Medical technology

Looking at the advancement of technology over the last two centuries is a sobering experience and to be honest, I haven’t given much thought as to what these advancements mean to a me as an MHA student. Will healthcare be a place where I can find job satisfaction?

In order to answer this question, I must first consider how the rapid advancement of technology will change the healthcare environment and then consider the ramifications of these changes. I will try to consider the organization, financing and delivery of healthcare while making my analysis.

I looked up the term, “medical technology” on Wikipedia and here is what I found:

“Medical technology refers to the diagnostic or therapeutic application of science and technology to improve the management of health conditions. Technologies may encompass any means of identifying the nature of conditions to allow intervention with devices, pharmacological, biological or other methods to increase life span and/or improve the quality of life.” According to this website, “the three largest companies active in this sector are Siemens A.G., GE and Philips.”

The website also lists roughly 20 (and opportunities to click and explore) examples of some of the technologies in use today.

From this view, it looks as if technology has greater effects on the delivery of care than perhaps any other arm of the industry. Of course, this is not the only area of the system that will be affected but probably the one that requires the most scrutiny—especially in light of the political climate of today where many are looking to the “healthcare home” model to improve quality and manage costs.

Certainly, the vision of being ushered into a room to have some machine perform some diagnostic test or therapeutic intervention seems rather cold when compared to the Norman Rockwell on your grandmother’s kitchen wall. I have read countless articles and research papers wherein large numbers of individuals feel somehow cheated by the “drive-by” service they get from providers. Will the introduction of these technologies exacerbate the “lack of personal attention” that is already a problem? Or, will technologies free up physician’s time which can in turn be spent with patients?

Another sure-bet as far as technology and healthcare goes is the design, development, and implementation of EMR systems. Today at the Washington Health Legislative Conference I was reintroduced to the idea of a 3rd party medical records storage provider. This provider operates a bit like igoogle. Insurance companies will contract with these third parties (who will contract with one another) and patients will store all of their lab test results, X-rays, medical histories and so forth on some server maintained by the third party. Each person will have an access code and will give the code to whomever they see fit, including providers. Some organizations will go other directions with this. Some will buy, some will hire and build, and some will hire for design and build themselves. At any rate, eventually all companies will have to implement some type of EMR system if they want to stay competitive. I wonder just how much cost savings are really involved here.

Some medical technology (if not most) helps sick people to live longer. In a world where insurance is supposed to spread risk but each player vies for the healthiest enrollee’s, I wonder if the distribution of these advancements will be fair and equitable. Lots of policy stuff here…What about overuse or underuse of technology? If cost containment is already so HUGE, what will the influx of new, expensive technologies mean in terms of costs?

Taken from the CNW Group website at http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/August2008/21/c5740.html

CT exams per 1,000 people performed 2007
Canada (103)
United States (207)
Belgium (138)
Sweden (89)
Spain (57)
England (54)
Denmark (34)

Rate of MRI exams per 1,000 2007
Canada (31)
England (25)
Spain (21)
Denmark (17)
U.S. (89)
Belgium (43)
Sweden (39)

Well, it doesn't seem as if Americans are adverse to technology, looking at this data! However, a CT scan or an MRI is a far cry from sitting in a doctor's office with a machine to take your pulse and temperature, check your heart rate or measure your height. Which I believe is where we are headed.

Medical technology will no doubt affect the world of healthcare across the entire system. Questions of quality, policy, workforce training & recruitment, equity, availability, social perceptions, and many more are on the horizon. All of which I feel confident that I would like to explore further, thereby increasing my interest in the industry. Moreover, I believe that medical technology has much to offer the healthcare industry in the way of increasing quality of care and improving business processes. I believe that I can find job satisfaction as a leader in healthcare and I also believe that healthcare will gain with the advancement of technologies.