How many of you have seen Avatar? What’s amazing to me about that movie is the technology and the 3D experience. It impacted me so much I decided to sit down and really think about how it will impact the future of health care.

Technology is dramatically altering the ways in which we diagnose, treat, care for and manage patients. Information processing and communication are centrally involved in virtually all health care activities, including obtaining and recording information about patients; communication among health care professionals; accessing medical literature; selecting diagnostic procedures; interpreting laboratory results; and collecting clinical research data.

Current Patient records are static and flat—consisting either of unstructured data written on paper or more structured text information stored in various databases. In either case, the records provide disparate bits and pieces of information on diagnoses and diseases; accessing a comprehensive history proves to be an enormous challenge.

Does it really have to be that way? What if there was a way to use 3D technology to bring the information to life? What if a system could bring together all these flat and static pieces to derive a dynamic and full picture of a patient’s health status in real time? And what if the system were to provide this information in an intuitive and easy-to-use way? Doctors, Nurses, and other health care providers could spend their precious time acting on data rather than struggling to sort through it all!

3D Medical Records Will Improve Patient Care

An IBM technology innovation for intelligent electronic patient records using a 3D model of the human body, has proved to be practical and valuable in a first trial at a Danish Hospital. Created at IBM’s famed Zurich Research Lab, the technology uses an avatar—a 3-D representation of the human body—to allow doctors to visualize patient medical records in an entirely new way. Called the Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME), this innovative visualization method allows a doctor or nurse to click with the computer mouse on a particular part of the avatar “body” to trigger a search of medical records to retrieve relevant information.

“It’s like Google Earth for the body,” said IBM Researcher Andre Elisseeff, who leads the healthcare projects at IBM’s Zurich Research Lab. “In hopes of speeding the move toward electronic healthcare records, we’ve tried to make information easily accessible for healthcare providers by combining medical data with visual representation, making it as simple as possible to interact with data that can improve patient care.”

Using the 3D representation, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers can consult an overview of patient data quickly and easily as well as accurately identify and locate previous treatments and treated areas of the body, and this in a way they are used to: by examining the human body. In the future, 3D medical records could become even more flexible by integrating such features as speech technology or a realistic visual representation of the 3D avatar. Thinking beyond improved patient care, imagine the possibilities 3D technology offers for medical and nursing education!

Become A Leader In Health Information Technology

Electronic medical record systems are the rage these days in health care and for good reason—early evidence suggests that they save lives and money. Their integration into public health clinics is likely to occur at a robust pace over the next two years, leading to solid job prospects for those with an expertise in clinical systems, nursing informatics, and health informatics. Nurses, in particular, are likely to be tapped for emerging project roles in clinical flow analysis and quality measures.

Biomedical Health Informatics, Nursing Informatics, and Health Information Technology are emerging, interdisciplinary and diverse fields that apply principles of computer and information science to the advancement of life sciences research, health professions education, public health, and patient care. The demand for workers who understand health care, information systems, and technology is growing rapidly especially with the new administration’s push to move to electronic medical records.

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