Importance Achow Can Science Technology Impact Healthcare Trends

How Can Science and Technology Impact Afghanistan Healthcare Trends?
Name
institution
due date
How Can Science and Technology Impact Afghanistan Healthcare Trends?
Introduction
Afghanistan has been ravaged by the war, which has crippled the healthcare system by destroying the healthcare infrastructure. The government has been reviving the healthcare system and aligning it with its strategy and vision for its people. As a country still reeling with post-conflict challenges, its healthcare needs are unique in various ways, such as high PTSD patients, injured/maimed/disabled citizenry, low income due to the ravaged economy, etc. Some of the major challenges towards rebuilding and establishing a robust healthcare industry are very low mortality rates (48yrs) high infant mortality (257 for every 1000 live births) CITATION Vis10 \l 1033 (Viswanathan, et al., 2010). Afghanistan has only 117 government-run hospitals and few privately owned hospitals serving over 35 million people, and since the country is vast, many people travel hundreds of kilometres to access proper healthcare. MSF hospital in south Afghanistan has a 300-bed capacity and serves over 1 million people CITATION Low16 \l 1033 (Lowry, 2016). However, the country has embarked on ambitious plans to harness the power of technology to ensure it delivers quality healthcare to its residents. Thus, Afghanistan ought to:
Develop Data-Driven Healthcare
The world is powered by information and healthcare can be greatly improved by investment in technology. Many developed countries have invested in collecting data from its people to analyze and establish trends that can help institute strategic preemptive interventions to improve healthcare delivery. Wearable technology has enabled many patients to relay information about their health to their respective physicians/doctors for analysis and helps in understanding their illnesses/conditions better CITATION Lew15 \l 1033 (Lewy, 2015). The information is either relayed through the internet or physically delivered to the healthcare provider in digital format for analysis. These wearable technologies have sensors that detect variations in blood pressure, sugar level, etc. and they assist the doctors in understanding their patients’ illnesses/conditions and the best approach to treat them CITATION Pat12 \l 1033 (Patel, Park, Bonato, Chan, & Rodgers, 2012). Mobile computing has played an instrumental role in this approach to healthcare as it stores the information from the wearables and relays them to the healthcare providers. Mobile apps running on smartphones have also been developed to help patients track their health status through their interactive user interfaces.
Additionally, in matters records, there has been an exponential increment of digital records. Though the government and or healthcare providers will be necessitated to build a robust infrastructure for the data, it is an inevitable trend that will be the backbone of healthcare in the future. Electronic health records (EHR) and electronic medical records (EMR) technologies are the solutions to the traditional slow creation, storing and retrieving paper-based records. The space taken by paper-based records is also the immense and efficient transmission of the records is challenging, costly, and slow because they are bulky CITATION Eva16 \l 1033 (Evans, 2016). The internet and accelerated technology have enabled healthcare providers to share information on their patients securely and reliably. The retrieval of the information is easy, and each patient can view his/her healthcare information easily over the internet. Though there have been few privacy issues that can be fixed by informed policies, the information sharing platforms powering better healthcare provision have greatly improved healthcare, and if reflected in Afghanistan they can have a huge impact. The most important step is to build a robust network infrastructure to support EHR and EMR and institute the necessary legal framework to protect the privacy of patient’s data.
Improving treatment procedures
Technology has led to better methods of diagnosing and treating various diseases. In the past, most diseases, illnesses and conditions’ diagnosis processes were less accurate using traditional approaches which have been often longer, likely invasive and with lower success rates. Research and refining of diagnostic equipment and diagnosis tools have lowered the cost of diagnosis, improved its accuracy and speed of diagnosis. Most of the diagnostic tools are not even invasive, and they are affordable such that they can be privately owned per household. The scientific community and oncologists have promised to build toilets that test human excretion and fecal matter for various diseases and health status of the individual. The toilets will advise on the hydration level of the body, and whether the individual has to take more fluids to stabilize the homeostatic balance, they will test for diabetes and sugar levels. Research is still being conducted to build a toilet that tests for cancerous cells in fecal matter and even detects many years before the cancerous cells reach a detection point CITATION Sta16 \l 1033 (Stanford University: Faculty of Medicine, 2016). A toilet would have the same ability to detect cancer as state-of-the-art oncology equipment in an oncology research center.
Technology is also revolutionizing treatment procedures such as invasive treatment. Minimally invasive heart surgeries powered by technology have changed how heart surgeries are performed. The surgeons perform the surgery with the help of robotic arms, and it is far safer, highly effective and minimally invasive. 3D printing is also promising to help make casting custom made physiotherapy easier and better by printing limbs and other components that perfectly suit the patient. Afghanistan has many people who have been maimed by the war and embracing 3D technology in physiotherapy would go a long way into improving the quality of life of many of her citizens. Other areas where technology has greatly improved treatment processes and procedures are an organ transplant. New technologies have promised to provide laboratory-grown organs to patients. Skin spray technology has been already approved by the FDA, which is an alternative to traditional skin grafting procedures to treat burns CITATION NBC18 \l 1033 (NBC News, 2018). There are many ways in which technology will change the traditional approaches to treatment processes. Thus, since science and technology redefining and remaining diagnosis and treatment procedures, Afghanistan ought to align its strategic goals with the new possibilities brought by this technology.
Telemedicine/Telehealth
These two terms have been used interchangeably, but a closer look at both of them reveals that there is indeed a difference in their meaning and scope. Of the two terms, telemedicine is the oldest and was coined in the 1970s. The World Health Organization (2010) defines telemedicine as “healing at a distance.” It continues to state that telemedicine is the use of ICT to help enhance and improve patient outcomes by making access to he...