Assignment9DelanyTamabayeva

Assignment9DelanyTamabayeva

To Do

• 1. please work as a group (minimum: 2 members; max: 6 members) and submit one answer as a group (clearly identifying the members of your group)
• 2. Read:
  • Chapter 8 in Ben Shneiderman's book entitled "The New Medicine: E-Healthcare" (lecture on Oct 27)
  • Chapter 9 in Ben Shneiderman's book entitled "The New Politics: E-Government" (lecture on Oct 29)

Question 1

discuss what YOU consider the two major influences of information and computer technology on healthcare with comments on how these developments have changed:

• the healthcare business
• the doctor/ patient relationship (pluses and minuses)

Question 2

assume you need to inform yourself about some medical problem or issue (e.g.: high blood pressure, hip surgery, torn ACL or Achilles tendon, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), attention deficit disorder (ADD), you want to travel to a country in Africa (any precautions needed?), ....) - choose one example from the list or one chosen by yourself and

• explore the WWW about it, and
• describe what you found out and did not find out?

Question 3

as elections are coming up on November 4, 2008:

• identify the major differences between elections in 1980 (before the Internet, Social Networking, blogs, ....existed) and 2008!
• which new possibilities do you personally see as positive or negative developments?

Group response

1. Members of the Group

Daniel Delany, Diana Tamabayeva

2. Question 1

We consider the growing ability for patients to access public, free information about health problems and their symptoms to be a major milestone in the modernization of healthcare. Websites like WebMD, Google Health and Wikipedia offer detailed 'diagnoses' of illnesses and injuries to anyone with access to the internet. Often, and probably most of the time, these vast databases of information are helpful to people with minor concerns about their health, and probably prevent many costly visits to the doctor's office each year. This (theoretically) brings down healthcare costs, because it allows doctors to focus their energy on people with serious ailments.

However, there are many dangerous downsides to this new paradigm in healthcare. Sometimes, sites like these reinforce the worries of people with hypochondriacal tendencies: an allergic rash may share symptoms with an obscure, fatal African disease, causing patients to overreact to small problems. The inverse is also true: the Internet is no substitute for a real doctor, and the patient's self-analysis may miss things a doctor would see. This becomes dangerous when a patient with serious health problems ignores them as trivial, reassured by the 'omniscient' Internet. More generally, one could say that 'self-diagnostic' web sites probably contribute to a society in which we become reactive to our health concerns, at the expense of regular checkups and preventative care. However, for those who cannot afford this level of care, the Internet may provide live-saving access to otherwise unavailable information.

Another big innovation in healthcare modernization is the adoption of computers and information technology in hospitals and clinics. This improves care on two fronts: administration of patient records, and communication among health domain experts. Nurses' lives have become vastly easier, and processes which formerly involved stacks of paperwork can be done digitally. More importantly, as long as the system being used is secure, digital health records provide a much safer and more reliable form of patient documentation. Computers also allow healthcare professionals to communicate with each other more seamlessly: when a patient changes doctors, the old doctor can simply e-mail the patient's records to his new doctor. Doctors with difficult cases can instantly cross-reference the patient's current symptoms with their past health problems, family history, and databases of past similar cases. In "The World is Flat," Thomas Friedman cites the example of the growing Indian radiology industry: American hospitals which cannot afford to have radiologists and other experts on duty at all times can send urgent late-night X-rays overseas, digitally, to waiting foreign specialists who interpret them and send back an instant diagnosis.

3. Question 2

One of the vastly spread illnesses in America and in the rest of the world is diabetes. Searching for search word "diabetes" in Google results in 107,000,000 search results. The first one that shows up is the website for American Diabetes Association http://www.diabetes.org/. This website is probably is one of the most credible ones out there.This website contains a lot of tips to patients with diabetes. Because treatment of this illness is not straightforward and is not complete with only medication, information like this is crucial for people who are trying to adjust their lives to this health problem. Diet and exercising is may be even more important part of treatment than medication in mild cases. So websites are very helpful to people with diabetes. Websites can provide a patient with information and tips that no doctor can express during medical appointments. Although, there are plenty of information on how to prevent diabetes, the only thing that these websites can't do is diagnose the illness because symptoms are usually are very mild and sometimes unrecognizable by a patient himself, and only blood test can show if there is a problem.

4. Question 3