Positive and Negative effects of Digital Medical Records
This assignment was created by students at The City College of New York for the Freshman Inquiry Writing Seminar, Web Discourse. Students are researching a social issue in one of four large topics: Urban Life, Public Health, Immigration, and Education. This will result in a final research paper that explores both how the conversations surrounding the issue are enacted and how a CCNY student may enter that conversation in a meaningful way.
The proposal for my essay is the positive and negative effects of digital medical records. I believe that this is important because this new technology will greatly affect the performance of medical facilities everywhere. I think that both sides of the argument should be explored along with the opinions of doctors supporting both sides.
There are doctors that believe that digital medical records will make them better doctors and help them make fewer mistakes. Hospitals can even save time and money by utilizing this new technology.
There are also doctors that believe that this technology is harmful to the practice. There are some older doctors that think that today’s doctors are relying too heavily on technology and cannot perform decent physical examinations without the help of some sort of new technology.
I think that this is interesting because people are always thinking that new technology will always be an improvement for the ways things were done in the past. Even I believe that digital health records will be a new way to improve medical facilities. There will always be people that prefer the old way of doing things and there might be some truth to that but only the future will be able to tell whether this new technology will truly be a new useful tool.
Comments
The argument of the older doctors seems invalid. The doctors would not depend on the records to do their job for them, but it would help greatly in the exclusion of errors in reporting medical history and contact information.
If the digitized records were that powerful, then doctors could be replaced by computer programs. Surgeons would still be in business...for now. You could just type in your symptoms and it will give you back search results, starting with the most relevant one. You decide which one applies most to you and request the proper treatment.
Of course there are some obvious flaws in that system. Self-diagnosis is not very reliable at all, and no computer program is perfect, but over time the developers could work to reduce the error to the point that it is insignificant.
Posted by: Michelle | October 20, 2009 12:02 PM
I think the topic of digitizing medical records is really interesting. While it is good to consider the topic from many perspectives (not only the doctor's and patient's, but other parties that might be affected), it may also be interesting to delve into the topic by first considering the issues.
One of the issues that come to mind is privacy. How secure will these records be? I don't want the whole world knowing what sicknesses I had or if I might have come in for condoms/contraceptives on a certain day.
In the end, people will want to know how much this change can improve the situation compared to the potential harms. If records go digital, they may help improve our medical facilities like you say, but can you somehow quantify how much they would improve healthcare? How many people could have been saved with the proper history at hand? And then can you compare that to the potential harm that the information could have in the wrong hands?
A risk analysis might be a useful way of thinking of this: (probability_good)*good - (probability_bad)*bad >?1. But then that's also a limited way of thinking about things ethically. If you save 10 people by killing 1, the good outweighs the bad, but it should not be the course of action we take.
This is an interesting issue, and it could prove effective to motivate people with the interesting parts up front in an intro.
Posted by: Stellios | October 20, 2009 12:05 PM