While a lot of hospitals internationally are focusing on improving solely human efficiency and knowledge to reduce errors, many medical facilities in Thailand are looking to robotics to increase the amount of lives saved. According to the article “Bangkok Hospital Group and IBM Collaborate on Smarter Healthcare initiative in Thailand,” Bumrungrad International Hospital in Bangkok has already had huge success in eliminating terminal mistakes throughout each ward of their hospital. Adopting the IBM programs has been only the start of a very useful system; the robots pick out even the most complicated dosages of medicine and use a bar-coding method so that each patient receives exactly what he/she needs. Although this technique is expensive for most hospitals to afford at this time of economic struggle, I think it’s vital in order to save the lives of more people around the world.
If the new technologically advanced systems were integrated slowly into the human-run system in place, then the hospitals would only need to pay for a little at a time. International hospitals like Bangkok have more capital to obtain this technology to facilitate the storage and implication of the patient data. According to InboxRobot.com, “the software will connect hospital data and analyze statistics to help executives make precise investment decisions that will truly meet patients' needs” (www.inboxrobot.com). This proves that even though the product may seem expensive at first, the hospitals could both be saving lives and making smarter financial decisions—one of these decisions being the purchase of IBM technology.
The positives of this system outweigh the negative cost issue in that the amount of lives being saved will be invaluable. The data transfer between robots and patients decrease the amount of room open for human error to occur. Also, the increase in information technology has opened up a brand new way of handling medicine efficiently. This new technology should be utilized to its fullest and not just overlooked as a mere possibility. The barcode system in place in the Bangkok Hospital ensures that each patient gets the right drug and the right amount, making it very difficult to mess anything up. Although some may argue that there is nothing technology can do better than human hands when it comes to administering drugs in healthcare, this method proves to be working out for the best. Pat Downing, a director for this project at Bumrungrad International Hospital, said “you would really have to have almost malicious intent to give the wrong medicine to the wrong patient at the wrong time” (computerworld.com). While human error can sometimes just be a slip of the wrong drug, this new information technology being utilized in Thailand is making it almost impossible to mess the procedures up. The robots are so much more precise in what they do that the 98,000 patients that die each year due to purely human error would shrink exponentially.
Although I don’t think all of medicine should be handed over to that of technology and data transfers through robots, I do believe that this particular IBM program is on the right track. There is still a demand for intelligence in the human labor aspect of healthcare, but decreasing the human error side of this could only work for the better.
Works Cited
"Bangkok Hospital Group and IBM Collaborate on Smarter Healthcare Initiative." Inbox Robot. IBM, 11 Sept. 2009. Web. 20 Sept. 2009.
Nystedt, Dan. "Robots improve safety, efficiency at Thai hospital." Computer World. 12 May 2009. Web. 20 Sept. 2009.
I agree that this new system could be very effective in the United States. I always see stories of doctors over-prescribing and under-prescribing, and this initiative would definitely eliminate this problem. Doctors seem to over-prescribe so that their patient's sickness if fully eliminated, but the excess prescription can be harmful.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that this new system should not force the medical world to implement more information technologies. The medical field definitely is a personable field. It demands on-the spot decisions and there are many variables in a medical problem that a computer may not be able to compute.
It is a shame that this system is so costly, because it is very beneficial to the medical world. I hope this can be implemented into the United States in the near future.