High-Tech Innovations in Medicine

  • Virtual Care: Doctors in remote ‘command centers’ are increasingly keeping tabs on vital signs of patients in intensive-care units.
  • Medical Detectives: Got a hard-to-diagnosis ailment? Patients can now post their symptoms online and offer a reward for a diagnosis from a host of doctors.
  • Doctor on Demand: You can have a virtual consultation with a physician for nonemergency medical issues.
  • Personal Care: Bedside tablets let hospital patients text the nurse. Patients can check their own charts and lab results.
  • Transparency: New insurance tools let patients compare the price of care between hospitals and calculate out-of-pocket costs.

More on the WSJ.

Comments (12)

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  1. Martha says:

    I can understand the doctors’ opposition to virtual monitoring but patient health should come first.

  2. Steven says:

    I’m interested to hear on the progress with the medical detectives website. If crowdsourcing can actually work better, this could dramatically reduce the need for specialty care.

    • Mark says:

      I agree with your earlier sentiment but I’m not sure if the latter is quite true. These diagnoses won’t always be accurate. Even if a specialist does not diagnose right away, they will still know if potential diagnoses are right or wrong.

    • Josh says:

      Yes, but these online sources can’t prescribe treatment and herein is the problem.

  3. Turner says:

    Bravo on the transparency innovation.

  4. Turner says:

    Bravo on the transparency innovation!

  5. Bradley says:

    Those nurses better turn off the read receipt.

  6. Buster says:

    Sure beats the Heck out of getting stuck for an hour in a physician’s waiting room full of contagious, sick people.