Predictive Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Database Management- everything can be combined and used to create a digitized medical world, where your healthcare is handled in the most advanced and able hands. With advancing technology, healthcare and detection of diseases become more accurate and easy, preventing heavy tolls on life or a family’s finances. Here are the top benefits of digitization in the healthcare industry.

Improved Patient-Doctor Coordination

Keeping track and records of your health has been less of a paper-filing hassle and more of updating it on a computer file, every time you return from the doctor’s clinic. Tests, reports, diagnoses, and other medical history doesn’t need to be gathered up in loose sheets and stored in the same old, primitive way. It becomes really difficult to retrieve all these documents at the time of the next check-up or say, at the time of an emergency. Thanks to a digital filing system, the medical history of a patient can be maintained on both ends- the patient himself as well as the doctor. Moreover, uploading your regular medical visits and other information into a Cloud file and giving your doctor access to edit or add items can be as helpful as it is easy to do! In case of an emergency when a completely uninformed doctor is handling your healthcare, it is a literally life-saving to have a chronologically arranged list of all your medical data.

Automated Administration

Administrative expenditure in the United States accounts for more than 25% of their expenditure on hospitals, as a whole, which is higher than in most first-world countries. Fact check on something pretty disturbing- doctors spend even less than only one third their time spent in the hospital, with patients. Most of their time is lost doing administrative tasks. A simpler job for doctors is to enter patient details and notes about them into an electronic record-keeping system. 

This isn’t completely efficient though. How can digitization step in here? Computers can do what they’re best at doing: automatic tasks. Artificial Intelligence (commonly known as AI) can help provide reminders and advice on prescriptions. This will reduce the time doctors waste on data entry and help them completely focus on their patients.

Interaction with Patient

Till about a decade ago, a patient-doctor interaction used to be, kind, of one-sided. Patients used to blindly obey the prescriptions and instructions provided by doctors without questioning their methods or asking to know the issue they were actually dealing with. Now, healthcare isn’t just a prescription-and-medicine transaction, and definitely not one-way; it has become a lot like a business transaction (of course, with some distinctions). Interaction with the patient has become much more prevalent because of the digitization of the healthcare remedies. Technology has enabled doctors to keep track of what’s going on with the patient and let them know immediately when they see any anomaly. Patients, in turn, have the privilege to dial into their doctors anytime they need. Hence, the interaction is now from both ends.

Mapping Physical Health

Ever owned a fitness band? What do fitness bands do? From monitoring your heart rate to counting how many steps you have walked. From counting the number of lunges, you did yesterday to how much water you’ve consumed today. There are mobile applications that track a woman’s menstrual cycle. There are devices that measure your blood sugar level in a span of 2 minutes. Almost every basic level of healthcare is covered by these devices. All of the information tracked into the devices is flowing into your smartphone, and your smartphone, in turn, is logged into a cloud account. So, all this information about your health can be directly accessed by your doctor, and he can keep track of your health on a regular basis. AI and predictive analysis track the pattern of your health and warm you if/when there’s a serious health problem coming.

Increased Awareness

Many people search for the symptoms of their illness on the internet instead of doing the tedious task of going to a doctor’s clinic. Some even share their symptoms on social media groups with others suffering from the same problems, where they discuss and come up with self-prescribed solutions for their illnesses. What they fail to understand is that even two people having the exact same symptoms might have different problems. This is because health problems occur due to various other factors like genetic causes, climatic conditions, allergies, living conditions, etc. So, for these stubborn masses, there’s a highly specialized community of doctors who can help give individual attention (through the internet though) to a single patient and their problem and educate them about the different causes and cures of the illness. This isn’t a match for physical visits, but can at least prevent deaths due to wrong self-medication (yes, this happens a LOT around the world).

Safety of Medical Data

Physical data in the form of files and papers and x-rays aren’t always possible to maintain throughout one’s lifetime. They can get easily misplaced, lost, destroyed due to various reasons, or messed up with other papers. A digital database of an individual’s healthcare information can be uploaded into Cloud, and that is virtually present forever! Accessing and editing these databases is much easier compared to hard copies of the same. And you don’t have to carry around a bulk of the paper and call it your medical history, every time you visit a doctor!

I hope this article was helpful to you. Start digitizing your healthcare today!