Our healthcare systems around the globe are collapsing. Or if not collapsing, there is a huge debt that they are raking in and that’s definitely not easy on the purse of governments. However, there is an easier way to stay on top of the disease and make sure that patients are treated in a manner that saves costs, but it also saves lives.
What’s the biggest challenge of medicine today? You got that right – diagnosis. Making a diagnosis is increasingly difficult because the industry has been turned into a business. It brings in a lot of money, but it also causes patients who aren’t as well-off to fight a treatable disease for months on end.
Why Prevention Is the Future of Medicine
Medicine today has been reduced to a lot of bureaucracy. Developing countries in central Europe are quickly catching up with the west, but they are overlooking their tested and proven medical practices in the process. If you take a place such as Poland, healthcare has always been free, but the country’s rising living standards mean one thing – the spreading of private clinics. Private clinics aren’t bad. Their existence gives you many advantages:
- You get medical attention on the spot
- You have access to advanced equipment cheap
- Waiting times are cut
All in all, this seems like a bargain deal. The truth is that it isn’t. Private clinics aren’t specialized in dealing with multiple conditions in the sense that traditional hospitals are. If you go to an ear doctor, for example, you will get checked from head to toe, and the doctor would conclude that there’s nothing wrong with you without even giving you a recommendation where to go and what to do.
The infuriating bit is that in such systems you feel helpless to act. Once again this is because of the fact that healthcare has been turned into a business. While things continue to deteriorate for the public sector, one question emerges – how can governments guarantee that the public sector is saved? It’s simple enough – prevention is the best way to go.
Prevent Diseases, Don’t Treat Them
Imagine that you are a locksmith service. Your customers will want to get a quote and find the locksmith prices right away. But what if you could offer your customers something better? What if you could give them a guarantee and tell them what to purchase so that they wouldn’t need another lock change for a long while? Some businesses offer free inspection and maintenance check-ups to make customers happy and this is precisely what medicine should be doing as well.
Instead of focusing on dealing with a problem, the medical profession can save itself quite a bit of money if doctors could prevent diseases. To do so, they would need to monitor patients instead of having them hauled over to a hospital for tests. This can be achieved by the use of a remote wrist band.
Understandably, such monitoring rises a few questions – not least of all is the privacy of patients. However, if people agree to use private and independent wrist bands that don’t collect the data on them and just track their own changes, then the privacy issue can be avoided altogether.
Fighting diseases can indeed start very early on. Even some of the most aggressive conditions can be treated quickly if they are caught early on. How to do so? The use of smart wrist bands would be helpful. A band can be programmed to inform wearers if aberrations start showing up in their vitals. This would allow patients to quickly send data to their doctors.
If a health expert suspects something, they can let patients know and then switch onto full-time monitoring – still no need for tests. This preventive medicine is useful and helpful to doctors and patients. Nobody is wasting time nor money and people can actually enjoy quicker results and preventive medical measures. When lives are at stake, time is of the essence. Thanks to smart technologies and preemptive medicine, though, the time when doctors missed out important symptoms are nearly over. What needs to be done moving forward is to make sure that the medical profession continues to serve the patients.
