The Second Semester is starting out strong in my Interventions in Biomedical Sciences Class. This week in particular was definitely not short of excitement, but the week itself was very short. Due to inclement weather, our week was shortened to only three days. Unfortunately for me, I suffered a concussion and only came in two days this week as a result. That’s alright, though, because I still got to participate some this week.
This week we began our discussions about telehealth. Telehealth refers to the use of technology to connect medical professionals with their patients remotely. We all remember telehealth coming into play during Covid when doctors tried to avoid exposure to the highly contagious virus, but this practice was on the rise long before 2020. At St. Luke’s, we have three telehealth robots. Each of these robots are able to move through rooms with the direction of a remote individual. We each created a patient profile for a patient in an urgent care type setting. One of our fellow classmates will direct the telehealth robot and try to come up with a diagnosis based on the symptoms reported by the “patient” using the profile. My patient was a seven year old female with fever and a sore throat. She has normal oxygen, pulse, and blood pressure. Her throat can be observed to have white patches. Hopefully, my classmates will realize that she has strep throat!
Our discussion post this week was on big data. Big data refers to complex sets of information that are beyond conventional database softwares. Big data can be beneficial in aiding in educated decision making for medical professionals. Big data is also being used to improve patient outcomes, produce new prescriptions, conduct research, develop treatment plans, prevent healthcare fraud, and allocate staff members to areas of need. In order for this to happen, though, medical professionals need to work with specialists to create systems that can organize this information to ensure it is accurate and easy to access. Technology certainly makes it an exciting time in Biomed.
That’s all for this week! I am looking forward to using the telehealth robot next week. Although it was a short week, I definitely enjoyed it and learned a lot.
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