In the digital era, technology has touched pretty much everything. Although there are several threats associated with it, technological advancement has made its entry into the healthcare industry. Being a trillion dollar industry that is spread across clinical services, hospital care, nursing homes, dental care, home healthcare and medications, healthcare can gain a lot from digitization. At present, diagnostic centres in Uttarpara already makes use of technology for better patient management.
The following are a few ways in which digitization has altered this sector:
Improved Coordination:
Digitization has made it convenient for both healthcare professionals and patients to coordinate with each other better. Patients are no longer required to maintain a huge file of medical records that they need to carry to receive pathology services in Hooghly. They can simply maintain their medical history in an easy-to-carry digital form. The patients can upload them to a cloud and decide who can have access to that information.
Improved Mapping:
Technologies are getting more and more advanced with every passing day. A number of tiny devices are available in the market today for monitoring heart rate, counting one’s steps, and many other things related to the body. It is not just limited to the smart phone or the smart watch but also includes a wide variety of recently introduced medical wearable devices. Thus it can be said that digitization has made it simple to examine progress and spot abnormal situations proactively.
Higher Awareness:
At present, a major part of the population still prefers to Google their symptoms and arrive at conclusions rather than making a trip to a good diagnostic centre in Uttarpara. This could often land them in the emergency ward due to faulty self-medication based on terrible diagnosis.
Apart from Google, this percentage of the population is often seen discussing symptoms and diagnosis in various forums on Facebook and similar social networking sites. Almost one- third of the population is known to share experiences about various healthcare services and physicians. They feel that such information is trustworthy and reliable as they come from real humans. However, they fail to realize that medicine is itself a very broad field. In spite of showing identical symptoms, two patients may have very dissimilar medical conditions based on hereditary features, environment, and other factors.
Downside:
As in case of everything created by man, technology too has its downsides. One of the major drawbacks of technology in this sector would be compromising the patient’s privacy.
