How Technology is Moving Healthcare Companies Forward
There are pros and cons when it comes to technology, and its overall influence on humanity. There’s a chance that we’re all — and especially teenagers — spending too much time staring at a screen. Plus, cybercrime, from the theft of sensitive information to interference in foreign elections, is a major concern. It’s important, however, that we don’t focus exclusively on the negative aspects, because, without doubt, information technology has also pushed the world forward in a positive direction, in certain areas anyway. One such example is healthcare. Tech advancements are empowering patients, improving services, and helping to treat and cure illnesses. If you have any doubt, just imagine what it would have been like if you’d fallen ill in medieval times. Tech continues to push the healthcare world forward, as we’ll see below.
Individual Care
One of the issues that has compromised healthcare treatment in the past has been the power dynamic. Everything was more or less set by the professional, with the patient just following along. Now, thanks to wearable tech, patients are able to have a much more hands-on healthcare experience. Indeed, they’re simply better informed, and this has lead to healthcare improvements. They’re sharing data they themselves have collected with their doctors, who are thus able to make better-informed decisions (you can get a better snapshot of someone’s health by looking at data collected over six months, rather than just one in the doctor’s office).
Working More Efficiently
Healthcare professionals go to school for years in order to treat their patients to the best of their ability. But in fact, much of what doctors and nurses and other professionals do isn’t directly linked to healthcare at all; it’s just taking care of the paperwork, or handing out medication, and so on. They’re things that need to be done, but they don’t require years of schooling. Now, thanks to technological advancements such as Robotic Prescription Dispensing Systems, doctors can focus on what they do best: helping people. Technology has essentially streamlined the healthcare professionals working day, so that it makes the most of the skills they’ve spent years acquiring.
AI for Better Care
Artificial intelligence does, rightly, get some bad press — in a factory or in a warzone, it would be a disaster. But in healthcare, it’s virtually all positive: it’ll help the patients’ life immeasurably. A diagnosis that might have taken hours or weeks to figure out will be sussed by AI in seconds. It’ll also come in handy when it comes to routine procedures, too. A robotic machine will become supremely talented at the relatively straightforward surgeries that sometimes go wrong because of inevitable human error.
Improved Training
Technology is also helping to train the next generation of doctors and nurses, too. Instead of practising on dummies, and then fumbling their way through the real thing when a person is in front of them, hospitals are now using VR headsets to train their students. They’re able to practice as if they were in the real situation, which in turn raises standards.