Importance Achow Can Science Technology Impact Healthcare Trends

How Can Science and Technology Impact Afghanistan Healthcare Trends?
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How Can Science and Technology Impact Afghanistan Healthcare Trends?
Introduction
Afghanistan has been ravaged by the war, which has crippled the healthcare system by destroying the healthcare infrastructure. The government has been reviving the healthcare system and aligning it with its strategy and vision for its people. As a country still reeling with post-conflict challenges, its healthcare needs are unique in various ways, such as high PTSD patients, injured/maimed/disabled citizenry, low income due to the ravaged economy, etc. Some of the major challenges towards rebuilding and establishing a robust healthcare industry are very low mortality rates (48yrs) high infant mortality (257 for every 1000 live births) CITATION Vis10 \l 1033 (Viswanathan, et al., 2010). Afghanistan has only 117 government-run hospitals and few privately owned hospitals serving over 35 million people, and since the country is vast, many people travel hundreds of kilometres to access proper healthcare. MSF hospital in south Afghanistan has a 300-bed capacity and serves over 1 million people CITATION Low16 \l 1033 (Lowry, 2016). However, the country has embarked on ambitious plans to harness the power of technology to ensure it delivers quality healthcare to its residents. Thus, Afghanistan ought to:
Develop Data-Driven Healthcare
The world is powered by information and healthcare can be greatly improved by investment in technology. Many developed countries have invested in collecting data from its people to analyze and establish trends that can help institute strategic preemptive interventions to improve healthcare delivery. Wearable technology has enabled many patients to relay information about their health to their respective physicians/doctors for analysis and helps in understanding their illnesses/conditions better CITATION Lew15 \l 1033 (Lewy, 2015). The information is either relayed through the internet or physically delivered to the healthcare provider in digital format for analysis. These wearable technologies have sensors that detect variations in blood pressure, sugar level, etc. and they assist the doctors in understanding their patients’ illnesses/conditions and the best approach to treat them CITATION Pat12 \l 1033 (Patel, Park, Bonato, Chan, & Rodgers, 2012). Mobile computing has played an instrumental role in this approach to healthcare as it stores the information from the wearables and relays them to the healthcare providers. Mobile apps running on smartphones have also been developed to help patients track their health status through their interactive user interfaces.
Additionally, in matters records, there has been an exponential increment of digital records. Though the government and or healthcare providers will be necessitated to build a robust infrastructure for the data, it is an inevitable trend that will be the backbone of healthcare in the future. Electronic health records (EHR) and electronic medical records (EMR) technologies are the solutions to the traditional slow creation, storing and retrieving paper-based records. The space taken by paper-based records is also the immense and efficient trans...