In the nearly two hundred years since computers have evolved from just being machines made to make the calculation of large numbers easier to becoming an integral part of our world, especially in the healthcare industry. In the last fifty years, computers have greatly helped the healthcare field in numerous ways, such as better tracking of patient data, allowing doctors to connect to other doctors around the world for consulting with doctors in other countries, and have made the surgery process much less invasive, not needing to resort to exploratory surgery unless absolutely necessary. Therefore, technological advancements in the last decades have played an important role in the medical industry, bringing benefits to all facets of the medical field. This is why the continued implementation of computers and the technologies made possible by them must be given more weight when discussing medical funding.
There will be people who say that computers in the medical field are a danger to patients' privacy and safety, from illegally being downloaded, forcibly taken by hackers for any number of reasons from being sold to others for identity theft, and finally being lost in a crash losing all the data the hospital has on their patents. These fears, while valid, are not as serious as they once were, starting with a computer crash concerning hospitals and primary care physicians they keep hard copies or physical copies of patient records in either warehouses or doctors’ offices respectively, so even in the event of a crash resulting in all patient data being lost, they can retrieve the hard copy and reenter it into the computer for accurate record keeping, the reverse is also true if patient files are lost, then the records can be printed off with nothing being lost. For the more concerning issue, especially in the interconnected world we live in the privacy concerns of unlawful attainment of your private information, it has been a key point of hospital administrative concern in fact since 2016 over forty percent of hospitals have seen a massive increase in their health information technology (IT) infrastructure with emphasis on data security. Generally speaking, there are still data breaches at hospitals like any other place that deals with huge stores of personal data there is no denying that, however the increase in IT budgets clearly shows that hospitals administrators are taking the potential of data breaches very seriously with administrators being willing to spend much time, money, and effort to make sure that patient records are secure and in less danger than previously. Thus, even though there is a danger of patents records being illegally accessed, hospitals are taking the necessary steps to ensure that they are not only complying with EHR incentive programs but ensuring that patients' personal information is kept safe from anyone who wishes to illegally access said data. Therefore the risks should not stop people from discussing the importance of technology in the medical field and its further funding.
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To better understand how much technology is benefiting the medical field, we must first understand how the computer came about and why it was first needed, that should give us a scale of the impact of the computer in medicine. Computers were first invented to simply make the process of counting large amounts of numbers, specifically the census of population easier with less time being devoted to counting. The computer was first introduced in a hospital during the mid-50 as an automation of financial and accounting. It was in the middle of the 1960s that hospitals realized that they could use computers to enter patient medical records, with the end of the 60s leading to a concept of nationwide data standards and guidelines. Continued innovation and expansion of computer capabilities over the next 40 years would lead the computer from a simple data processing device used by hospitals for financial, accounting, and electronic medical records to medical devices that helped save not only many lives but make medical procedures less invasive and safer. This innovation also lead many in the healthcare industry to realize they could use computers to track potential outbreaks of dangerous pathogens or to cut down time on testing for issues in patents. Further showing why budgets for medical technologies and computers must be given weight when discussing budgets in hospitals or the medical field in general.
The most obvious benefit of computers in the medical field is better treatment of patients, less suffering, and quicker recovery time. The use of new machines made possible by innovations in computers and related technologies allows doctors to reduce the need for exploratory surgery, while also ensuring that doctors make informed and more importantly correct diagnoses in their patients. This leads to a speed-up in not only the diagnosis process but also medical procedures becoming safer and less invasive, such as laser treatments for certain medical problems. This leads to an improved rate of recovery, where instead of a procedure taking several weeks to recover, it has been shortened to just a handful of days. The use of computers, particularly the information technology part, has made patient care much more reliable and safer than in the past. By the use of hand-held computers to check patient history and make sure their patients are receiving the correct treatment, putting all results from lab tests to medical orders electronically into a main database that can be referred to at a later date, patients also have an easier time accessing their own information so they can understand what is being done and how it will affect them. All of these improvements in the medical process have shown a clear increase in patient care and are reasons why they should be continued improvements in the electronic medical field.
