Read the following post written by my colleague and respond by expanding upon their post on the use of digital medicine. APA Format – Minimum of 2 sources (scholarly articles) no older than 5 years old.
As the first pandemic of the digital era, digital solutions were found to assist healthcare through a challenging time effectively. Telemedicine has been around before the COVID pandemic; however, it has helped launch telemedicine into standard everyday practice. Treating patients while outside of their presence seems simple enough, but it opened many more doors and challenges. Tools such as biosensors, digital apps, machine learning, AI, and telemedicine need to find a way to be extracted, integrated, and disseminated for extensive use (Abernethy et al., 2022). At the primary care clinic where this writer is employed, virtual visits via video camera were a “great idea in theory” until COVID 19 happened. Then, it was necessary to provide healthcare to those who should remain quarantined at that time. If patients had blood pressure cuffs offered by us, we could obtain viable blood pressure and heart rate reading to insert into the chart and use in their treatment.
With the mass amounts of data generated by the pandemic, big data has become even more complex. Due to the newness of COVID-19, many codes did not correlate and made encounters challenging (Abernethy et al., 2022). Not to mention the part it played in resource planning systems. Wearables such as Holter monitors, blood pressure sensors, and glucose monitors generate data that must be extracted, integrated, and disseminated (Abernethy et al., 2022).
Within my workplace, we are still experiencing challenges in resistance to change. Many doctors and nurses do not like the virtual telehealth medicine used for annual appointments and nursing education moments. However, with the use of the Clinical Contact Center, known as the VA’s call center, that offers virtual urgent care, the staff seems to like that aspect! It is comforting to know I have another outlet or access to care for my patients through the virtual urgent care system we have in place. The biggest challenge over the last couple of years is getting the information out to the patients regarding the existence of this program. The VA is known for sending mass mail to patients, often tossed right into the trash (at my house included). People are just now starting to utilize this fantastic digital tool more frequently.
The challenges noted in the article “Turning the Body Into a Wire” by Sen et al. (2020) are disturbing. To know there is the ability to hack into an insulin pump or perhaps tap into the working system of a pacemaker to one of the leaders of the free world is terrifying. To know we humans walking internet bodies presents a vulnerability to extract data, interpret data, and manipulate that data. The main challenge facing the information in this article is access to personal data. One of the strategies recommended to that for potentially compromised encryption data is to have human involvement. Yes, it’s nice to have an automatic sensor on devices such as an insulin pump, but the wearer must give the clear to disperse the calculated amount of insulin may serve as a backup form of safety. Along those same lines is to have a backup safety system within the wearable that must be activated after the initial prompt that permits to release of the function. Another way the challenge of leaked data could include using a key or set of numbers that change every ten seconds, that the doctor has access to, and only the wearable can sync to that number.
