Medicine goes to the mall: enhancement technologies and quality of life (original) (raw)
Related papers
2022
The new normal has become the "now normal". Indeed, it is now inevitable that the health care system has changed, including the pharmaceutical services. A big evolution has taken place which will correspond to a huge change in pharmaceutical practice in order to keep abreast with the new normal and continue rendering pharmaceutical services and access to the community. The emergence of new ideas in order to meet the demands of the society in terms of pharmaceutical services while keeping the community safe from contamination with the coronavirus has taken a tool. This pandemic situation has indeed opened an avenue of new pharmaceutical services like Drive-Thru Pharmacy, Telepharmacy and Door-to-Door Delivery of Medicines. However, the full practice of these pharmaceutical services are not yet fully developed and accepted. Several studies have indicated that during the pandemic community pharmacist have faced ample challenges like emotional exhaustion (13.39%) and depersonalization (5.64%) which were higher in comparison to pre-Covid-19 situation. Indeed, Pharmacist are experiencing burnout with work from the demands of the consumers but supplies are limited. Truly, the Covid-19 pandemic has created a great havoc in the pharmaceutical industry especially during the lockdowns. Though market trends for Drive-Thru Pharmacy is suggestively positive but the actual materialization of this new pharmaceutical service innovation is left to be further studied for full global development and acceptability. This review aims to elucidate the possible good benefit of Drive-Thru pharmacy especially during the pandemic. Its birth, challenges, potential market trend and socioeconomic implications shall be discussed and its corresponding correlation.
Improving Access to Medicines through Integrated Technologies
2013
Access, equity, quality, and cost-effectiveness are key issues facing health care in both developed and developing countries. With about 75% of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas, and their healthcare services are sparse, it is only stating the obvious that patients sometimes travel long distances just to access healthcare services and/or to receive medication refills leading to work absenteeism, low productivity, inefficiency and rapidly plummeting quality of life. Technology in healthcare over the years attempts to solve some of the problems associated with access to health thereby looping all of these functionalities towards overall healthcare improvement. This paper will review holistically the interplay of factors that influence the healthcare access value chain as well as how the application of digital technologies can bridge the gaps in both rural and urban locales.
2017
Purpose: Self-service technologies (SSTs) are part of the everyday experience. On a normal day, you may visit the ATM, go through the express self-service check out at the grocery store, or utilize the bag-check kiosk at the airport. In recent years, SSTs have been incorporated into health centers across the country, but the utility and impact of these on-site technology services have yet to be explored. Thus, using a grounded theory approach, our study aims to understand the following: (1) factors that affect decisions to use healthcare SST; (2) patient perceptions of healthcare SST; and (3) consequences of healthcare SST use.
Medication as infrastructure. Decentring Self-care
Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), and specifically the concept of infrastructure as conceptualised by , this paper argues and empirically demonstrates that self-care may be considered a practice that is thoroughly sociotechnical, material, distributed and de-centred. Comparing the practices related to medication in the treatment of asthma, type 2 diabetes and haemophilia, we show that in practice there is no 'self' in self-care. More specifically, the 'self' in self-care is an actor who is highly dependent on, and intertwined with infrastructures of care, in order to be self-caring. Infrastructures of care are the more or less embedded 'tracks' along which care may 'run', shaping and being shaped by actors and settings along the way. Obtaining prescriptions, going to the pharmacy, bringing medication home and administering it as parts of daily life are commonplace activities embedded in the fabric of life, especially for those living with a chronic condition. However, this procurement and emplacement of medication involves the establishment and ongoing enactment of infrastructures of care, that is, the connections between various actors and locations that establish caring spaces and caring selves.
Quality of Life: Erosions and Opportunities Under Managed Care
The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 2000
In recent years a number of commentators have discussed the importance of measuring quality of life (QL) in health care. We want to know whether an intervention will help people to live better, not just longer, and whether some treatments cause more trouble than they are worth. New technologies promise wondrous benefits. But when millions of people have no insured access to health care, and when many others face increasingly stringent limits on care, technologies’ high costs require us to choose what we should do from the broader universe of what we can do.The challenges to measuring QL are formidable. Researchers debate whether to measure general QL or disease-specific QL; whether to focus on functional status such as the patient's ability to walk and dress himself, or on the value people ascribe to that functional status; whether to seek the values of the general public, or to concentrate on people actually affected by a given disease or disability.
