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Digital Technology And Healthcare: An Integration Which Is Here to Stay!

InnoHEALTH magazine digital team — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 11:17:21 +0000

The digital technology has not only impoverished its efficiency in operation for a better patient care but has increased the total outlook of both healthcare professionals for treatment & diagnosis.

No one can stop technology from evolving. As I sip a cup of coffee taking a break from diagnostic work , I wonder at some point, every part of our lives will have changed through the power of digital technologies. Hasn’t it?

The recent pandemic has revolutionized many aspects of human life, one among the many which tops the list is undoubtedly the accelerated integration of digital technology and healthcare revolutionising the practice of medicine. The digital technology has not only impoverished its efficiency in operation for a better patient care but has increased the total outlook of both healthcare professionals for treatment & diagnosis. Let us now take a bird’s eye view on how the technology has gone hand in glove for the healthcare industry.

With the incorporation of electronic health records (EHR) the scenario has changed to a digital versions of a patient’s paper chart.

Enhanced Communication:

Gone are the days when one had to prepare a day ahead to visit his physician for consultation as it would take most of his day. Today teleconsultations have become commonplace and all it takes is a smart phone to block a slot and finish a video consultation within four walls of one’s home .No longer do physicians have to stagnate their practice to a confined clinic. Teleconferencing has made even cross border consultations for patients and opinion exchange for practitioners easy.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) :

Many of us often faced a situation when during a doctor’s visit we ended up putting up a sad face when he would have asked for old ailment or medical records? Sheets of papers and laboratory reports would be packed in a cover only until recovery and then forgotten till the next spurt of disease. With the incorporation of electronic health records (EHR) the scenario has changed to a digital versions of a patient’s paper chart. The EHR is a boon where real-time, patient-centered records are kept and the information is made available instantly and securely to authorized users. While an EHR records the medical and treatment histories of patients, an EHR system is built to store standard clinical data collected in a provider’s office and can be inclusive of a broader view of a patient’s care.

EHRs contain a patient’s medical history, diagnoses, medications, treatment plans, immunization dates, allergies, radiology images, and laboratory investigation results. This digital format helps share information with other health care providers and organizations – such as laboratories, specialists, medical imaging facilities, pharmacies, emergency facilities, and school and workplace clinics – so they contain the overall information from all specialists involved in a patient’s care. It makes hassle free shifting of patients from one centre to the other.

Big Data:

Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled devices have made remote monitoring in the healthcare sector possible, unleashing the potential to keep patients safe and healthy, and helping the clinicians to deliver superlative care.

Medical research is the backbone to develop sustainable medicines and devices for which massive data access is a pertinent. The collection of data for epidemiological studies, research, or clinical trials, digital technology for laboratories and institutes has been more diverse and cater to a wider population due to incorporation of digital technology. As we step into the era of preventive medicine, studying trends in big data facilitate early detection of chronic and lifestyle diseases.

Wearables and IoTs :

The digital revolution has developed hundreds of wearables that monitor real time human body parameters like blood pressure, pulse rate, oxygen saturation and the like. These apps enable patients to monitor their health and disease with a timely alarm of concern. Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled devices have made remote monitoring in the healthcare sector possible, unleashing the potential to keep patients safe and healthy, and helping the clinicians to deliver superlative care. It also keeps the physician updated on the effect of medication dosages and modifies treatment protocols by tracking vitals when needed without personal consultation visits

Artificial intelligence :

AI – the digital technology where machines mimic human cognition, and are capable of learning, thinking, and making decisions or taking actions. AI has unified man and machine in many fields of medicine including medical laboratories, radio diagnosis surgical specialities and in the form of smart monitoring devices in critical care units. Precision medicine is the application of AI wherein AI-powered body scans can spot early stages of cancer and vascular diseases and predict health issues people might face because of their genetic constitution.

The road ahead……

Digital technology has literally transformed healthcare and the trend is expected to continue in the years to come. Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, blockchain, healthcare mobile apps, wearables and many other such advancements will change the future of healthcare. However, algorithm developers must be careful to keep the access secure and validate the technology before being declared for use. Also with a humongous population of 1.3 billion scattered across urban and rural India challenges in healthcare delivery are posed in terms of accessibility, affordability and quality.The partnership between technology and humans could reap tremendous rewards.

Will machines take over the physician’s role?

Well yes and no. Healthcare delivery will undoubtedly be enhanced in terms of diagnosis and treatment with integration of technology, but nothing can still take away the human touch. We have entered into an era of man with machine and not man versus machine paving way for a better and healthy tomorrow.

