Medicine  

The most revolutionary technology advance in medicine today may not be on the operating table, or in the incredible prosthetics now being developed, but in the back-end medical records systems. This critical link in the healthcare chain has seen big changes in the last few years.

Technology is transforming many different industries, including health care. While new advances in medical research tend to make headlines, they tend to only affect a few patients. The most revolutionary tech appears in record keeping. The storage of medical records seems like a boring element of healthcare, but it is actually a critical part of delivering care to patients and coordinating care between different doctors and specialists. The evolution of medical record-keeping has been a decades-long process that has finally started to bear fruit in the form of electronic medical records that centralize all medical data for patients.

The potential applications of EMR technology are powerful and diverse

The potential applications of EMR technology are powerful and diverse, and even though it doesn't get as much medical coverage as cancer research, it will have far deeper and longer-lasting effects on how people interact with the health care industry.

Why EMR?

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Every care provider from family doctors working alone up to major regional hospitals has used paper to store medical information, test results, and other information about their patients. Paper systems are difficult to search, take up a lot of space, and are hard to share between different physical locations. One of the most complex parts of medical care is when a team of specialists is working together on one patient, but are all located in different places. With paper records, it is hard for the entire team to see the important medical data for the patient. The only options for sharing the records are the mail and fax machines, both of which are cumbersome and inconvenient.

Electronic medical records change all that. A patient can have their family history, all of their testing, their vital statistics, and any other relevant information stored electronically. Then the entire care team can access the information instantly in real time. Furthermore, EMR storage is far easier than paper storage. It can be hard to replace one record-keeping system with another during an upgrade, but services like Health Data Archive support care providers as they transition from one system to a new one.

Legal Complications

Any EMR system needs to be safe and secure, because federal privacy laws require care providers to protect the medical information of all of their patients. Only authorized people, such as the care team, can legally access the data. That means information security is a paramount concern.

Electronic record-keeping promises to accelerate care delivery and provide both security and openness.

By Lizzie Weakley

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Medical Technology  

The field of medical technology continues to see incredible growth. Improved health care and quality of life mean happier people. Advances in medical technology are important to improvements in healthcare.

Medical technology involves a broad range of healthcare products. Such technology is applied in diagnosing, monitoring and treatment of diseases affecting humans. The techniques that entail medical science applications are geared towards improving health care quality. Diagnosis of diseases, minimization of hospital stays and reduction of late diagnosis of diseases are some of the most important applications of medical technology.

History

Medical technology has advanced by focusing on cost reduction through the use of biotechnology, information technology, and medical devices. Research can easily be done and informed decisions reached in a more conversant manner. For example, doctors can seek factual information by use of technology instead of listening to patients' information or reports that may be subjective in nature.

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Medical technology has improved from the use of primitive devices to more advanced devices. For example, doctors used to examine patients hearts manually by listening to the heartbeat with their ears. However with the advancement of the technology, they are now able to use advanced devices to diagnose diseases and be able to provide treatment to a well-known condition.

As the transformation is being realized in the medical technology, it has taken serious innovations to achieve the use of more sophisticated scanning technology. From the microscope, X-ray to the MRI. In the past, doctors had to see the tumor as opposed to present, where there are machines to diagnose it even at earlier stages.

To establish a new drug, they had to have repeated tests in laboratories that involved trial and error, but now it's easy through the use of information technology and biotechnology in the medical services.

The human genome project has made it remarkably easier to treat genetic diseases through a more personalized treatment arrangement. This collaborative project has been a significant milestone in the medical technology world.

Going forward

Further advances are being continuously developed. Recent advances include world's smallest pacemaker, drone ambulances, prosthetic arms printed by 3D printers and a glucose-sensing contact lens being developed by Google for diabetic patients. There are many working parts that contribute to the success of new machines and technology, like washers and machined parts from Phoenix Specialty.

The field of medical technology continues to see incredible growth. Improved health care and quality of life mean happier people. Advances in medical technology are important to improvements in healthcare.

By Anita Ginsburg

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Author Bio - Anita Ginsburg is a freelance writer from Denver, CO and often writes about business, finance, education and home. She graduated from Colorado State University in 2004. A mother of two, she enjoys traveling with her family when she isn’t writing.

