Digitalization is advancing with great strides. Hardly any field remains unaffected by it, and this applies without restriction to the healthcare sector as well. However, just as many people in other fields do not recognize at first glance what advantages digitization can have for them there, the same is true in the medical field. This article therefore clarifies the 5 major advantages.
Unrestricted information
Whoever reads these lines is already a medical-digital beneficiary. Because MedLexi.de is an information portal for the consumer. For example, anyone who browses our category of diseases will, through digitization alone, get information that was reserved exclusively for professionals just a few years ago. The only alternatives were encyclopedias – often formulated in a way that was difficult for laypersons to understand, necessarily severely limited in scope, and constantly threatened with being out of date. The medical sector is one in which updates, knowledge expansions, and even rethinking happen in rapid succession. The medium of books is not an adequate vehicle for constantly updated information. However, digital information is not only an asset in terms of the ease with which a website can be updated. For it is also true that storage space is incomparably cheaper than paper and book printing. In book form, MedLexi.de would fill several volumes and cost considerable sums – medical knowledge would thus remain limited to a wealthy clientele. Digitization has democratized health knowledge. It has made it more accessible, less complicated and easier to understand. And that is not only an informative gain, but also contributes directly to public health – because everyone can find out what is good for them at any time, free of charge.
Decrease tasks
We live in a time when a swipe of the thumb on a smartphone screen can control the lights, the TV channel, the heating, even the front door. And just as digitization makes countless tasks large and small easier for us in the home, it’s also working in the medical field. Let’s start with insurance. Here, Clark also acts as a digital insurance manager, but its main merit is that Clark experts are available to users via chat or phone and provide individualized advice. Just because the app is algorithm-based, the user does not get a one-size-fits-all insurance policy, but an offer tailored to his or her individual needs. The user enters all his or her insurance data into the app, such as sums, deadlines and the like. This has three effects:
1. the simplest benefit is that all insurance documents may remain in the cabinet after signing. All relevant information is in the app and can be clearly viewed and edited there. 2. all contracts can be checked and evaluated if desired. 3. alternatives with other insurers can be automatically searched and suggested – in which case the service even takes care of the cancellation. But digitization can do even more. It reminds us to take medication, right down to the exact number of tablets. It helps with sports, preventive care, and reminds us of treatment and preventive care appointments. Yes, the non-profit platform washabich.de even provides translations of patient findings – carried out by volunteer medical students in the upper semesters. Through all of this, even complex medical points become manageable for laypeople and thus safer.
Simplified communication
When medical students are confronted with important historical moments in a few years, 2018 will most likely be mentioned in Germany. The year in which what had long been technically a given also became possible by legal means: telemedicine. For two years now, German physicians have also been fully permitted to treat patients remotely within the bounds of what is medically justifiable. Nothing less than a real milestone – but one that could only become such thanks to 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 already began on the day the first patients with health insurance received the health insurance card with chip, which was in 1995. This detail alone simplified both patient-doctor communication and communication between doctors, because at least the basic data was stored on a uniform medium. And all in all, this not only simplified communication, but also significantly accelerated the entire communicative procedure, including administrative work – because where, of course, patient records are now only maintained electronically, nothing can actually ever get lost or become illegible again.
Accelerated, specified, simplified treatment
One of the great strengths of medical digital technology is to prevent errors on a grand scale. Probably every reader has already come into contact with a digital blood pressure monitor at his or her family doctor’s office. Perhaps a laser fever thermometer, a finger clip for measuring oxygen saturation. Possibly he has also been x-rayed. Not on film, but in such a way that the images appeared directly on the screen. It is general applications such as these that show particularly succinctly how important digital technology has become in medicine. After all, even the best-trained medical professional is “only” a human being with the potential for error. In medicine, these can be of particular consequence – for example, because diagnoses are made incorrectly, diseases are not treated correctly, values are misinterpreted. There is a reason why medicine was one of the 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 analog predecessors – think of a simple clinical thermometer with a digital display instead of a mercury column. But the further development progressed, the more capable the technology became. Today, we are at a point where the human physician still has the decision-making authority. But he or she can rely on a gigantic breadth of programs and techniques that scrutinize, check and thus simplify and reassure everything that has potential for error. As early as 20 years ago, surgeons were performing gall bladder removals via a surgical robot – across the Atlantic. Today, 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 it, surgeries can be performed by robotic hands that are even better and safer than the steadiest surgeon’s hands ever could. It is possible to foresee what significance this will have for the provision of contemporary surgical methods to remote areas.
Relieving the burden on caregivers
Nurses are in short supply, and not just in Germany. The problem is becoming more pressing in all states with aging populations. But where digitization is already literally helping these forces with administrative tasks, it can do so today and even more literally in the future. We are on the threshold of an era in which the nursing robot is no longer just a gimmick at trade shows. By now, AI has truly reached the point where it can complement humans in this segment – in fact, the only skeptics seem to be those for whom robots are supposed to make their jobs easier. However, since that is the only remaining hurdle, it should be easy to overcome.
