The medical field is constantly evolving. One of the biggest changes can be found in technology. For example, patient portals are a big thing now that allows the patient to have easier access to their health records, but not be able to adjust it. It also allows the patient to contact their physicians without having to make an appointment or leave their house. There are a lot of advantages but there are also some disadvantages that come with it.

Some disadvantages are that people of the older generation don’t always have access to a computer or the internet. And for those who do have access to it, they may not know how to use it. It then becomes a problem for them to take advantage of this new technology. On the upside, it relieves the facility from having as many patients coming in with questions for their physicians. Another downfall to having new high tech equipment is that the patient care time is decreasing. Some patients believe that their physician spends more time messing with the computer then actually listening to them.

High tech equipment has also helped decrease time spent on procedures, making doctors more accessible to other patients. For surgeries, outcomes of a procedure done with more advance care equipment is at a better and faster recovery rate. Thirty years ago, patients could probably spend one-to-two days in the hospital recovering from a surgery. Now the patient can go home the same day!

In some aspects it’s a great timely modification that has been made in the medical world, but in others it has taken away from other things like patient care. Change can be a positive thing but also a negative thing when dealing with this kind of situation. Adjustments occur to help the medical professionals and the privacy of the patient and their dignity.

The most important advantage that could be taken from this is that the reason that this kind of change has happened was to protect the patient and their dignity. It protects them from having their information from being leaked to people that it doesn’t need to be leaked to. The old ways of keeping a patient’s medical record was to keep it in a folder in a filing shelf behind the receptionist. With the electronic medical records or EMRs it is kept online in a system that is only accessed by the people that have rights to it. The people that have rights to access it is the physician, the recipients, and the nurse taking care of you. They all will be monitored to make sure that those people log out of your record and it is recorded how long they are in the record for.