How Technology Is Affecting Healthcare
The days of calling your doctor for every common ailment are over! You want to know what that bump, lump, hump, or slump is? You can look it up and get your answer. Not sure how to get rid of diarrhea or that pesky stomach ache, head on over to the many health sites out there and find your symptoms. Whether this is a good thing is heavily debatable. Misdiagnosis can happen with even the most trained professionals, so tread carefully. Let us take a look at the positive side though. Technology is providing our society with many more tools than we previously had. The days of saws and axes are fading and the days of lasers and gadgets are arriving! Below are just a few ways that technology is revolutionizing healthcare.
Social Media Patients
Doctors and other medical professionals can now contact their patients much easier. They can form more direct relationships by responding to posts, messages, and contacting them in ways that were never available before. This may be a more comfortable medium for some patients than phone calls, because some patients suffer from anxiety or other social disorders. The use of social media can also help prepare for the worst emergencies. Posts can be made to a hospitals page, or posts of accidents can be monitored so emergency rooms can prep and ambulances can be on the scene before 9-1-1 is even called. Doctors dealing with a spike in specific medical emergencies can create instructional videos for their websites that describe how to deal with an issue that can be handled at home; potentially saving patients and doctors valuable appointments.. Overall, social media is letting medical facilities better their relations with their patients, respond faster to emergencies, and assist others with common injuries or ailments. With the growing nature of social media one can only guess what more innovation will come to healthcare!
Information
Healthcare and treatment information is more readily available to the public than ever before. No need to go dusting off those old tomes and finding a remedy that might not even work, now you can email your doctor and get a response in minutes! No longer must we suffer from headaches without a cure or wonder why that bowel movement was a funky color. All of this information is at our fingertips. Our society is better equipped to handle medical emergencies, common ailments, and find the right doctor. We have all of this information ready at a moment’s notice. That is incredibly powerful. Not even 50 years ago, people were dying from many things we consider easily treatable today.
Innovation
We are discovering new and more innovative ways to operate and fix health issues every day. Over the past few years we have taken great leaps in medical technology. We now have lasers that can operate without leaving scars, 3D printed prosthetics for amputees, and major advancements in rebuilding organs from stem cells. What’s more is that the pace of innovation shows no signs of slowing down. Technology is taking the healthcare field by storm and we are all along for the ride.
