Healthcare and Medicine

Introduction
ICT is becoming essential when healthcare is concerned as ICT systems are developed and enables doctors to provide better quality medical care for their patients.

Where can technology take us? - Health and Medicine
Patient records are being saved digitally instead of each patient having a card and a file. This saves a lot of storage space and also enables doctors to easily find files when treating patients instead of only finding some files or having some missing details which could be crucial to curing the patient.''Some systems in the United States have been added which allows doctors over 120 different locations simultaneous access to patients’ records stored on a central database. This means access to the patients file is available from practically anywhere in the hospital.''

Patient monitoring provides 24 hour service and doctors can then be alerted

at any time if there is a problem. This also helps patients in intensive care who need 24 hour surveillance, the blood pressure, heart rate, temperature and blood oxygen levels are automatically monitored which saves time and makes a doctors life easier.

Magnetic resonance imaging are machines which use magnets to scan the body, this type of scan is good for showing things such as tumours, infections and hemorrhages and are often use to scan the neck and spine.

Computed Axial Tomography (CAM) is an X-ray tube which rotates around the patient taking photos, these are then reconstructed in 3D axial slice images and each slice is examined carefully, proved useful for detecting brain tumours.



A medical expert system is a program which analyses questions which have been entered by a doctor/nurse… and provides expert quality answers which helps them make a decisions and may suggest better alternatives.

The expert system is divided into two parts:

Knowledge base: Contains a large volume of information in a particular field.

Inference engine: Analyses the input data using reasoning methods and the knowledge base and then comes a conclusion.

Advantages:-

- Indicates a range of possible health problems

- Gives support in making decisions when a doctor maybe unsure

- Help experts achieve an accurate solution rapidly.

Disadvantages:- 

Lack of judgement and intuition.

Cannot learn from mistakes and therefore may make them again

Tele-medicine is simply being treated by a doctor online or over the phone, this is usually for patients who live in remote areas which lack in medical aid.

How ICT has helped medical care (video) : Questions

1.What is Computer axial tomography?

2.Name 2 Advantages and Disadvantages of a medical expert system.

3.Name 3 ways ICT has helped Healthcare over the years and explain each of them.