New technologies in medicine
What else should be invented for you? What do you need? Which new technologies in medicine will bring a real breakthrough? These are the questions medical staff are constantly asked. High technology and healthcare professionals — these two elements often live side by side. The world produces a great deal of high-tech products, yet relatively few of them are made for hospitals or clinics.
To shed light on what medicine actually needs, a representative of the Center for Digital Health Innovation at the University of California, San Francisco met teaching staff and CARE experts from the university hospital in San Francisco and asked them a simple question: “What do you need? What can Silicon Valley inventors develop for you?”
The list was published with an invitation to start-ups, developers and IT professionals: “Please get in touch if you are working on any of the issues on this list.”
We are pleased to share this list of digital assistants and new medical technologies that could genuinely make patient care easier.
A virtual “supervisor”
A great deal of staff time goes into continuously monitoring the health of individual patients, especially those who are contagious or who have flare-ups that put themselves or recovering patients at risk. If even some of these monitoring and observation tasks could be taken on by robots, enormous savings would be achieved.
Artificial intelligence for the whole system
Various proposals have been put forward for algorithms to predict outcomes and support patients, covering areas such as certain devices, intensive care monitoring, vital signs, conclusions drawn from collected data, forecasts and so on.
The specialists surveyed in San Francisco, however, would like an even stronger connection across the entire hospital environment — that is, a system in which the whole setting (such as lighting or bed movement) adapts to the specific needs of each individual patient.
A direct link between medical equipment and the patient’s medical record
The problem is that nurses and doctors spend too much time on administrative tasks. Information that has to be passed from one document to another is too often duplicated. Streamlining this process would be a huge step forward.
For example, significant savings could be achieved simply by automating the link between a piece of medical equipment and the patient’s file, so that information about the procedure is recorded directly.
Telemedicine communities
Telemedicine means one-to-one contact between patient and doctor: the patient on one side of the screen, the doctor (or pharmacist, or specialist) on the other. There is a great need for virtual patient groups that would ease the burden on clinics whenever an issue can be resolved remotely.
Tools that give a clear picture of costs
The situation in Switzerland differs fundamentally from other countries, as most bills are paid in cash. The problem, though, is that patients do not understand medical bills. The healthcare professionals surveyed in San Francisco propose an ideal “ongoing” tool that presents the costs charged or planned for the patient step by step and in advance.
Pain management
There are some quite useful tools and digital assistants for managing chronic pain. However, a complex two-dimensional dashboard is inconvenient for patients. The data also needs to be integrated into the patient’s file, creating a single system for observing, monitoring and treating pain.
Dedicated applications for the medical office
Medical offices handle a vast number of administrative tasks at the same time. In addition to the need for general automation (see above), specific solutions for nurses and doctors are also required.
