What different types of computer technology are used in health care?

There are many types of technology utilized by the health care industry. These range from record- and bookkeeping software to lasers used in surgical procedures to the development of imaging technologies to supplement or replace the age-old use of x-rays and other means of diagnosing illnesses and injuries. As with many other types of industries, health care facilities are always adapting to technological developments in their fields and always seeking to upgrade their capabilities to both provide their patients with the best available instruments and to keep pace with a highly-competitive operating environment.

Managing a modern medical facility requires the introduction of state-of-the-art software for maintaining patient records and for billing purposes. Medical billing and coding are two types of activity common to all medical facilities. The role of insurance companies in the regulation of medical care is substantial, and health care providers are in a constant state of communication with insurance companies and with federal and state government medical care programs, such as Medicaid, which is a federally-operated health care program for the indigent, and Medicare, which is a federally-operated health care program oriented towards the elderly, as well as Tricare, which is the health insurance program offered to military families and retirees. The large number of “players” in the health care payment system provides both for competition in the marketplace and for confusion and complications in the billing and authorization processes. Computer software programs intended to facilitate the keeping and processing of medical records for billing purposes, then, have to be constantly updated to keep pace with growing demand for health care among an aging population and for a frequently-evolving system of payers and processors. The transition over time from paper files to Electronic Heath Records both improves the efficiency of the health care industry’s record-keeping processes and makes more vulnerable to theft and violations of patient privacy those same now-electronically-maintained records.

Technologies utilized in the health care field also include those utilized for the diagnosis of illnesses and injuries, from cancerous cells to broken bones. Long-dependent upon x-rays and invasive surgical procedures to locate and diagnose illnesses, the evolution of technology has allowed for more precise and less-invasive procedures. The development of computerized tomography, or CT (often referred to as “cat” scan) imaging technology, and of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices revolutionized the diagnostic industry. Both are routinely used, along with evolved x-ray technology (with much briefer periods of radioactive exposure to which the patient is subjected than in earlier periods) and are very efficient at helping radiologists and others to detect illnesses, like tumors, in their infancy, thereby making successful treatment far more likely.

Finally, technologies used in the performance of surgical procedures have advanced greatly over the years. Cyberknife, for instance, utilizes highly-focused, high-dosage radiation to penetrate the patient’s skin without the use of invasive surgical procedures to treat tumors and other growths. More invasive but oft-used technologies include surgical lasers, which used extremely-intense focused light (laser beams) to cut and repair tissue, a major improvement, in many cases, over reliance on scalpels to cut tissue.

These, then, are some of the most prominent uses of technology in the health care field.