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The Economist‘s Technology Quarterly reveals some recent advances in medical technology:
Tags: Technology
Information technology has the possibility of greatly increasing the efficiency of health care. EMRs can reduce the cost of accessing patient information. New technologies can make medical devices more effective.
But is there a cost to increased medical technology? GigaOM wonders
“...will widespread diagnostics increase the burden on healthcare? Somewhere between 10 and 50 percent of autopsies reveal diseases other than the one that killed the patient. If consumers test themselves, then tell their doctors, the medical system could wind up treating 50 percent more diseases than it does today — even those that wouldn’t have killed the patient.”
Will treating diseases before they appear increase health care quality or just drive up costs? On the future will reveal the answer.
Tags: EMR, Health IT, Technology
My grandmother is 96 years old and incredibly lives on her own. My mother drops off packages of food she prepares for my grandmother and gets her mail, but my grandmother still does her laundry and gets herself ready in the morning. Bringing in some help for her or moving her to an assisted living facility are options, but my grandmother loves her home, sees herself as fiercely independent, and a change would be difficult for her at this age.
Lately, however, it has been getting tougher for my grandmother to live on her own, which is why a New York Times article on high-tech elderly monitoring systems caught my attention. The article talks about how some sons and daughters have installed motion sensors and a remote monitoring systems to check up on their aging parents.
“Sensors attached to the wall are able to register when Mrs. Trost [an elderly parent] gets out of bed and whether she stops at her medication dispenser, and to alert her daughters to any deviations from her routine that might indicate an accident or illness. The family is updated by electronic report every morning.”
This technology not only is beneficial for the elderly individual (who gets to stay in their home), and for their family (who can more quickly check up on their loved ones), but can also saved costs by delaying the time when the elderly are moved to an assisted living facility. Elderly concerns with privacy is a problem and people (like my grandmother) would likely resent the monitoring…at least at first.
Nevertheless, as people around the world continue to live longer, monitoring technology can help keep the elderly in their homes and out of assisted living facilities.
Tags: Assisted Living, Elderly, Monitoring, Technology
The Economist (“Doctor on Call“) has an shows that mobile phones may have another use for doctors: a microscope.
“Mr Maamari is a member of a research team led by Dan Fletcher, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, which has developed a cheap attachment to turn the digital camera on many of today’s mobile phones into a microscope. Called a CellScope, it can show individual white and red blood cells, which means that with the correct stain it can be used to identify the parasite that causes malaria. Moreover, by transmitting an image directly over the mobile network, the CellScope could greatly help with the remote diagnosis and monitoring of many illnesses.“
Tags: Microscope, mobile phone, Technology
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