What Is the Importance of Technology in the Medical Field and Why It Needs Further Funding: Argumentative Essay

What Is the Importance of Technology in the Medical Field and Why It Needs Further Funding: Argumentative Essay

In the nearly two hundred years since computers have evolved from just being machines made to make the calculation of large numbers easier to becoming an integral part of our world, especially in the healthcare industry. In the last fifty years, computers have greatly helped the healthcare field in numerous ways, such as better tracking of patient data, allowing doctors to connect to other doctors around the world for consulting with doctors in other countries, and have made the surgery process much less invasive, not needing to resort to exploratory surgery unless absolutely necessary. Therefore, technological advancements in the last decades have played an important role in the medical industry, bringing benefits to all facets of the medical field. This is why the continued implementation of computers and the technologies made possible by them must be given more weight when discussing medical funding.

There will be people who say that computers in the medical field are a danger to patients' privacy and safety, from illegally being downloaded, forcibly taken by hackers for any number of reasons from being sold to others for identity theft, and finally being lost in a crash losing all the data the hospital has on their patents. These fears, while valid, are not as serious as they once were, starting with a computer crash concerning hospitals and primary care physicians they keep hard copies or physical copies of patient records in either warehouses or doctors’ offices respectively, so even in the event of a crash resulting in all patient data being lost, they can retrieve the hard copy and reenter it into the computer for accurate record keeping, the reverse is also true if patient files are lost, then the records can be printed off with nothing being lost. For the more concerning issue, especially in the interconnected world we live in the privacy concerns of unlawful attainment of your private information, it has been a key point of hospital administrative concern in fact since 2016 over forty percent of hospitals have seen a massive increase in their health information technology (IT) infrastructure with emphasis on data security. Generally speaking, there are still data breaches at hospitals like any other place that deals with huge stores of personal data there is no denying that, however the increase in IT budgets clearly shows that hospitals administrators are taking the potential of data breaches very seriously with administrators being willing to spend much time, money, and effort to make sure that patient records are secure and in less danger than previously. Thus, even though there is a danger of patents records being illegally accessed, hospitals are taking the necessary steps to ensure that they are not only complying with EHR incentive programs but ensuring that patients' personal information is kept safe from anyone who wishes to illegally access said data. Therefore the risks should not stop people from discussing the importance of technology in the medical field and its further funding.

To better understand how much technology is benefiting the medical field, we must first understand how the computer came about and why it was first needed, that should give us a scale of the impact of the computer in medicine. Computers were first invented to simply make the process of counting large amounts of numbers, specifically the census of population easier with less time being devoted to counting. The computer was first introduced in a hospital during the mid-50 as an automation of financial and accounting. It was in the middle of the 1960s that hospitals realized that they could use computers to enter patient medical records, with the end of the 60s leading to a concept of nationwide data standards and guidelines. Continued innovation and expansion of computer capabilities over the next 40 years would lead the computer from a simple data processing device used by hospitals for financial, accounting, and electronic medical records to medical devices that helped save not only many lives but make medical procedures less invasive and safer. This innovation also lead many in the healthcare industry to realize they could use computers to track potential outbreaks of dangerous pathogens or to cut down time on testing for issues in patents. Further showing why budgets for medical technologies and computers must be given weight when discussing budgets in hospitals or the medical field in general.

The most obvious benefit of computers in the medical field is better treatment of patients, less suffering, and quicker recovery time. The use of new machines made possible by innovations in computers and related technologies allows doctors to reduce the need for exploratory surgery, while also ensuring that doctors make informed and more importantly correct diagnoses in their patients. This leads to a speed-up in not only the diagnosis process but also medical procedur