Computer Science in Healthcare
General Information
Hello, my name is Arya Kuttiyan and this is the website I made as the culminating project for the independent study I did on computer science in healthcare.
You can find the syllabus here
With computer science being a very up and coming field, its applications are endless. It has a wide range of benefits in the healthcare field and can streamline many different processes and help create a healthier world.
Some ways that computer science is used in healthcare is through telehealth, data analysis, decision making, information systems, medical imaging, caring for critically ill patients, therapy, psychology and more.
Categories
Public Health informatics: When computer science is used to collect data on a population to benefit the public health field.
Consumer Health Informatics: Technology that is used to improve a patient's experience. For example, a website or an online portal.
Clinical Research Informatics: When computer science is used to collect and analyze data to improve healthcare. For example, data can be studied to find relationships between diseases and certain factors like race, gender and living conditions.
Translational Informatics: When computer science is used to store and interpret biomedical or genomic data.
Clinical Informatics: When computer science is used in the treating and diagnosing of patients.
Fields
Information Systems
Information systems in a hospital help with the storing and transferring of the data. It keeps that data secured and can be applied in patient care, biomedical research and education. Some examples are billing, inventory, pharmacy, wards and registration systems.
Data Analysis
Data analysis requires a lot of data collection and interpretation. So, a lot of statistical calculations need to be done like standard deviation, standard error and statistical significance tests. These tests can take a long time, but with computers the process goes by faster. Some computer packages used for this purpose are BMD, SPSS, GenStat and Epi-info.
Clinical Decision Making Support Systems
Decision making support systems help complement a doctor's skills. Computers are reliable, fast and have a lot of memory. So these systems are able to diagnose patients as well has come up with possible treatment plans. The program parses the patient data and uses its knowledge base on the healthcare field to produce predictions and decisions.
Caring for Critically Ill Patients
Critically ill patients need a lot of data collected on them to help them survive. A computer is not only able to collect this data, but also presents it to a doctors in an organized and readable manner. For example, technology can collect vital signs, medicine dosages and laboratory information.
Drug Development
The process for making a drug is time consuming and tedious. However, AI is able to predict which compounds would work best for drugs, recruit patients, monitor patients, predict a patient's response to a drug and more. This helps make the drug development process more efficient.
Limitations
While these technologies are helpful, they do have a range of limitations. For example, computers can't think like the human brain. They are also very susceptible to bias. For example, the AI and machine learning used in healthcare uses a lot of data. This data can contain bias by race, gender, age and more, which causes the technology to have a biased output. Additionally, data entry is a pain for medical professionals, and there is always the risk that technology will get a virus, and the data will get erased.