April 26, 2009
How Technology Is Changing the Medical Profession
In an article this week in US News and World Report, Bernadine Healy, M.D. cites three innovations based on information technology - clinical practice guidelines, electronic medical records, and large-scale population science will bring medicine into a new biological revolution.
Population Science
The disconnect between public health and personal health is changing as epidemiology and biostatistics offer a kind of macroscope that complements the microscope and stethoscope in assessing environmental and biological factors that underlie individual diseases. Also in controlled clinical studies, epidemiological principles have become the gold standard for evaluating medical interventions.
Guidelines
Evidence-based guidelines promote more uniform and higher quality care. However, in clinical practice, guidelines can help but not supplant critical thinking. Some physicians could oversimplify an illness or miss the specifics of an individual treatment by charting therapy based on statistics.
EMR
"Another innovation that will benefit patient care is the integrated electronic medical record, which will make information more available, more accessible, and more accurate. A powerful side benefit will accrue to population research itself because computerized information on virtually every American can be compiled, searched, shared, and analyzed. The government assures the public of medical privacy, but it will be the responsibility of the physician to see this is honored, for it is physicians, not the government, who have taken an oath to protect the secrets of their patients."
The national medical record will improve continuity and minimize redundancy of care. "Integrating electronic medical records with reimbursement data will make immediately transparent the economic implications of the doctor's pen. This information should help physicians rein in inappropriate costs. It will also make it imperative for them to weigh in when arbitrary reimbursements inappropriately deny their patients care."
Information technology is ushering in changes with the hope of making medicine better and safer. "It will be the obligation of the physician to make sure that it remains high touch as well as high tech."
Source:
US News & World Report