The Quiet Health-Care Revolution(theatlantic.com)
theatlantic.com
The Quiet Health-Care Revolution
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/the-quiet-health-care-revolution/8667/?single_page=true
3 comments
This is an amazing article. Go CareMore!!!
So if we can prevent hospitalizations for the elderly, that is a huge win. Bonus points for using everything we know about wireless sensor networks to monitor patients' conditions and predict when something catastrophic is about to happen, rather than relying on a person to physically examine each patient.
I have seen one patient who developed sepsis while in a nursing home. She had an expressive aphasia, so she wasn't able to tell us that she was feeling ill. I wonder if we would have been able to test for it earlier with better monitoring and mining.
I realize it sounds obvious to say "going to the hospital is bad" but they have a bigger impact than you'd think. Upon return to a nursing home from a hospital, patients will have been moved to a different room. Or moved from a single-occupancy to double-occupancy room. Which has a cascade of implications in terms of their care. Often this kind of thing is a function of how much the patient can afford, which is significantly decreased after a hospitalization. So the prospect of having better care (via technology, since nursing homes are chronically understaffed) to prevent preventable hospitalizations is so so cool.