Health technology

Pre-digital era During the pre-digital era, patients suffered from inefficient and faulty clinical systems, processes, and conditions. Many medical errors happened in the past due to undeveloped health technologies. Some examples of these medical errors included adverse drug events and alarm fatigue. When many alarms are repeatedly triggered or activated, especially for unimportant events, workers may become desensitized to the alarms. Healthcare professionals who have alarm fatigue may ignore an alarm believing it to be insignificant, which could lead to death and dangerous situations. With technological development, an intelligent program of integration and physiologic sense-making was developed and helped reduce the number of false alarms. Outdated paper records were replaced in many healthcare organizations by electronic health records (EHR), with adoption in the United States increasing rapidly from the late 2000s to near-universal use by the early 2020s. According to studies, this has brought many changes to healthcare. Improvement To help promote and expand the adoption of health information technology, Congress passed the HITECH act as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. HITECH stands for Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act. It gave the department of health and human services the authority to improve healthcare quality and efficiency through the promotion of health IT. The act provided financial incentives or penalties to organizations to motivate healthcare providers to improve healthcare. The purpose of the act was to improve quality, safety, efficiency, and ultimately to reduce health disparities. One of the main parts of the HITECH act was setting the meaningful use requirement, which required EHRs to allow for the electronic exchange of health information and to submit clinical information. The purpose of HITECH is to ensure the sharing of electronic information with patients and other clinicians are secure. HITECH also aimed to help healthcare providers have more efficient operations and reduce medical errors. The program consisted of three phases. Phase one aimed to improve healthcare quality, safety and efficiency. Phones add an extra level of threat. In 2015 the Medical Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) was passed, pushing towards electronic health records. In the article "Health Information Technology: Integration, Patient Empowerment, and Security", K. Marvin provided multiple different polls based on people's views on different types of technology entering the medical field most answers were responded with somewhat likely and very few completely disagreed on the technology being used in medicine. Marvin discusses the maintenance required to protect medical data and technology against cyber attacks as well as providing a proper data backup system for the information. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) also known as Obamacare and health information technology health care is entering the digital era. Although with this development it needs to be protected. Both health information and financial information now made digital within the health industry might become a larger target for cyber-crime. Even with multiple different types of safeguards hackers somehow still find their way in so the security that is in place needs to constantly be updated to prevent these breaches. Policy With the increased use of IT systems, privacy violations were increasing rapidly due to the easier access and poor management. As such, the concern of privacy has become an important topic in healthcare. Privacy breaches happen when organizations do not protect the privacy of people's data. There are four types of privacy breaches, which include unintended disclosure by authorized personnel, intended disclosure by authorized personnel, privacy data loss or theft, and virtual hacking. It became more important to protect the privacy and security of patients' data because of the high negative impact on both individuals and organizations. Stolen personal information can be used to open credit cards or other unethical behaviors. Also, individuals have to spend a large amount of money to rectify the issue. The exposure of sensitive health information also can have negative impacts on individuals' relationships, jobs, or other personal areas. For the organization, the privacy breach can cause loss of trust, customers, legal actions, and monetary fines. HIPAA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. It is a U.S. healthcare legislation to direct how patient data is used and includes two major rules which are privacy and security of data. The privacy rule protects people's rights to privacy and security rule determines how to protect people's privacy. According to the HIPAA Security Rule, it ensures that protected health information has three characteristics: confidentiality, availability, and integrity. Confidentiality indicates keeping the data confidential to prevent data loss or individuals who are unauthorized to access that protected health information. Availability allows people who are authorized to access the systems and networks when and where that information is in fact needed, such as natural disasters. In cases like this, protected health information is mostly backed up on to a separate server or printed out in paper copies, so people can access it. Lastly, integrity ensures not using inaccurate information and improperly modified data due to a bad design system or process to protect the permanence of the patient data. The consequences of using inaccurate or improperly modified data could become useless or even dangerous. Physical safeguards include lock and key, card swipe, positioning of screens, confidential envelopes, and shredding of paper copies. Lock and key are common examples of physical safeguards. They can limit physical access to facilities. Lock and key are simple, but they can prevent individuals from stealing medical records. Individuals must have an actual key to access to the lock. It was further institutionalized with the establishment of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in 1972–1973. HTA is defined as a comprehensive form of policy research that examines short- and long-term consequences of the application of technology, including benefits, costs, and risks. Due to the broad scope of technology assessment, it requires the participation of individuals besides scientists and health care practitioners such as managers and even the consumers. A study conducted in 2007 noted that the assessments still did not use formal economic analyses. Issues such as the determination of products that needed to be developed, cost, and access, among others, also emerged. These, some argue, need to be included in the assessment since health technology is never purely a matter of science but also of beliefs, values, and ideologies. There are at least two dimensions to an ethical HTA. The first involves the incorporation of ethics in the methodological standards employed to assess technologies while the second is concerned with the use of ethical framework in research and judgment on the part of the researchers who produce information used in the industry. In the future The practice of medicine in the United States is currently in a major transition. This transition is due to many factors, but primarily because of the implementation and integration of health technologies into healthcare. In recent years, the widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHR) has greatly impacted healthcare. In his book ''The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age'', Robert Wachter aims to inform readers about this transition. Wachter states that there will be fewer hospitals in the future, and due to the advancement of technologies, people will be more likely to go to hospitals for major surgeries or critical illness. In the future, nurse call buttons will not be needed in hospitals. Instead, robots will deliver medication, take care of patients, and administer the system. In addition, the electronic health record will look different. Healthcare providers will be able to enter the notes via speech-to-text transcriptions in real-time. Wachter stated that information will be edited collaboratively across the patient-care team to improve the quality. Also, natural language processing will be more developed to help parse out keywords. In the future, patient data will reside in the cloud, and patients as well as authorized providers and individuals will be able to access their data from any device or location. Big data analysis will constantly be improving. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will be constantly improving and developing as it receives new data. Alerts will also be more intelligent and efficient than the current systems. ==Medical technology==