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 This could also cause doctors to have out of date medical records due to a patient seeing more than one doctor.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.
This is very interesting considering the fact that the health care industry spends millions of dollars a year on technology but very little on making the records digital. I know that one of the requirements under the "Obama-Care" is standardizing and making the records digital. The argument is that this will decrease cost in the health care industry and therefore making it more affordable. What is strange to me is the fact that ,the standardization and the digital record keeping, is not a widely spread procedure and that the government has to intervene and tell the health industry to do it. Do you thing the health industry is slow to adopt, standardization and digital record keeping, because these two thing are not in their interests. It reduces the switching cost from one doctor to another which is not in the doctors best interests.
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