7 EdTech Tools That Will Shape Future Of Healthcare Professionals
The role of technology in medical education has evolved with time. Medical education is being impacted by a variety of variables, such as the changing healthcare environment, the physician's shifting role, altered societal expectations, rapidly advancing medical science, and the diversity of pedagogical approaches.
The use of technology in medical education aims to facilitate the acquisition of fundamental knowledge, enhance decision-making, increase perceptual variety, improve skill coordination, prepare students for rare or crucial situations, promote teamwork, and increase psychomotor abilities. Technology utilisation has also primarily developed in response to the new challenges facing medical education.
Present-day medical education makes extensive use of technology. The technologies we selected are the most promising and are expected to grow in prevalence by 2022.
Virtual and Augmented Reality
Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are quickly emerging as high-tech solutions for improving healthcare education delivery. With medical technology undergoing revolutionary advancements at a faster rate than ever before, it is critical that all healthcare professionals stay current with the most recent innovations.
Training for medical students will greatly improve and be made more realistic by utilising AR and VR technology. Medical students manage to become exponentially more self-sufficient without sacrificing the standard of their education. To keep all healthcare professionals informed about cutting-edge medicine, medical education must be ready for this shift and embrace it as soon as possible.
Wearable and Portable Technologies
Wearable technology, in most cases, is intended to continuously monitor human behavior and physical activity, including biochemical and physiological aspects. The devices could be data-driven, capturing patient vital signs such as blood pressure and heart rate, as well as blood oxygen saturation and body temperature.
Wearable technologies may also be video or photo-oriented to assist healthcare providers in assessing patients' movements in physical space, posture, and other factors. They can be attached to body limbs, objects in a room or vehicle, or even the skin of a patient.
Wearable technologies have been placed on patients in educational settings to allow instructors to see how medical students respond to and interact with them. Instructors can assist students in analyzing their speech patterns, word choices, emotional and empathy levels, and other aspects of the patient-doctor bedside manner.
Digital Health & Telehealth Technologies
Telehealth and digital health refer to virtually every aspect of healthcare that is made possible by remote or long-distance technologies. Remote clinical healthcare, health administration operations, public health operations, and professional health-related education are all examples of this. All of these aspects of telehealth are expanding as technology advances and the convenience of being able to serve students who have scheduling conflicts or geographic barriers that would otherwise keep them out of traditional on-campus healthcare programs grows.
Furthermore, through telehealth computer systems and dedicated video technologies, today's healthcare workers, particularly medical physicians and others who work directly with patients, have easy remote access to medical documents such as x-rays, patient medical histories, and even patients themselves.
Robotics
Robotics in healthcare refers to new technologies that exist in areas such as surgery, rehabilitation, sterilization and cleaning, voice recognition, and many others to assist healthcare workers with daily tasks and patient care. Surgical robots, exoskeletons, care robots, and hospital robots are the four main types of robotics used in healthcare. From minimally invasive surgeries and recovery efforts to in-home patient assistance and general laboratory tasks, the use of robotics in healthcare is expanding year after year, making healthcare more efficient and precise.
Robotics is widely used by clinical healthcare providers, such as doctors and nurses, as well as educators at colleges and universities. Healthcare professionals actively use robotics support, from the operating table to the administrative offices, as it can help clinical facilities enhance patient care, minimise waste, and frequently save on overall facility costs.
Remote Health Monitoring
Remote patient monitoring commonly referred to as RPM, or remote health monitoring, essentially helps medical professionals acquire data about patients outside of conventional healthcare settings, such as clinics and hospitals.
Remote health monitoring in education has the added benefit of allowing healthcare students and patients to learn a great deal from the data collected by advanced monitoring systems. Regardless of the student's location, working healthcare professionals and instructors can provide students with the data they need to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of treatments. Patients also learn how their habits, lifestyle, and environments affect their health, the efficacy of their treatment plans, and their overall mobility.
Artificial Intelligence
AI is becoming more popular and widespread in the healthcare industry. The majority of standard applications for this technology involve patient diagnosis, treatment plan development, various administrative activities, and patient engagement. Machine learning, natural language processing, physical robots, task automation, administrative applications, and other types of AI applications in healthcare are rapidly expanding. HealthTech highlights some of the most recent AI-powered medical tools, such as robotic-assisted therapy, MelaFind, and virtual assistants.
Depending on the type of AI, it can be applied quite broadly across the healthcare field. Neurologists, radiologists, ultrasound technicians, pathologists, intensive care nurses, immunologists, researchers, and a variety of other professionals have found AI technology useful in their patient-facing or research-driven roles.
Computer-Assisted Learning
CAL, in its broadest sense, is when we use computerized technologies to support human learning. One of the primary applications of CAL in healthcare has simply been to assist students, professors, and healthcare professionals in keeping up with the massive amount of health-related information we've acquired through advanced technologies. Furthermore, CAL has become an increasingly popular tool for medical professionals to learn sophisticated skill sets that are increasingly linked to advanced technologies.
Colleges and universities can use a variety of CAL to help their students gain a more nuanced understanding of healthcare topics, medical procedures, and other topics. Students and instructors can receive immediate feedback on the learning process and task progress. Researchers discovered that CAL has helped students learn essential knowledge and skills at a faster rate, particularly in asynchronous, self-paced learning scenarios, due to the rapid advancement of technology in healthcare.
With the shift of medical care from the traditional hospital setting to ambulatory medicine, the changing healthcare environment necessitates changes in documentation, with all information, including both health knowledge and medical records, becoming digital. This also requires the ability to provide care in a much shorter period of time. A national imperative is to put an emphasis on cost-cutting and evidence-based resource management. Most industries will depend on cutting-edge technology in the future, but the medical sector will benefit the most from it.
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