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Physicians must adopt new IT tools to keep up with changing healthcare system

01.24.2012

Patients are generally smarter and better informed than they have been in the past, and much of the information they have gathered about their own health comes from online resources. Experts are saying that doctors will need to make use of similar tools in the near future in order to keep up with these highly informed patients and to continue delivering high quality care.

Lukas Zinnagl, the co-founder of the online health and medicine magazine MedCrunch, recently wrote in KevinMD that the world of medicine is growing more and more complex by the day. Things are progressing to a point where no single physician could know everything he or she may need to about specific conditions.

"The problem is that Google knows more about certain diseases than the average physician will ever be able to learn and hold on to. The shift from knowing something to knowing where to get it from is changing the way medicine is being practiced," he wrote.

At the same time, patients are able to tap into this information to learn everything there is to know about their own specific health conditions. In order for physicians to keep up, they may need to make use of clinical decision support tools and other resources. Knowing where to look for information may become more important than already possessing knowledge.

Many physicians have reacted negatively to these developments. They believe that no machine will ever replace their experience and expertise in a given field. However, proponents point to the fact that the healthcare industry currently lacks efficiency and does not produce the high-quality outcomes it could. This is why they seek to use electronic health records and clinical decision support tools to augment - not replace - physicians' knowledge.

The Healthcare Information Management Systems Society says that clinical decision support is one of the most powerful tools for lowering costs and delivering higher quality.
 

Categories: Patient Satisfaction 

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