By Despite the benefits of health technology, there is some Dark Side to it too. Let’s have a look at them:
Technology solutions are assisting healthcare professionals in improving performance, increasing cooperation across systems, and managing costs as the industry faces new challenges. As the demands on enterprises grow, health technology can help firms optimize procedures, automate jobs, and enhance workflows on a scale that people can’t. These solutions are assisting healthcare personnel in improving patient care, creating better experiences, and reducing burnout as hospitals and healthcare systems adopt value-based health reimbursement models. However, caveats exist with this change in Health Technology. They are
Cost:
Technology brings down prices in practically every area of the economy, just as your digital camera grows better and cheaper every year, so does technology drive down the cost of manufacturing, retailing, and research. But, for some reason, technology in healthcare has the reverse effect: instead of cutting expenses, it increases them. Medical technology, from CT scans to stents to biologics, is a major contributor to health care spending’s 10% annual increase rate, which is roughly three times the rate of inflation.
According to a Massachusetts state audit, healthcare expenses increased by 20% between 2006 and 2008, owing mostly to new imaging technology. Digital mammography, the new – and pricey – approach to checking for breast cancer, had the biggest rise. Scalable technology in healthcare is unusually hard to come by. There is no shortage of technology; it’s just that it doesn’t appear to be improving and becoming cheaper at the same rate as the rest of the universe. This is particularly odd given that CT scans and pacemakers, to name two commonly blamed cost drivers, rely on the same digital technology that is becoming more affordable outside of healthcare.
In the medical technology sector, there is much too little pricing transparency. Hospitals and clinics can’t know whether there’s a better bargain elsewhere without an open marketplace of pricing and services, and manufacturers may keep costs high. Second, and probably more importantly, medical technologies continue to rely on a select group of experts to implement them. We may have all become amateur navigators as a result of GPS, but we haven’t all become amateur radiologists as a result of CT scans. To put the technology to work, those highly skilled and costly professionals are still required, making it hard to completely automate a process. As a result, technology remains expensive to use, and expenses continue to rise.
Technology being counterintuitive:
As technology continues to have a positive impact on our everyday lives in a variety of ways, we must also be aware of its negative consequences, even in the operating room (OR). The negative aspects of OR technologies and the overburden it causes might range from slight user annoyance to patient death. A Chicago man died in 2007 as a result of the exact “hands” of a surgical robot controlled by a surgeon who’d never used the technology on a real subject. This sad incident exemplifies the dark side of health information technology (HIT), which includes medical gadgets that assist health care providers.
The OR’s equipment produces an incredible amount of visual and auditory data. Electronic monitoring at one hospital’s five intensive care units (ICU) produced over 2.5 million alarms in a single month, according to a recent New York Times report. To make matters worse, equipment standards are so lacking that a sound made by one type of equipment may indicate that all is okay, while a similar sound emitted by another machine indicates that immediate attention is required. As per the ECRI Institute, alarms were the No. 1 healthcare technology danger from 2012 to 2015.
In most cases, technology is not the issue. Training metrics that measure the capacity to apply clinical judgment to the use of a device, as well as competency in its use, must be created, and OR/HIT training should be informed by analogies or examples of instruction in other complex systems. This training must not be placed only in the hands of the equipment maker. Our medical system’s market-driven approach has resulted in a massive technological revolution that has been beneficial, but it has occasionally been provided to end consumers prematurely.
