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Health Care

IT is dramatically improving health care in the following ways:

  • prevention and control of emerging infectious diseases,
  • patient to health care provider interaction,
  • rapid dissemination of information,
  • improved responses to outbreak situations.

Efforts to contain outbreaks of dangerous infectious diseases require the rapid collection and transmission of detailed patient data to medical labs or public health centers. Health professionals need tools to communicate important scientific or epidemiological findings to other parts of the health care community. IT is enhancing capacity in each of these areas.

Many health problems in developing countries are being addressed using IT. Digital records and images utilizing digital cameras have made it possible for doctors around the world to share information or offer advice on treatments for complicated ailments. For example, using Internet connections, doctors working in remote regions of northern Uganda during an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus would be able rapidly to transmit their findings to experts at the World Health Organization in Geneva and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

Before the arrival of the Internet, transferring detailed patient information of this kind could take as long as two weeks. In conditions like these, when the rapid dissemination of information is vital to treating infected persons and containing an outbreak, IT can provide tools for an efficient outbreak response.

Public health officials are also using new technologies to study the impact of health interventions and to target disease prevention programs. For example, health agencies have used satellite-based global positioning systems (GPS) to monitor the spread of West Nile Virus in the United States. Data collection and monitoring technologies like these increase the information available to public health officials when they make important health policy decisions.

Click here for more information on IT and health care: Free Music, Free Software, Free Medicine: Debates on Intellectual Property and Digital Medical Records.

Information Technology Applications in Health and Medicine

  • Patients will have access to their medical records from any location via secured Internet sites. Readily available medical records will help ensure that individuals receive appropriate care when traveling or changing medical institutions. 
  • New devices are able to determine the chemical content of blood when placed on top of the skin.  
  • A simple digital watch can be incorporated into a pill bottle-cap to record the time and date when the bottle was opened. This will allow medical personnel to monitor the use of medication by patients.

* Picture Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23065375@N05/2234741663/

 

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