Most rich countries and even some third world companies, like India, have digitized their medical records. This move increases efficiency and thoroughness for doctors but also signals an emerging and highly relevant industry for technology job seekers. What’s really surprising is the fact that the United States is really behind on this whole movement. Here in the USA doctors, for the most part, still manually view and exchange important patient data. Well it looks like this is all about to change as the Obama Administration has passed laws sanctioning $28 billion in subsidies meant to encourage doctors to go digital.
Apparently the technology giants are taking these legislation decisions really seriously as they are predicting the health industry to be the next big player in the cloud computing movement. A recent article in The Economist emphasized the heavy interest that technology companies were taking in the medical field,
Doctors’ surgeries, hospitals and patients would all be able to retrieve and manipulate the data remotely, over the internet. Bridget van Kralingen, a senior executive at IBM, sees health care providing maybe one-tenth of the $7 billion in revenues her firm sees from cloud computing by 2015.
But The Economist also warns that huge gains in the IT medical field are not guaranteed. Doctors and other medical workers are often reluctant to adopt new technologies. One industry expert went as far as calling the medical industry “anti-innovation”. There are also concerns over the security of digital medical records. Everyone is familiar with the horror stories of identity theft and digitization would inevitably beckon a chorus of nay-sayers.
But the benefits of moving ahead with medical cloud computing far outweigh the possible setbacks. Medical firms that have decided to digitize their records have lauded the system. They emphasize the fact that smart phone use combined with digitally accessible records can be endlessly convenient in addition to being safer and more definite. Digital records reduce the risk of human error, plain and simple.
All the positive indicators surrounding medical cloud computing making it a burgeoning industry worth keeping an eye on. If digitization of medical data takes off, there will be a ton of technology related jobs that come with it.
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