Technology in medicine is paving the way for patients to access better care. by Kirthi Korattur
Powering medicine In the Doctor’s Office
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ou walk into the doctor’s office and sit on the examination table, the exam table paper beneath you crinkling loudly. As the doctor logs into their computer and begins to type in your height and weight, you look around the room, glancing at the various instruments hanging on the walls, from sphygmometers to ophthalmoscopes. Suddenly, you realize that you are surrounded by technology. Technology currently being developed and used across the United States allows doctors to increase their impact on patients and better care for them. Technological innovations make practicing medicine more convenient and enable patients to receive procedures that are more efficient and less damaging. Telemedicine, 3-D imaging systems, bioelectricity and robotic surgery are only some of the technologies that are improving patient’s lives.
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Electronic Medical Records, or EMRs, record data regarding a patient’s health, such as their blood pressure, oxygen level, heart rate and prescriptions. EMRs keep information safe and make it easier for the information to be transferred. Dheepa Ramasamy practices internal medicine at the Houston Methodist West Hospital in Houston, Texas. Ramasamy received her Doctor of Medicine from the Thanjavur Medical College in Thanjavur, India. “There’s no more paper charts,” Ramasamy said. “It’s all digitized. It’s easy to record data, it’s easy to store it [and] it’s easy to send it.” EMRs have allowed doctors to digitally send prescriptions to the pharmacy. This avoids errors and better ensures that the patient receives the medicine they need. Mia Markey is a professor in computational biomedical engineering and researches technology to help breast cancer patients.
Markey is part of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and focuses on providing data and images to women seeking breast reconstruction. While EMRs have their benefits, they still have some issues that must be resolved. For example, data may not be transferable if two offices use different systems incompatible with each other, Markey said. Although EMRs can make storing information easier, the process of entering the data can be difficult. “There is a lot of information to go into the health record; it’s created a burden in some places on providers,” Markey said. EMRs result in “additional new work and new paperwork that [healthcare providers] have to do, that they actually didn’t do before,” Markey said. Outside of EMRs, even the stethoscopes that measure a patient’s heart rate or a sphygmomanometer, which measures a person’s blood pressure, are examples of technology used in medicine. A Computed Tomography Scan, or CT Scan, is used to obtain a more detailed assessment of a patient’s organs, while avoiding the risk of harming a patient when cutting into their skin to diagnose them. Before, doctors performing laparotomy would have to “open up the abdomen to see what’s wrong,” Ramasamy said. “Now, you can just send them for a CT scan. It’s like