Health Outcomes in Patients Using No-Prescription Online Pharmacies to Purchase Prescription Drugs
Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2012
Many prescription drugs are freely available for purchase on the Internet without a legitimate prescription from a physician. This study focused on the motivations for using no-prescription online pharmacies (NPOPs) to purchase prescription drugs rather than using the traditional doctor-patient-pharmacy model. We also studied whether users of NPOP-purchased drugs had poorer health outcomes than those who obtain the same drug through legitimate health care channels. We selected tramadol as a representative drug to address our objective because it is widely prescribed as an unscheduled opioid analgesic and can easily be purchased from NPOPs. Using search engine marketing (SEM), we placed advertisements on search result pages stemming from the keyword "tramadol" and related terms and phrases. Participants, who either used the traditional doctor-patient-pharmacy model to obtain tramadol (traditional users, n = 349) or purchased it on the Web without a prescription from their local doctor (ie, nontraditional users, n = 96), were then asked to complete an online survey. Respondents in both groups were primarily white, female, and in their mid-forties (nontraditional users) to upper forties (traditional users). Nearly all nontraditional users indicated that their tramadol use was motivated by a need to treat pain (95%, 91/96) that they perceived was not managed appropriately through legitimate health care channels. A majority of nontraditional users (55%, 41/75) indicated they used NPOPs because they did not have access to sufficient doses of tramadol to relieve pain. In addition, 29% (22/75) of nontraditional users indicated that the NPOPs were a far cheaper alternative than seeing a physician, paying for an office visit, and filling a prescription at a local pharmacy, which is often at noninsured rates for those who lack medical insurance (37%, 35/96, of NPOP users). The remainder of participants (16%, 12/96) cited other motivations (eg, anonymity) for using NPOPs. In terms of health outcomes, nontraditional users experienced a significantly (P < .01) greater number and severity of adverse events, including life-threatening seizures: 7% (7/96) of nontraditional users reported seizures, while none of the traditional users reported seizures. Although online pharmacies can offer distinct advantages in terms of convenience and cost, users of these "rogue" pharmacies that offer drugs with no prescription or doctor supervision do so at great risk to their health, as evidenced by much higher rates of adverse events. The most logical explanation for these findings is that the lack of physician oversight of dosage schedules, contraindicated conditions, and concomitant medications, were responsible for the increased intensity and frequency of adverse events in the nontraditional users. Although we only examined tramadol, it is logical to postulate that similar results would be observed with dozens of equally accessible prescription drugs. As such, the geometric growth in the use of online pharmacies around the world should prompt intense medical and regulatory discussion about their role in the provision of medical care.
JMIR Research Protocols, 2016
Background: For patients with complex care needs, engagement in disease management activities is critical. Chronic illnesses touch almost every person in the United States. The costs are real, personal, and pervasive. In response, patients often seek tools to help them manage their health. Patient portals, personal health records tethered to an electronic health record, show promise as tools that patients value and that can improve health. Although patient portals currently focus on the outpatient experience, the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (OSUWMC) has deployed a portal designed specifically for the inpatient experience that is connected to the ambulatory patient portal available after discharge. While this inpatient technology is in active use at only one other hospital in the United States, health care facilities are currently investing in infrastructure necessary to support large-scale deployment. Times of acute crisis such as hospitalization may increase a patient's focus on his/her health. During this time, patients may be more engaged with their care and especially interested in using tools to manage their health after discharge. Evidence shows that enhanced patient self-management can lead to better control of chronic illness. Patient portals may serve as a mechanism to facilitate increased engagement. Objective: The specific aims of our study are (1) to investigate the independent effects of providing both High Tech and High Touch interventions on patient-reported outcomes at discharge, including patients' self-efficacy for managing chronic conditions and satisfaction with care; and (2) to conduct a mixed-methods analysis to determine how providing patients with access to MyChart Bedside (MCB, High Tech) and training/education on patient portals, and MyChart Ambulatory (MCA, High Touch) will influence engagement with the patient portal and relate to longer-term outcomes. Methods: Our proposed 4-year study uses a mixed-methods research (MMR) approach to evaluate a randomized controlled trial studying the effectiveness of a High Tech intervention (MCB, the inpatient portal), and an accompanying High Touch intervention (training patients to use the portal to manage their care and conditions) in a sample of hospitalized patients with two or more chronic conditions. This study measures how access to a patient portal tailored to the inpatient stay can improve patient experience and increase patient engagement by (1) improving patients' perceptions of the process of care while in the hospital;
Healthcare, 2013
So far, the very meaning of health and therefore, treatment and rehabilitation is benchmarked to the normal or species-typical body. We expect certain abilities in members of a species; we expect humans to walk but not to fly, but a bird we expect to fly. However, increasingly therapeutic interventions have the potential to give recipients beyond species-typical body related abilities (therapeutic enhancements, TE). We believe that the perfect storm of TE, the shift in ability expectations toward beyond species-typical body abilities, and the increasing desire of health consumers to shape the health system will increasingly influence various aspects of health care practice, policy, and scholarship. We employed qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate among others how human enhancement, neuro/cognitive enhancement, brain machine interfaces, and social robot discourses cover (a) healthcare, healthcare policy, and healthcare ethics, (b) disability and (c) health consumers and how visible various assessment fields are within Neuro/Cogno/ Human enhancement and within the BMI and social robotics discourse. We found that health care, as such, is little discussed, as are health care policy and ethics; that the term