Emily van der Haagen

5/5 (1)

In a couple years healthcare will change revolutionary. Big hospitals will disappear. At least, that is what the Dutch minister Edith Schippers and State Secretary Martin van Rijn claim. Apart from new medical complaints like ‘tablet-neck’, ‘iPad-wrist’, ‘WhatsApp-thumb’ and ‘selfie-elbow’, there is another development going on which is called e-health. E-health is explained as the use of technology to support or improve health and healthcare. As a consequence of e-health, patients will be able to control their health and there are more advantages.

Advantages

First of all, healthcare will be closer to patients as e-health provides solutions like an online patient portal where they can make appointments, see their research results and medical and medication information. They can also e-mail questions to their doctor or nurse. Secondly, e-health will reduce costs. This is as a result of the first advantage. Because of the quicker access to your medical information and easier contact with doctors, it will save a lot of time and visits to the hospital. Thirdly, it will be easier for patients to monitor their health themselves and therefore be more independent.

Drawbacks

E- health will stimulate the use of smartphones and other electronic devices, whereas this causes medical complaints as mentioned in the introduction. For this reason, it might be better to put smartphones away more often and just enjoy the ‘real’ world. Secondly, only 16% of the patients are using these new possibility of requesting their medicines online and solely 3% asks questions online according to the e-health Monitor 2016 of research institutions Nictiz and Nivel. So a lot of patients are not even able to find their ‘digital doctor’ and the ones that do find the new online possibilities say it’s not user friendly.

Furthermore, it will be dangerous for the health of patients if digital records are transferred in a bad way, like medication overviews which are not up to date. There is a serious problem here, because the computer systems are not connecting to one another. Lastly, the digital healthcare market is a growing market where billions are circulating, however it is not even sure if e-health is really going to improve healthcare and make it cheaper.

Concluding, there has to be done a lot more of testing and research regarding e-health before it will become a real revolution instead of a hype.

Sources:

Zorgvisie. (2016). Zorgvisie – E-health dossier. [online] Available at: https://www.zorgvisie.nl/home/dossiers/e-health/ [Accessed 5 Oct. 2016].

Nos.nl. (2016). ‘Zo’n e-consult vind ik het handigste dat er is’. [online] Available at: http://nos.nl/artikel/2126626-zo-n-e-consult-vind-ik-het-handigste-dat-er-is.html [Accessed 5 Oct. 2016].

Haks, K. (2016). Smartphonestress. FysioPraxis, (9), p.3.

Nos.nl. (2016). E-health: hype of zorgrevolutie?. [online] Available at: http://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2114269-e-health-hype-of-zorgrevolutie.html [Accessed 5 Oct. 2016].

Ad.nl. (2016). Patiënt komt niet bij digidokter. [online] Available at: http://www.ad.nl/dossier-nieuws/patient-komt-niet-bij-digidokter~ae12f17e/ [Accessed 7 Oct. 2016].

5/5 (2)

Your smartphone, Facebook and Google, they are all being ‘smart’. Meaning they gather a lot of data about you. Nowadays, even cities and governments are becoming smart. For example, police services are experimenting with algorithms which can predict the possibility of criminality based on large amounts of data. Thus, police services can send agents on a preventive basis. Furthermore, data about citizens is not only used for investigations, but it is also taken into account when the government is laying down a policy. Consequently, computers and data will become more and more important in politics.

On one hand, this development seems helpful to reduce crimes and make decisions about government policies easier. On the other hand, we should be aware of the fact that companies and governments are gathering lots of data over the last years thinking they can optimize the world. The main idea is; if you have enough data, the truth will automatically appear, so managers and politicians should do what the data tells them to do. Hence, this is leading to a dictatorship of big data, which makes this development sound quite alarming.

However, due to globalization and digitization, the world has become too complex. In the digital economy everything will namely be connected. Like social networks, infrastructure, electricity and internet of things. This connection also means that everything will be dependent on each other. Therefore, the idea of using a supercomputer which will tell what to do is not very realistic.

If the development continues as it is currently doing at the European Central Bank for instance; stimulating economic growth by buying stock of selected firms instead of only buying government bonds. Then, society will become a planned society where governments decide which companies are doing well and which are performing poorly in the stock market. Justifying their investment choices by huge amounts of big data.

Sources:

http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2016/08/19/we-bouwen-aan-een-dictatuurvan-data-3333699-a1517178

http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/384395/hubfs/blog-files/minority-report.jpg?t=1460641844950 (image)

E-health: hype or revolution?

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