Digital Technology and Healthcare
I found it both interesting and a little overwhelming at the numbers of apps out there for nurses and other medical professionals. The increased use of technology in nursing impacts us in many ways. The time invested in learning new software takes away from hands on care in hopes that it will eventually allow us to make better use of our time and ultimately patient care will benefit. Unfortunately, many of the newer charting systems seem geared more toward those things that increase hospital reimbursement and not with the nurse’s workload in mind. While these technological advances should make charting easier and less time consuming, I do not hear nurses saying how much more they have for hands on patient care. Some of the electronic charting has alerts set up that are routinely ignored by the nurse due to redundancies in the software. It is difficult to imagine working without the technology that we now have. With drug resources, lab values, assessment data, and clinical procedures all available on hand held electronic devices we definitely have an advantage and opportunity to increase the quality of care. On the other hand, do these resources make us less available to our patients? It seems like the more technology we have available, the more we are expected to do. So, do we really have more time for patient care and what is the quality of that care?
A study done by Free et al. (2013) on the effects of mobile technology using text messaging to patients using ARTs and smoking cessation programs supports that these types of interventions can increase adherence. Health-care providers need effective ways to encourage “health-care consumers” to make healthy lifestyle choices and to self-manage chronic diseases. The amount of information, encouragement and support that can be conveyed to individuals during face-to-face consultations or through traditional media such as leaflets is limited, but mobile technologies such as mobile phones and portable computers have the potential to transform the delivery of health messages (Free et al., 2013).
My only experience with technology and patient education is on a personal level. My husband is a diabetic and has an app suggested by his primary care provider. The app allows him to track blood glucose levels, insulin administration, carb counting, and exercise. He used is religiously when it was first introduced but the frequency decreased over time. His feelings were that it was too time consuming and he could not see the benefit from it.
Free, C., Phillips, G., Galli, L., Watson, L., Felix, L., Edwards, P.,…Haines, A. (2013). The effectiveness of mobile-health technology-based health behavior change or disease management interventions for health care consumers: A systematic review [Supplemental material]. PLOS Medicine, , . doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001362
