Jive Weasel

One thing that stays the same in the medical field is the ever present desire to be able to provide the best quality care for patients. Year after year, innovative technological breakthroughs allow the medical community to be able to perform their jobs better and faster. Thing have not change. Here are 7 medical technologies that will change the world in the next decade.

1. There’s a whole new approach to searching for the cures of different medical conditions that millions of people fall victim to every year. Dr. Ho, the head of medical informatics at the Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D, is creating mathematical models of diseases which can be put onto a computer. This will allow for new drug testing to be done on these computer models rather than animals and humans.

2. Another medical technology is what GE Healthcare, the maker of the technology, calls eHealth. The goal of eHealth is to connect doctors to doctors in such a way that all information that is shared between them is understandable and readily accessible. Because healthcare information is currently fragmented into thousands of different frameworks that have their own unique system, it’s almost impossible to quickly and easily share information. With eHealth valuable, and sometimes even life-saving information, can make its way to the proper health care professionals in record time and will be easily understood.

3. Remote healthcare may be just what the older generation and the seriously ill or handicapped citizens have been waiting for. Remote healthcare is the innovation of Intel. It seeks to reduce hospital visits by monitoring a patient’s vital signs right from the comfort of their own homes. This remote monitoring technology could save people, tons of time and money, and give health care providers an upper hand as to how best to treat their patients by studying them in the settings where they live.

4. For cancer patients all over the world, a new technology, referred to as individualized therapy, aims to give healthcare providers the ability to visually map large networks of cancer cells which could allow them to get the right cancer medication to the right cancer patient at the right time. Currently doctors are only able to diagnose cancer by the history of the cancerous tumor, and try to determine which treatment is best. With this new technology, doctors will be able to see a more distinctive attribute of the molecular pathways of these tumors which will allow them to diagnose the type of cancer in less time, and to know which treatments to give.

5. Two Stanford University students have designed the NanoLab. This is a portable medical lab that will allow an individual patient to self-test rather than going to a medical facility for a simple diagnosis. The device will have a number of different sticks that can be used to diagnose different illness. All the patient has to do is add some blood or saliva and let the NanoLab do the rest. This will be a remarkable piece of technology for use in third world countries.

6. The founder of BioNanomatrix, Han Cao, has created a chip that may lower the cost of genome analysis. This chip could provide doctors with the information they need to tailor a patient’s medical needs to their unique genetic profile, and allow them to identify new viruses in record time.

7. Researchers at Kitasato University have developed a medical scanner that increases the resolution of the current existing technology by an astonishing 1000 times! This is a significant development in the world of advanced cancer detection.

Trudi Buck writes about how to apply to radiology tech schools.