Computers in Medicine: What Can We Expect Next?

Over the years, computers have consistently been expanding in the use of our everyday lives. We use them at work, at home, at school, on our cell phones, to predict the weather, to get information, and so on. It is constantly growing and has become a major player in the medical field as well. Most hospitals and clinics rely on computers for their administration, financials, and data submission and retrieval purposes. When you break a bone, a computer takes an x-ray to determine the exact placement of the break, MRI's take pictures your internals, and surgery can now be performed through small incisions using cameras hooked up to computers. Computers manage everything.

The progress of medicine in the past few years has been rapid and extremely beneficial. Computers play such a large role in this advancement, that it is likely that they will become an absolute necessity in every part of medical practices in the near future.

One example of the rapid growth of computer systems in medical practice is Dean Care, a large medical practice in Madison, WI, recently changed their whole system of patient information over from the standard folder method, to a secured software program where all history and patient files are available at the nurses' and doctors' fingertips. Rather than having to request files be sent over from a different clinic or hospital, this new software allows all of this information to readily available.

This new technology opened up a lot of new job opportunities for IT techs, programmers, and other software people, but took away many of the lower paying, traditional jobs, such as the person you'd see walking around with a cartful of files. In some ways it's a good thing to offer more high paying jobs, but it expands the clinic's budget even further, as well as takes away from many of the people who are not educated in computer systems, software, or other technical backgrounds.

Within a few years, there will be a plethora of new machines available to do anything from taking blood, to self check-in for patients. It will be interesting to see how many human jobs are taken over by computers. However, the need for humans to oversee all of the technical machines will never diminish. There will always need to be someone there to either fix problems that arise, or to take over if one of the computer systems fails. The need for human interaction will obviously never completely vanish, but it may diminish a great deal.