Digitization is making great strides. Hardly any field remains unaffected, and this also applies without restriction to the health sector. But just as many people in other areas do not recognize at first glance what advantages digitalization can have for them there, it is also in medicine. This article therefore explains the 5 great advantages.
Unrestricted information
Anyone who reads these lines is already a medical-digital beneficiary. Because is an information portal for consumers. For example, if you look around in our diseases category, you will get information through digitalization that was only available to specialist staff just a few years ago.
The only alternatives were encyclopedias - often formulated in a way that was difficult for laypeople to understand, necessarily very limited in scope and constantly threatened with being out of date. The medical industry is one in which updates, knowledge expansions and rethinking happen in rapid succession. The medium of the book is not an adequate medium for constantly updated information.
But digital information is not only beneficial in terms of making a website easier to update. Because it is also true that storage space is much cheaper than paper and letterpress. would fill several volumes in book form and cost considerable amounts - medical knowledge would therefore be limited to a wealthy clientele.
Digitization has democratized health knowledge. It has made it more accessible, lower-threshold, easier to understand. And that is not only an informative benefit, but also contributes directly to public health - because everyone can find out free information about what is good for them at any time.
Acceptance of tasks
We live in a time when a swipe of the thumb on a smartphone display can operate the light, the TV transmitter, the heating, and even the front door. And just as digitization makes countless large and small tasks easier for us in the household, it also works in the medical field.
Let's start with insurance. Here the company Clark also acts as a digital insurance manager, but its main merit is that the Clark experts are available to the user via chat or telephone and provide individual advice to the user. Just because the app is algorithm-based, the user does not get a one-size-fits-all insurance, but an offer that is individually tailored to their needs. The user enters all his insurance data, such as amounts, deadlines and the like, into the app. This has three effects:
1. The simplest benefit is that all insurance documents can remain in the closet after they have been signed. All relevant information is in the app and can be clearly viewed and edited there.
2. All contracts can be checked and evaluated on request.
3. Alternatively, alternatives from other insurers can be searched and suggested automatically - in this case the service even takes over the termination.
But digitization can take off even more. It reminds us to take medication down to the exact number of tablets. It helps with sport, with preventive care, reminds you of treatment and preventive appointments. Yes, the non-profit platform washabich.de even provides translations of patient reports - carried out by voluntary medical students in the upper semesters. All of this makes complex medical points manageable and therefore safer for laypeople.
Simplified communication
If medical students are confronted with important historical moments in a few years' time, 2018 will most likely also be mentioned in Germany. The year in which what was technically possible for a long time also became possible through legal channels: telemedicine.
For two years now, German doctors have also been fully permitted to treat patients remotely within the framework of the medically acceptable patient. No less than a real milestone - which, however, could only become one through digitization:
- The possibilities of video telephony,
- Various programs for collecting medical data,
- Programs for digitization and transmission,
Only they made it possible for medical communication to break new ground. However, it should not be forgotten that the process began on the day on which the first health insurance patients received the health insurance card with chip, that was in 1995.
This detail alone simplified both patient-doctor and doctor-to-doctor communication, because at least the basic data was stored on a standardized medium. And overall, this not only simplifies communication, but also speeds up the entire communicative procedure, including administrative work - because where patient files are of course only maintained electronically, something can actually never get lost again, be illegible.
Accelerated, precise, simplified treatment
Every reader is likely to have come into contact with a digital blood pressure monitor at their family doctor. Perhaps a laser clinical thermometer, a finger clip for measuring oxygen saturation. He may also have been x-rayed. Not on film, but in such a way that the images appear directly on the screen.
It is above all such general applications that clearly show how important digital technology has become in medicine. Because even the best trained medical professional is always “only” a person with the potential for error. In medicine, these can be particularly significant - for example, because diagnoses are made incorrectly, diseases are not treated correctly, values are incorrectly interpreted.
There is a reason why medicine was one of those fields that integrated digital technologies particularly early and quickly. In the beginning it was the fact that these are more precise and many times faster than their analogue predecessors - let's think of a simple clinical thermometer with a digital display instead of a mercury column.
But the further the development progressed, the more capable the technology became. Today we are at a point where the human doctor still has the authority to make decisions. But he can rely on a gigantic range of programs and techniques that question, check and thus simplify and reinsure everything that has potential for error.
20 years ago, surgeons carried out a gallbladder removal with a surgical robot - across the Atlantic. Today the 5G technology, which is on the rise, shows what is possible when gigantic amounts of data can be transmitted in real time. Simply put, because of you, robotic hand operations can be performed that are even better and safer than the calmest surgeon's hands could ever do. The importance of this for the supply of remote areas with contemporary surgical methods can be foreseen.
Relief of the nursing staff
There are not enough caregivers in Germany. The problem is becoming more and more pressing in all countries with an aging population. But where digitization literally helps these forces with administrative tasks, it can literally do it today and even more so in the future.
We are on the threshold of an era in which the care robot is no longer just a gimmick at trade fairs. In the meantime, AI has really reached the point where it can complement people in this segment - the only skeptics actually seem to be those for whom the robots are supposed to make their work easier. However, since this is the only remaining hurdle, it should be easy to overcome.
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