direct software to log into the database of a doctor and access information about their field. Communication between doctors and the patients has flourished due to advancements in technology.
Healthy living entails daily activities to keep fit and healthy through a patient’s life. Through technological advancements, the patient gets the avenue to stay healthy. Modern technology provides gadgets and devices that ensure that the patients lead a healthy life and take rest as required medically. There are gadgets improvised to check on the daily health of the patients (Furukawa et al. 870). For example, the Fit bit gadget checks one’s daily activities and tracks the rest and sleep of a patient. With technology development, people have access to tools such as gym that aid physical fitness. All these devices aim at making the health of the patient well checked.
However, technology does not please all the medical staff due to a few negative effects that come along with it. Carlsson (47) argues that the fight for insurance in the medical sector appears both as a blessing and as regret to the health sector. In the health sector, access to the health insurance policies deems easier than most of the sector due to the effect of unionism. Insurance deems desirable in the health sector because the people assure the doctors of payments and settled debts even when there are no people directly associated with the Medicare. However, insurance has proven the most undesirable facility that technology availed to the health sector due to the adverse effects that it brought to the practitioners. Insurance simply means that the access of patients to the doctors limits to a certain level because they deem assured of treatment any time they fall sick; thus, the patients become a little complacent in seeking advice (Buntin et al. 1217). When the consultations decrease, the doctors lose a good portion of the market because they cannot get the platform to form strong rapports with the patients at their level of interaction and they only meet them when they come for treatment.
According to Brailer (589), the health sector benefits from technology because the patients can get home based care and treatment when they need it. However, this care and treatment has proven one of the most dangerous in the field of health. When a person feels sick, they seek for the symptoms on the web and from the media. Circumstantial symptoms prove deceiving in most of the cases because some symptoms appear for multiple illnesses, and it becomes hard to distinguish them except when some expert analysis comes in. In most cases, patients jump to select one of the ailments, which show the symptoms they have and get a diagnosis from the same source. Patients suffer adversely when they undertake such channels for treatment. The medical departments in most of the countries have moved to discourage people from the homemade treatments because of prevalence of such cases. The worst experience for the medical sector with technology was dabbed ‘the ghost doctor’ by the World Health Organization (WHO). The ghost doctors post profiles on most of websites and on the social media and use them to deceive and con people yet they never exist. People post profiles in ghost names and ask for payments thus tarnishing the health sector (Anderson et al. 825).
The health sector enjoys various benefits from the onset of new technology. Precisely, the last thirty years have seen great transformation in the health sector. The tools used, the systems, the practical expertise, and accessibility enhancement associates with technology a great deal in the health sector. Essentially, technology has improved health care procedures. However, technology came with a few setbacks to the health sector, with people going for insurance, wrong homemade dosage and ghost doctors. However, it is apparent that technology has offered more solutions to the health sector than the problems it created.
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