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 Medicine  

In the developed world it is often easy to take medical care for granted.  Here are a few of the ways doctors are changing the world by preventing diseases and helping injured patients.

T

oday, people have forgotten that there was a time before there were physicians available to treat illnesses and injuries. While everyone may see shows on television depicting physicians working in hospitals and private practices, they forget that doctors are changing the world in numerous ways to prevent diseases and assist injured patients. The world of medicine has changed since the time of bloodletting to get rid of an illness or operating on patients without anesthesia.

Offering Charitable Medical Care

In many parts of the world there is no access to medical care, leading to the public having simple problems that are easily fixed but are untreated. While in the United States a child with a cleft palate or lip is operated on quickly, in third world countries, there is no access to surgeons to correct this common congenital defect. Nonprofit health care and medical organizations provide surgical procedures to repair congenital defects with volunteer physicians worldwide.

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Getting Involved in Politics

Physicians are getting involved in politics to make changes in how the government views health care for the public. In the United States, physicians have always had a presence in the government with approximately 20 currently serving as members of the United States Congress. They are often instrumental in helping other politicians understand the high cost of health care and how it is inaccessible to many citizens. The physicians serving in political roles are trained in a wide assortment of specialties, leading to providing vital information to the public.

More Physician Owned Hospitals

With many physicians frustrated with the bureaucracy involved in medical care in the United States, many are grouping together to control their own medical facilities. These physicians want to advocate for better medical care for patients rather than constantly worrying about the cost of treatments and insurance. Patients give physician owned medical facilities, like Nueterra, high scores for personalized treatment that indicates the hospital really cares about patients.

Promoting New Medical Treatments

Physicians work directly with patients and medical conditions, making them the best professionals to think of new medical treatments. Instead of new surgical techniques and treatments being inventing by researchers in a laboratory, physicians are taking the lead by devising unique solutions for devastating diseases such as cancer, acquired immune deficiency disorder and Alzheimer’s disease. Finding a cure for medical conditions is what many physicians did long ago before bureaucrats changed the system.

The Public Wants Physician Owned Hospital Medical Care

Many physicians are fighting for their rights to operate hospitals despite the government’s plans to make it more difficult. With the government taking control of more health care insurance plans, there are new regulations in place to make it harder for physician owned hospitals to receive reimbursements. The general public is voicing their opinions concerning these regulations because they want a higher level of medical care.

By Meghan Belnap

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 Medicine  

Technology has allowed doctors and patients alike to get more answers and have better access to health care. Here are just a few examples technology is making medicine better.

The world of health care has greatly benefited from technological advancements over the years. From X-rays and surgical devices to medical apps, we can all enjoy better health care at the hands of technology. Here are just a few ways improved health care is possible from modern advancements:

1. Sensors Save Lives

Sensors and wearable technology have life-saving potential. Medical alert pendants are one example. Electronic sensors detect falls in progress, and trigger the dispatch of medical responders. With the touch of a button, a person in an emergent state can summon immediate assistance.

The Sproutling baby monitor eliminates worry about SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and is an example of how sensors are impacting the medical field. It's a wearable device that straps onto a baby's ankle and interfaces with a base communication device and mobile app.

The system monitors a baby's heartbeat, body temperature, movement, and the noise level in a room. It also tracks a baby's sleep patterns and behaviors. There are many wearable sensors that can help with almost any health condition you may have.

2. Smartphones Monitor Health

Smartphone apps for health are cousins with wearable technology. Medical professionals use mobile apps to access diagnostic and treatment information. Their patients use apps to monitor body functions of food intake, calorie burn, and heart rate. Apple HealthKit and Google Fit can transmit this data directly to doctors.

The BRisk app, developed by a surgeon, includes values, formulas and tables to evaluate a woman's risk for breast cancer. The GI Monitor app logs symptoms of digestive disorders, such as ulcerative colitis, which can be used to tailor treatment.

Medical devices attached to smartphones have revolutionized health care. IBGStar is a blood glucose meter that plugs into an iPhone. It tracks carbohydrate intake, blood glucose, and insulin doses. The Withings Blood Pressure Monitor uses a cuff device that attaches to an iPhone. It records blood pressure, dates readings and stores results.