Another benefit of the information age to doctors in the medical field is connectivity between doctors both patients and doctors, such as using social media to reach a wider population along with establishing contact with patients, launching public awareness campaigns, and using social media for community outreach. This is not just limited to populations in the local world but to doctors around the world known as Telemedicine, defined by the World Health Organization as the delivery of healthcare services, where distance is a critical factor, by all healthcare professionals using information and communication technologies for the exchange of valid information for diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease and injuries, research and evaluation and for the continuing education of healthcare providers, all in the interests of advancing the health of individuals and their communities. This solves a big problem in the healthcare community by allowing doctors to not spend long amounts of time trying to reach each other and discuss patients, whether it’s two regular doctors or a specialist consulting regular doctors. This benefits patients in underdeveloped or disaster areas by allowing specialists to be contacted for consultation without having to move patients that either can’t be moved due to complications from the move or there is no time for anything else but performing the surgery there. Extending from doctors using smartphones to connect to each other, there is a surgery simulation innovation created by a collaboration involving Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the University of Buffalo features a robot that allows real-world views of surgeries eliminating the need for live environment to train aspiring surgeons with the benefit of giving professionals the ability to experiment in a simulated environment rather than risking making a mistake on real patients. For more patients benefits, there are applications for the smartphone or other such devices that create referrals digitally with the referrals reaching millions of providers who are in search of treatment options with the potential to allow patients to gain treatment they would have missed using the paper method of referrals and the healthcare facility they go to gain money that would have otherwise been lost. This is all part of a relatively new field of study called health informatics whose goal is to collect, store, analyze, and present health data in a digital format, which leads to the most important but until recently underused use of computer-related technology in the medical field, which is the use of collected data to predict medical trends or potential outbreaks.
The use and analysis of this collected data help nearly every aspect of the medical field, from pharmaceutical companies to doctors and the World Health Organization. A less obvious use of collected data from doctors is for the pharmaceutical companies, in which the collected data gives them insights into how to improve the products they offer, how patients are reacting to the medications they are given, if there are any problems with select patients, and if there are any gaps in the treatments they offer. A more obvious use of data is analyzing the data to discover trends in the medical field along with potential outbreaks, like if there is a trend of the flu going around locally or if there is a huge outbreak of measles in a tri-state area. For the World Health Organization, they use this data to also predict outbreaks like local doctors do, but they also use this data to see if certain plans they implemented, or treatments for a particular disease are working, and whether they should continue with what they are doing or go to a different plan or treatment. However, this practice of using the data doctors have collected has not seen much use until recently further, showing just how much help computers can be in the medical field and why they have to be given more weight when considering what place the funding for any health care facility is going.
For the future of health care thanks to technology like that of science fiction maybe finally within our grasp. Just as the use of cybernetics to replace lost limbs allows those who have lost arms or legs the ability to have all their limbs back and live full lives, along with potential people who can’t walk due to accidents being able to walk again. For the problem of not enough organ donations for transplant, there is research into 3D printing to make organs for people with failing organs. We may also see an age where A.I. is used in hospitals to help with patient management and running basic tasks of the hospital like shift rotation.
In conclusion, the use of technology in the healthcare field started as a very small part of the hospital, used only for the financial part of administration only to go on, to become a very big part of the medical field. From just lowering the need for invasive surgeries and recovery time to using the data collected by doctors to predict trends in health care to potential outbreaks that could be caught and more easily contained. All of this has been made possible by the computer and the technology developed from them like heart monitors, MRI machines, and CAT scans have made it so doctors are more easily able to digamous problems that patients have with doctors no longer needing to go for exploratory surgery. The potential technology that could be developed from the implantation of computer-related technology and the suffering that it could end around the world more than makes the arguments that when discussing funding for the medical field, computer-related implantation should be among the first to be bought up along with giving considerable weight to them when discussing funding.
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