How Medical Diagnosis Has Been Impacted By IT

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As per discussed by Sudir Raju in previous articles, as of the fourth industrial revolution and the emergence of today’s different IT technologies, pretty much every sector of the economy and the industry, in general, has adopted to some extent the use of this avant-garde aid. Thus, today, a considerable variety of different technologies and other tools are used in the medical diagnostic process all across the world; however, the primary focus of this article is to highlight the role of IT in the health sector as it has permeated a large group of different technologies in healthcare, ranging from electronic health records, clinical prognosis, patient engagement tools, data analysis, laboratory tools, laboratory imaging technologies to other medical devices, etc. 

Health IT is the key and plays a vital role in today’s western diagnostic process: it is responsible for capturing the information about an individual, thusly providing physicians with reliable and accurate information. It includes all sorts of data: from clinical history to physical exams, IT provides doctors and physicians with the necessary information in order for them to both prescribe and assess tests and subsequently outline their subsequent workflow with a patient. Besides, since it is widely known that patients attend to different health professionals depending on the complexity of their case, IT has also enabled the whole industry to share information from one side to another.

Since there are rather little doubts about the fact that health IT does really have the potential to improve today’s diagnostic and prognosis processes in a positive way. Every time health IT tools aid and support diagnostic team members in finding out what is really going on with an individual without losing sight of the importance of keeping a human-centered principle, health IT does really comes in handy as it reduces the chances of possible diagnostic errors. Be that as it may, nonetheless, there are also several instances where this has not been the case and the diagnostic process has not been improved whatsoever, which is why some members of the healthcare community are no less than skeptical when it comes to speeding up the pace to which such technology is now being implemented, for they want to minimize the possibility of making mistakes.

Implementing the use of health IT, however, does lean towards a much more positive side, as it does entail the potential to aid in the discovery of possible and plausible diagnostic errors. The medical community also recognizes that the adoption of Health Information Technologies can also span over other aspects around medical diagnostics such as the tools that now available for physicians to properly assess an individual. With that being said, and since the adoption of additional technologies is based on the fact that minimizing the chances of making mistakes and falling into misguided diagnostics basically aims to act in the betterment of a patient’s safety, the medical community seems to agree upon the fact that health IT interacts within a context in which the involved sociotechnical system involves not only the technology itself but also the individuals responsible for operating such workflow, which ultimately delivers a new level of complexity since the present factors interact with each other most of the times with unknown foreseeable outcomes.

However, if one were to take a much wider look at this topic in general, the design of health IT seeks to provide additional support to today’s diagnostic process, particularly by supporting physicians and all the individuals involved in it as well as the procedures and task they are supposed to perform. Thus, a patient’s safety or rather the degree to which an individual’s overall safety can be improved, rises up since the potential of diagnostic errors is diminished. The no less than an overwhelming amount of complexities found within the healthcare sector has required all professionals to get acquainted with a vast quantity of information, which has resulted in them actually facing many cognitive challenges as applying the aforementioned information outstrips human capacities. This, of course, has led to another type of challenges when it comes to diagnosing an individual.

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The aforementioned aspect is perhaps the key behind the adoption of all IT technologies within the healthcare sector. Doctors, physicians and pretty much every healthcare professionals often make diagnostic errors because they fall victim of their very own nature as they are no less than vulnerable to a fallible human memory, communication mistakes and lapses and other several aspects inherent to human nature. It has been widely accepted and recognized that IT has a tremendous, to say the least, potential to help these professionals to mitigate their limitations and actually step up their level; however, it is still soon to assert that every single sub-sector can harness IT to the same degree, for healthcare in other countries is actually way behind today’s developments and the adoption would actually be useless.