3. Less-Invasive Scanners Detect Pathology

Melanoma is the most deadly type of skin cancer. Until recently, the only way to accurately assess a mole for malignancy was by invasive surgical biopsy. The MelaFind Optical Scanner takes the guesswork out of cancer diagnosis, without surgery. Approved by the FDA, it is a hand-held tool that analyzes skin tissue. MelaFind uses technology initially developed for missile navigation to scan the surface of a suspicious lesion. The signals collected are then processed and compared with a photo registry of images.

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4. Technology Tracks Pregnancies

Physicians use ultrasound to track conditions of pregnancy. Obstetrical 4D ultrasound achieves the highest imaging quality. Ultrasounds are used to assess fetal growth, birth defects, amniotic fluid level, chromosome abnormalities, placental location and umbilical cord malformation. Pregnancy is also monitored with fetal heart rate machines. With the help of technology, doctors can track pregnancy milestones more easily and detect any health concerns.

5. Portal Technology Streamlines Healthcare

A patient portal is an online website that provides a point-of-contact between patients and doctors. With a username and password, you have 24-hour access to your personal health information. You can track lab results, medications and immunizations. You can download and complete forms to expedite office visits. Payments can be made. Many portals enable you to obtain prescription refills and referrals. You can schedule appointments. Some clinicians provide the opportunity to communicate via e-mail.

Even from home with the internet and smartphone apps, anyone can get more involved in their health care. Technology has allowed doctors and patients alike to get more answers and have better access to health care.


SOURCE  Dr. Gilbert Webb at Mercy.net

By Anita Ginsburg

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Author Bio - Anita Ginsburg is a freelance writer from Denver, CO and often writes about business, finance, education and home. She graduated from Colorado State University in 2004. A mother of two, she enjoys traveling with her family when she isn’t writing.

 Anti-Aging  

By the year 2050, the number of people over the age of 80 will triple globally. This unprecedented demographic shift could come at great cost to individuals and economies. Now researchers are raising the alarm over the need to fight aging.

Medicine focuses almost entirely on fighting chronic diseases in a piece-meal fashion as symptoms develop. Instead, as many of our readers know, more efforts should be directed to promoting interventions that have the potential to prevent multiple chronic diseases and extend healthy lifespans.

Now, researchers writing in the journal Nature say that by treating the metabolic and molecular causes of human aging, it may be possible to help people stay healthy into their 70s and 80s.

In the researchers commentary, the trio of aging experts calls for moving forward with pre-clinical and clinical strategies that have been shown to delay aging in animals. In addition to promoting a healthy diet and regular exercise, these strategies include slowing the metabolic and molecular causes of human aging, such as the incremental accumulation of cellular damage that occurs over time.

"You don’t have to be a mathematician or an economist to understand that our current health care approach is not sustainable."

The researchers, at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Brescia University in Italy, the Buck Institute for Aging and Research and the Longevity Institute at the University of Southern California, write that economic incentives in biomedical research and health care reward treating disease more than promoting good health.

“You don’t have to be a mathematician or an economist to understand that our current health care approach is not sustainable,” said first author Luigi Fontana, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and nutrition at Washington University and Brescia University. “As targeting diseases has helped people live longer, they are spending more years being sick with multiple disorders related to aging, and that’s expensive.”

The diseases of old age — such as heart failure, diabetes, arthritis, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease — tend to come as a package, the researchers write. More than 70 percent of people over age 65 have two or more chronic diseases. But, they noted, studies of diet, genes and drugs indicate that interventions targeted to specific molecular pathways that delay one age-related disease often stave off others, too.
“Heart failure doesn’t happen all at once,” Fontana said.

“It takes 30 or 40 years of an unhealthy lifestyle and activation of aging-related pathways from metabolic abnormalities such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes to give a person heart failure in his 60s. So we propose using lifestyle interventions — such as a personalized healthy diet and exercise program — to down-regulate aging pathways so the patient avoids heart failure in the first place.”

