Healthcare has seen some huge advancement in recent times. Many new medical sensors and gadgets are capable of monitoring a patient’s health in real-time from anywhere in the world. Now, a new type of technology is being tested where machines will handle many parts of the job, and won’t require healthcare workers to show up in person.
Primary care physician Neil Singh of Brighton and Sussex Medical School, in an essay on Wired, talks about how the new tech will change healthcare for better or worse. He explains that some traditions in medicine might no longer exist after remote sensing technology continues to grow exponentially.
New technology can potentially save countless lives
The story talks about how these sensors are demonstrating the potential to save many lives. With the aid of real-time biometric analysis, they might be able to determine a patient’s deteriorating condition hours before a doctor or nurse happens to understand it.
Singh also talks about a patient who died in the hospital, wondering whether the advanced tech could have potentially saved his life.
“Remote patient monitoring technologies also have another potential: to uncouple patients from their health workers, allowing the theoretically limitless distance between the two,” Singh wrote.
Doctors might never visit hospitals
The essay gives an insight into what will be the role of doctors in a future where technology takes over their jobs and potentially make visiting hospitals redundant. The essay also provides introspection of what it could mean for the future of healthcare. With the advent of new technologies, healthcare workers across the globe might be able to save more people who dy due to lack of medical resources.
The new tech “may mean that doctors are always watching, but never there. I may be guilty of nostalgia; one could argue that remote monitoring is simply a predictable, and welcome, next step in finding safer ways to keep an eye on patients,” he said.
