I currently work in central hospital of South Karelia. I work in radiology department as a radiographer. My employer is Helsinki University hospital as we joined them in part of transfer of business at the turn of the year 2019-2020. My work is surrounded by different digital tools, mostly different patient information systems and digital systems that runs our imaging devices. Our job revolves around people’s personal information so the digital tools we use in work needs to be carefully selected.
I chose Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube and ChatGPT as my digital tools.
Facebook is the one that led me into the world of social media. I was about thirteen years old when I created my Facebook profile. It has not changed that much since then. Now there are more pages for companies when before there were only personal accounts. Helsinki University Hospital also has its own account. By the account they can share information and news about the hospital, health and research. The account keeps the information on a very general level. I think this is the point. You can exploit the visibility that account gives you, but you need to be careful of what you share. In my job there could be an account just for radiology. Radiology pages could go on the same path that the general page but specify in radiology. Radiology is fast growing area in medicine so there would be much to share in public.
Instagram is more fun to me. It can be a little more playful than Facebook. For example, radiology department could create an account where they can show more what the staff does during the day. It’s common that some hospital departments use Instagram to share videos for example their spaces in hospital and staff can do videos where they join in social media challenges and pass it forward. If in Facebook things are in serious matter, in Instagram things can be loosed a little. In Instagram there are also risks that need to be considered. If you film in hospital, you need to be sure that no patients or patient information is seen in videos. Also, you need to be careful that people don’t think you as unprofessional by the videos you share.
WhatsApp is easy to use message exchange application. In my work we use text messages to advertise people about their appointments or reschedules. Nowadays it seems a bit yesterday’s news. Many of us don’t use text messages anymore but we use WhatsApp instead. I am aware that WhatsApp is not information secure, but there could be chance if they developed that way. There are pros and cons about it. Pros because when we sent the message and the recipient reads it, we can see that. That’s when we know that the person has received the information. Cons is the information security aspect. Also, I am not sure if we as professionals want that our phone number shows to all those people we contact. I think there would be much phone ringing after that.
YouTube is the ocean of videos. In my job there are things that comes across millions of times and then there are things that comes by once in a career. In that case, when you get the case so rare, you have never seen before there would be helpful to see maybe a video about it. If in YouTube there were an account or platform to medical professions, the information could be spread via videos. If this ever works, it needs to be assorted somehow to be able to use only in professionals. Also, patient security and information security needs to be considered. Perhaps an organization e-mail address is required to log in the videos.
ChatGPT is quite new to me. It is become more familiar due to my studies and I’m starting to like it. It can help me with vocabulary or assorting text. In radiology ChatGPT, or something similar, is future. AI is constantly incorporated into radiology field. It has been painted that it could help radiologists to dictate studies, and that AI can find diseases even before human eye can see it. There are good things coming with this. If the doctor’s workload can be eased that is great. It liberates doctors to other tasks that requires human for example medical procedures. In my own job I could also use ChatGPT for example when I need to check what some terms mean, and it can give me an explanation and definition. ChatGPT is still not ready. It needs to develop more, so that we can trust in it steadfastly. We still need the human aspect in so many medial decisions. We also need to think that in the end of the day, who is really in response of the decisions AI makes?
At the beginning of this assignment, I thought that there is no way that for example Instagram or WhatsApp has anything to do with my job, or that they could be ever used as a part of my job. How wrong was I. When I started writing, I noticed that I got really into the assignment. Social media and e-platforms could be usable in so many ways in health care and in radiology. In every case the patient security and information security emerged. If we figure out how we can make those two things safe there are many ways to exploit them in health care.