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His own research has highlighted potential benefits from dietary restriction in extending healthy life span. He has found that people who eat significantly fewer calories, while still getting optimal nutrition, have “younger,” more flexible hearts. They also have significantly lower blood pressure, much less inflammation in their bodies and their skeletal muscles function in ways similar to muscles in people who are significantly younger.

Fontana and his co-authors also point out that several molecular pathways shown to increase longevity in animals also are affected by approved and experimental drugs, including rapamycin, an anticancer and organ-rejection drug, and metformin, a drug used to treat type 2 diabetes.
Numerous natural and synthetic molecules affect pathways shared by aging, diabetes and its related metabolic syndrome. Also, healthy diets and calorie restriction are known to help animals live up to 50 percent longer.

But it’s been difficult to capitalize on research advances to stall aging in people. Fontana and his colleagues write that most clinicians don’t realize how much already is understood about the molecular mechanisms of aging and their link to chronic diseases. And scientists don’t understand precisely how the drugs that affect aging pathways work.

Fontana and his colleagues contend that the time is right for moving forward with preclinical and clinical trials of the most promising findings from animal studies. They also call for developing well-defined endpoints to determine whether work in animals will translate to humans. They are optimistic on that front because it appears that the nutrient-sensing and aging-related pathways in humans are very similar to those that have been targeted to help animals live longer and healthier lives.

But challenges abound. The most important change, they argue, is in mindset. Economic incentives in biomedical research and health care reward treating diseases more than promoting good health, they note.

“But public money must be invested in extending healthy lifespan by slowing aging. Otherwise, we will founder in a demographic crisis of increased disability and escalating health care costs,” they write in Nature.

“The combination of an aging population with an increased burden of chronic diseases and the epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes could soon make healthy care unaffordable for all but the richest people,” Fontana added.



SOURCE  Washington University in St. Louis

By 33rd Square

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 Artificial Intelligence  

At a recent TEDx talk, IBM's Manoj Saxena gave a talk which delivered, as promised, not an IBM commercial, but delved into what the true potential of cognitive computing systems like Watson are in the future.

It has already been two years since IBM's Watson defeated the world's best Jeopardy! players and forever changed how we look at artificial intelligence.

From that point on, understanding information, not data was recognized as an area where computation could be implemented.  Computational speed combined with understanding is what this era of digital processing is becoming.

According to IBM's Manoj Saxena, there have been three big shifts in the history of knowledge: development of alphabets, development of the printing press, and development of the Internet.  Now, the next leap will be when artificial intelligence, or cognitive computing systems begin.  Systems, like Watson learn by reading, just like people do, making a whole new paradigm.  Other systems like Google Now and Apple's Siri also use conversational systems but not to the level of Watson.

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Saxena says Watson is less about programming, and more about actual learning by reading (at a rate of 200 million pages in three seconds) and working with people.  Saxena believes that this essentially means that the system is capturing the knowledge of the individual, such as those of a cancer expert.  Watson also learns from the answers that users select.

Already, Watson is beginning to impact the world of medicine.  Saxena believes the AI system is already working with the knowledge level of a first-year medical student. By the time today's students enter and leave medical school, the knowledge has doubled.  There is no way to catch up, let alone stay ahead for an unassisted person.  Watson's use therefore is to cover all of the research and disseminate the information and aid in decision-making with probabilistic certainty.

To prove Watson's capability, Saxena is pushing to have Watson pass the US Medical Licensing exam.

One of the major advances in Watson has been to shrink the size of the room-sized machine to the size of a single server.  The new "baby Watson," is now 9" x 18" x 36" and weighs about 100 pounds.  On top of that, the system is 240 times faster than the system that won on Jeopardy! These developments will make Watson use more widespread, compounded by the use of the system on the cloud.  One area IBM is exploring is using Waston in call centers (see video below).

Saxena is an Indian-American business executive, serial entrepreneur, accomplished CEO, inventor, investor, and philanthropist with interests in education, innovation, and automotive racing. Saxena is currently the General Manager for IBM Watson Solutions -- announced on March 2011. In this capacity he is responsible for the commercialization and scaling of IBM Watson, a new class of industry specific analytical solutions.



SOURCE  TEDx Talks

By 33rd Square

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