Risk and Benefit of Connectivity in Health Care, Research Paper Example

Connectivity in health care refers to the ability of a medical device to communicate with each other and the patient electronic health record. The emerging technologies offer unprecedented ability to promote connectivity in the health care. The connectivity in health care brings many benefits to caregivers, device administrators, and patients.

Among the benefits of connectivity includes improved quality of care. For example with the use of wireless connectivity once a device has been associated with the patient, the patient data is saved in their EHR. Availability of more patients’ data provides caregivers with a detailed medical history of the patient and thus improving their ability to make informed decisions. In addition, detailed data decreases the mistake of practitioners ordering multiple tests that end up consuming time and resources.

Connectivity in health care makes monitoring easy. For instance, a network-connected device monitored at a central point such as nurse station enables nurses and other caregivers to monitor several patients without having to move from one point to another.

According to data from research connectivity between the medical device, drastically increases  their efficiency.  For instance, a patient with brain injuries at ICU breath with help of ventilator that operates according to the parameter set by physicians. To set this parameter, the physician requires the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in blood of the patient. These tests are done in the lab 4 – 5 times in a day  and then set him to make necessary adjustment.  This is inefficient that can be improved by connecting procedure.

Despite the above benefits, connectivity in healthcare has some risks that are often associated with security and privacy of patient data that is communicated in hospital networks. For instance, if the network is not properly secured there are chances unauthorized person can gain access to such information. In addition, jamming and flooding of the network can cause interference affecting the wireless connectivity thus hindering the provision of care.