Technology and useful apps to make your life healthier

Due to technological advances over the past decade, it has become easier and easier to monitor and track your own life style to ensure that you are staying healthy and active. One way of doing this is by downloading applications on your personal hand held device or smart phone, that keeps track of things like calorie intake, physical activities, diet progress, weight loss, and so much more. I personally believe that this new way of keeping track of your life style allows people to make smarter every day decisions concerning their health. As obesity is becoming more common in American households, these applications can help stop and maybe one day decline the percentage of Americans who are obese. However, the available health applications are not always to help healthy eating and living; some of them in fact help people with diseases that they have such as diabetes so that they can closely monitor and analyze their body’s statistics. This allows taking control and managing your health a lot easier and convenient as you can always have access to these applications, whether you are at home or on the road. A major perk to many of these applications is that it is not just taking and analyzing the present data, it can store your past data so that you can see how you are improving over time as well as giving you recommendations for the future to help you one day reach your goal and become a healthier person.

                 A popular website that ranks all applications based on their popularity worldwide is AppAppeal. AppAppeal ranked the top 30 free health apps that help users learn more about their body, diet and overall wellbeing.

The top five ranked are as follows:

1.       WebMD

2.       LiveStrong.com

3.       SparkPeople

4.       MedHelp

5.       Avvo

If you would like to learn more about your body, diet, or overall health, these five applications may be a good place to start!

Works Cited

Kwasniewicz, Krzysztof

"Top 30 Free Health Apps." AppAppeal. Comcoaster, 2008 - 2013. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

9:12 PM

 "Top 30 Free Health Apps." AppAppeal. Comcoaster, 2008 - 2013. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

The Main Goal of IT in Health Care

   By Jack Williams      

As previously talked about in our group presentation, technology is greatly impacting the health care system more and more every day. One way it is greatly helping is it provides information faster, conveniently, and correctly. Originally, ones doctor and health care provider was personally responsible for all of your medical records, laboratory results, tests, and records sent from other doctors or health care providers. This became complicated if you were to change doctors or health care providers due to there being a greater risk of losing your medical history and records. This could also cause doctors to have out of date medical records due to a patient seeing more than one doctor. It can also take longer for other doctors to get a hold of a patients medical history is an emergency. In contrast, 21st century hospitals and health providers, use technology as their main source to store patient information in vast data bases worldwide. This information is extremely important, not only to Doctors and medical professionals, but to every day people, due to the importance of privacy and quick access for doctors and physicians. Along with your medical history, other information is stored in these data bases like medications, allergies,current and past doctors, immunization history, past diagnoses, etc. Once this information is inputted into the databases, there is little chance of it being lost or stolen and is easily distributed among doctors and health care providers to ensure professional health services no matter what doctor you see.

          It is very important to receive the best care possible for patients which in turn means that it is very important for doctors to have all the information about there patients so that they can provide great care. This is how IT indirectly improves the quality of your care.

Group 3

Sources:

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "Health IT and Health Care Quality." HeathIT.gov. USA.gov, n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

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