Technology in Health Care

It is apparent that the cost of health care is a major issue concerning Americans today. Various Presidents have been working with the government to try and create a plan to reduce the costs of health care. But how can technology play a role in reducing the cost?

I think that the general umbrella of how technology can affect health care costs is by improving health informatics systems and prevention systems. By keeping the community generally healthy and by activating immediate response plans when mass illness or epidemics first strike, health care costs will automatically go down. "Grand Challenges for Engineering", a plan for understanding and improving health, defines a goal for bioengineers as follows: "Biomedical engineers envision a new system of distributed computing tools that will collect authorized medical data about people and store it securely within a network designed to help deliver quick and efficient care."

This should be the general mantra of how technology can help reduce health care costs. Technology to make transferring information more efficient will completely cut out the cost of any unnecessary treatment, medication, or evaluation.

Based on this idea, here are a few ways to try and implement technology in reducing the cost of health care...

1. A completely computerized and standardized system that would be used to document patient information through health care systems across the United States. With one standardized system, information could be transferred immediately from place to place, reducing time and materials in recollecting information. Also, it would be useful in being able to transfer materials among different hospitals if places used the same type of information system.

2. Technology to gather healthcare information at any point in time could eliminate nonsense trips to the doctor. Grand Challenges proposed "wireless integrated microsystems, or WIMS", which are tiny monitoring systems embedded in either clothing or within the body that could monitor one's basic vital signs such as temperature and pulse. However, not only would the WIMS be able to detect vitals at home, but they could run on the same programming as the patient databases in hospitals and transmit any necessary information to hospitals from home. "WIMS could alert health professionals when a patient needs attention, or even trigger automatic release of drugs into the body when necessary," according to Grand Challenges for Engineering.

3. Surveillance and detection technology to monitor early changes in the components of air, water, soil, and food could alert government and health care systems of signs of attack or early signs of epidemic. Changes here that could affect massive numbers of people would need to be detected early on and treated early, therefore eliminating any extra costs that come with more advanced stages of the problem.

4. Technology to improve the general health of the public could reduce health care costs because fewer people would be getting sick, and thus less money would need to be spent on treatment. This involves installing any systems that could keep air and water more sanitary, homes and cities more sanitary, and food more nourishing.

These four principles are by no means a cure to the health care cost issue. However, they do show how technology could form the basis of reforms necessary to reduce costs. If implemented correctly and efficiently, in compliance with hospitals, government systems, and society in general, technology could greatly improve the efficiency of the health care system.

Source: "Grand Challenges for Engineering." Atkins, Randy. 2008.