New Technologies and Medicine
What else needs to be invented for you? What do you need? What new technologies in medicine will provide a real breakthrough? These are the questions that healthcare professionals constantly ask their patients. High technology and healthcare specialists—these two components often coexist side by side. While the world produces a lot of high-tech products, there are not so many for hospitals or clinics.
To shed light on what medicine specifically needs, a representative from the Center for Digital Innovations in Healthcare at the University of San Francisco met with teachers and CARE experts from the University of San Francisco Hospital. He asked them a simple question: "What do you need? What can inventors from Silicon Valley develop for you?"
A list was published—with an invitation to startups, developers, and computer professionals: "Please contact us if you are working on any issue from the list!"
We are pleased to provide you with a list of digital assistants and new technologies in medicine that could truly facilitate patient care.
A lot of labor resources are spent on continuous monitoring of the health status of individual patients, especially infectious individuals, or those who experience periods of exacerbation of the disease, putting themselves or others at risk during the recovery stage. If at least some of the monitoring and observation tasks could be taken over by robots, tremendous savings would be achieved.
Various proposals have been submitted regarding algorithms for patient prognosis and support, such as some devices for monitoring in the intensive care unit, vital data, conclusions after data collection, forecasts, etc.
However, experts surveyed in San Francisco would like to establish an even stronger connection throughout the hospital environment. In other words, to develop a system in which the entire environment (such as lighting or bed movement) adapts to the specific needs of each individual patient.
The problem is that nurses and doctors spend too much time on administrative tasks. Too often, messages that should be transmitted from one document to another are duplicated. Optimizing this process would be a huge step forward.
Example: significant savings could be achieved on its own if there is automation between any medical facility and the patient's record, to include information about the procedure directly.
Telemedicine involves one-on-one contact between a patient and a doctor. On one side of the screen is the patient, and on the other is the doctor (or pharmacist, or specialist). There is a great need for virtual patient groups that would relieve clinics when the issue can be resolved remotely.
The situation in Switzerland is fundamentally different from other countries, as most bills are paid in cash. However, the problem is that patients do not understand medical bills. The proposal from healthcare professionals surveyed in San Francisco is to provide an ideal tool "on a continuous basis," namely, step by step and in advance presenting the expenses accrued or planned for the patient.
There are quite useful tools and digital assistants to combat chronic pain. However, a complex panel with a two-dimensional image is inconvenient for patients. It is also necessary to ensure that the data is integrated into the patient's file, leading to a unified system for monitoring, monitoring, and treating pain.
Offices simultaneously solve a huge number of administrative tasks. In addition to the need for general automation (see above, point 3), specific proposals are also required for nurses and doctors.