Healthcare has been one of the largest industries as a laggard in adopting many of the technologies available to us as consumers. Reading posts and looking at pictures only helps so much for visual learners. Here are some examples of how you can use technology to improve your health.
Some include topics that were previously discussed such as CakeHealth and Fitocracy.
Social media has become an integral part for many us in our daily lives. The ability to feel always connected with those around you and around the world is something that humanity has never experienced before. Facebook is a great way to connect to those you already know. With Twitter, the traditional walls between celebrities and fans have been torn down. These, of course, are only two of the major social networks.
What if, with these new technologies, we can communicate with our doctors like never before as well? According to a recent study by UBM Medica shows that many physicians are already connecting with their peers in order to share and discuss best practices. Approximately 72% of physicians are engaging in social media (personally and/or professionally). The most popular platform, unsurprisingly, was Facebook with over 86% of the physicians who use social media. The next two platforms were Medscape and Sermo which are geared towards healthcare strictly which allow them to share best practices among other information.
As more physicians continue to realize the many benefits of connecting with other professionals, it’s likely that we will also see them engage with their patients.
How would you feel with using social media to connect with your local physician? Are you comfortable enough to tweet your doctor?
Who doesn’t like making their life easier? I know that I like to take advantage of anything that will help me do less work to achieve the same goal.
I’m sure many of you have already heard of the stellar service known as Mint. This simple, yet effective, site allows you to connect all of your monetary accounts such as a bank account or credit card to their website. I know, that sounds like Internet suicide by giving the login credentials of your financial accounts to some web service. Not to worry though, the connection is read-only so that no transactions can take place.
CakeHealth (mmm, cake…) works in a similar manner by providing a free and easy way to manage your health care plans. It brings all of them under one roof (at least metaphorically) so that you are able to easily manage and track your spending on health. If you would rather not share your account credentials, you are given the option to enter your expenses in manually or upload a PDF of your claim. The convenience of auto-updating is lost through the manual method, however.
I’m sure most of us can attest that quite frankly, medical billing sucks. The intention of CakeHealth is to help you better understand and organize the healthcare services you pay for. Benefits can range from catching medical over-billing to obtaining insights on filing your taxes correctly. It’s a piece of cake! (You know it was inevitable.)
Courtesy of http://www.ciefrenak.org
Despite the continued advances in technology, healthcare has been an industry that has lagged behind in adopting many of these. Why has an industry, which plays a pivotal role in everyone’s lives, been so seemingly apathetic to embracing technology? As most problems, it stems from a mixture of a lack of funding and the unwanted change. Recently, the healthcare industry has seen a surge due to factors such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The industry is primed for a heavy influx of technologies for consumers to better manage their health. Continue reading
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