Wired Doctors Can Improve Patient Health

You may have already noticed, but there is change afoot: your doctor is likely becoming more wired, further integrating technology and social media into the practice of medicine. How will this impact the health of patients? As a younger physician, I have grown up with the explosion of computer technology. In grade school, I played Number Munchers and Oregon Trail on the Apple IIe computers that populated the computer labs of my school and the local library. When I was 8, we got our first Zenith computer at home. It couldn't do much, really. It didn't even run Windows. It did, however, have a Lotus word processing application. I began to write on it. I even learned a little about DOS commands. Within five years, we had upgraded to a Gateway 2000 system. Its modem was shockingly slow by today's standards, a mere 2400 bps, but this connection opened up a world to me. I could access local bulletin board systems (BBS) to play turn-based games. We had AOL for email and early browsers to access the Internet. I could use Microsoft Encarta as an encyclopedia, listening to Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering his dreams. By the time I was attending courses at Oxford in 2000, I began to hear about a new search option called Google. As my education advanced, so did the technology that both supported and influenced it. The transition continued into medical school. When I started, we relied heavily on syllabi constituting of 1000s of pages and books that accompanied them. When I began my ...
Source: About Sleep Disorders - Category: Sleep Medicine Source Type: news