Group items tagged

The da Vinci, a surgical robot costing up to $2.6 million, gives surgeons powerful new abilities in the operating room. But while some doctors tout shorter recovery times for patients and decreased risk of complications, others warn of high costs and the lack of a national training standard.

As an aging population threatens to overwhelm the nation's hospitals and doctors, thousands of seriously ill patients are relying on computerized health trackers to help keep them safe at home.

stereotactic radiosurgery, or SRS, is one of the fastest-growing radiation therapies, a technological innovation designed to target tiny tumors and other anomalies affecting the brain or spinal cord, while minimizing damage to surrounding tissue. Because the radiation is so concentrated and intense, accuracy is especially important. Yet, according to records and interviews, the SRS unit at Evanston lacked certain safety features, including those that might have prevented radiation from leaking outside the cone. The mistakes in Evanston involve linear accelerators - commonly used for standard radiation therapy - that were redesigned by the manufacturer, Varian Medical Systems, so they could also perform SRS. As the devices became more versatile and complex, problems arose when vital electronic components could not communicate with one another.

A good overview of how the use of IT has affected the practice of medicine. Theses:  This computer record creates what I call an "iPatient" - and this iPatient threatens to become the real focus of our attention, while the real patient in the bed often feels neglected, a mere placeholder for the virtual record.