Composed by: “Dr.Archana Shetty, is currently working as a Blood Transfusion Officer and Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology at CDSIMER under the aegis of Dayananda Sagar University. An active academician with over 30 publications in national and international journals, her other interests include free verse poetry and blogging.”

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Blood donation amidst the pandemic: If you haven’t then the time to donate is now!

InnoHEALTH magazine digital team — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 06:33:50 +0000

A couple of days have just gone by, and as I sink into my chair in the Blood Centre, it dawns on me that it’s been a year and a half into the pandemic journey. The Posters and motivational messages on the display board of the Blood Centre I work in, still smell fresh from the celebrations of the ‘NATIONAL VOLUNTARY BLOOD DONATION DAY’ on the 1^st of October, which was as anticipated was sober this year and the year that passed. COVID -19 has had major implications for the global healthcare sector, with blood transfusion services being no exception.

While at one corner the donors were hesitant with apprehensions of even visiting the blood centres, recipients were jittered with the thought of the virus being transmitted through the received blood.

The pandemic has brought in revolutionary changes in diagnostics, new chapters have been written in terms of medications, genetics, treatment protocols, vaccination to name a few. However, the fact that the need for human blood during the pandemic was there cannot be changed,it is there and will only continue to grow. Though hospitals witnessed a drop in the scheduled planned surgeries, the need for blood units persisted due to its therapeutic roles in trauma victims, anaemic, thalassemics and cancer management. The only life saving medicine that cannot be manufactured but can only be passed on from a generous donor to a patient in need is the human blood. The demand and supply chain was badly affected. While at one corner the donors were hesitant with apprehensions of even visiting the blood centres, recipients were jittered with the thought of the virus being transmitted through the received blood. To add on was the constraint of conducting voluntary blood donation camps, restrictions on travel which further affected the workforce. These, along with other factors made it challenging to pile up blood stock and suffice the blood demands of the patients in need.

As a team working in a Blood Centre affiliated to a tertiary care hospital, that caters to a vast rural population, we took the responsibility of motivating all potential healthy donors in and around our campus. What came as a surprise was that a few key facts needed to be cleared which were engraved in their minds, especially regarding COVID-19 and Blood Donation. A snippet of the same has been given below with the hope that voluntary blood donation can be boosted up.

If you are a donor who wants to donate blood……

Blood donation during Covid is absolutely safe. All good Blood Centres practice stringent protocols of safety and donor screening. Spacing and repeated cleaning of donor stations, sanitizing places of potential contamination, wearing protective masks compulsorily and following biomedical waste disposal as per regulatory bodies are being followed. Also voluntary donor appointments are fixed by allotting time slots to avoid crowding at Blood Centres.

Vaccination and Covid……

The Notification from the Government of India has now declared that one can donate after 14 days of receiving any/each dose of currently available Covid vaccine, provided that the donor clears all the criteria for other norms of Blood donation. So, after two weeks past a vaccination one can be an eligible donor!

If at any point time one was hospitalized for Covid the proposed deferral period is 3 months from hospital discharge. Published studies and literature till date have shown that respiratory viruses like the SARS CoV2 cannot be transmitted by donation or transfusion.

What if you have got infected with Covid ………

According to the guidelines in India, a person can donate after 28 days of full recovery and without any further symptoms. If at any point time one was hospitalized for Covid the proposed deferral period is 3 months from hospital discharge. Published studies and literature till date have shown that respiratory viruses like the SARS CoV2 cannot be transmitted by donation or transfusion. So either as a donor or recipient you are safe!

Social media and healthcare related websites have been playing a crucial role in the dissemination of facts and myths pertaining to Blood donation ever since the Pandemic was declared. However it is recommended to follow credible websites and to directly speak to your doctor for any clarifications.

The above was a bird’s eye view of the need and clarifications regarding blood donation and Covid. I will consider my little effort worthwhile , after going through the above matter the little angel in your mind shouts out to you ‘ It’s time to be a hero and save lives, it’s time to donate blood and the time is NOW’

Composed by: “Dr.Archana Shetty, is currently working as a Blood Transfusion Officer and Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology at CDSIMER under the aegis of Dayananda Sagar University. With a teaching and diagnostic experience of over 12 years she is actively involved in blood transfusion services at the hospital.”

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Epilepsy is the Fourth Most Common Neurological Disorder

InnoHEALTH Magazine — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 11:04:03 +0000

Artificial Intelligence can help decode epileptic brains. Epilepsy is the fourth most common neurological disorder affecting nearly 65 million people worldwide. The seizures or ‘fits’ as is commonly known, arise due to unusual electrical activity in the brain and is the chief symptom of epilepsy. Neither dependent on age or gender, the onset of the seizure is unpredictable without a set pattern of frequency of occurrence or severity, often posing a challenge to the caregiver.

Did you know that one student commits suicide every hour in India?

Although epilepsy can be related to previous brain injuries or genetic factors, neurologists have found unprovoked, recurrent seizures in healthy individuals too. How and why these seizures occur remains a mystery. However, research has found that the source of seizures is within the brain. In other words, the brain itself is the generator of epilepsy.

Spatial maps of top 10 networks: If the origin is within the brain, then are there any fingerprints that can be detected? Does the brain often tell-tale signs which can be mapped to predict the tendency of epilepsy?

Reason for Aggression After Drink

Seeking answers to these questions, a team of interdisciplinary researchers conducted a study to peep inside epileptic brains. The results indicate that there exist independent neural networks that can carry disease sensitive information about the anomaly. With the help of machine learning models and artificial intelligence, researchers were able to detect and reveal the hidden patterns.

“Epilepsy is not a disorder but the manifesting of something from within the brain’s electrical activity. Interestingly, each one of us has the neural map of epilepsy within our brain. It is only when the network gets fired and manifests externally, in a recurrent manner, it becomes disorder or epilepsy,” explained Dr. Tapan Kumar Gandhi, lead researcher of the study from Indian Institute of TechnologyDelhi, while speaking to India Science Wire.

The usual diagnosing tool for epilepsy is by EEG (Electroencephalography) readings of epileptic patterns and visible symptoms like convulsions, loss of consciousness or sensory disturbances.

Existing studies reveal specific patterns that represent synchronous activities of sensory, auditory, cognitive and other functions. These activities are indicated by the change in blood flow to the brain and seen as BOLD signals or changes in the Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent output.

Recent developments in Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRI help picture these activities in the brain and detect the cause of seizures such as a lesion or scar. However, MRI is not very useful when a seizure flares up. Whereas, functional MRI — another scanning method — can record regional interactions in the brain when a particular task is being performed.

In 1995, Indian researchers had found that the brain shows prominent neural network connections even in its resting state. Termed as resting-state functional MRI or rsfMRI, the images from this scanning indicate neural patterns in an individual’s brain even when no action is performed.

In the present study, the team utilized rsfMRI technique and performed brain scans on individuals with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE), which is the most common form of epilepsy.

Dr. Gandhi said, “We hypothesized that there could be ‘disease-specific networks’ in epilepsy prone brain that can be identified with the help of the machine learning model.” Machine learning involves artificial intelligence to read live data instead of pre-programmed information. Such a building block of a machine is analogous to a neuron cell in the brain.

Researchers used a tool called Support Vector Machine (SVM) to deal with the complex and non-linear data obtained from the scans. By using another algorithm called Elastic-net based ranking, the relevant features of the neuroimaging data were extracted. The signals were integrated to reveal the patterns.

The team conducted a pilot study on 132 subjects – 42 with epilepsy, and the rest with healthy individuals. Parameters like age, gender, history of epilepsy, genetic predisposition, incidents of injuries, medications and more, were taken into account. The epilepsy patients underwent three rsfMRI while those in the healthy group were scanned once.

In all, 88 independent components or networks were obtained from the whole brain imaging data and fed as input to the SVM. From the patterns, top 10 strong networks were correlated with clinical features using another standard method called Pearson’s Correlation to generate the rsfMRI epileptic neural networks.

From the pattern inputs, the SVM could identify epileptic individuals to an accuracy of 97.5% and specific lobes in the brain responsible for the condition. The model also revealed correlations such as the age of onset, frequency of seizures, or duration of illness.

By this, researchers concluded that the independently derived rsfMRI contains epilepsy-related networks. ‘Our research establishes that with the help of machine learning methods, we can identify these networks, as we had hypothesized. Increased strength in these networks indicates the possibility of a progressing Temporal Lobe Epilepsy’, explained Dr.Gandhi.

The team included Rose Dawn Bharath, Sujas Bharadwaj, Sanjib Sinha, Kenchaiah Raghavendra, Ravindranadh C. Mundlamuri, Arivazhagan Arimappamagan, Malla Bhaskara Rao, Jamuna Rajeshwaran, Kandavel Thennarasu and Parthasarathy Satishchandra (National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bengaluru); Tapan K. Gandhi and Jeetu Raj (IIT, Delhi); Rajanikant Panda (Universitè de Liège, Belgium); Ganne Chaitanya (Thomas Jefferson University, USA) and Kaushik K. Majumdar (Indian Statistical Institute, Bengaluru). The study results have been published in the journal European Radiology.

Credits: India Science Wire

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