I was born at the end of the 1980s and the rapid growth of digitalization has happened during my youth – most importantly the development of mobile phones and the exponential growth of the internet. Phones, computers and information management have developed and become more and more important and necessary in life.
I work in the health sector as a operating room nurse and
development in the hospital has been fast. During my 10-year career digitalization has increased strongly and become more common in hospitals. When I started my career in the early 2010s, most of the patient information records were still made by hand. Patient information systems were in use, but they were DOS-based and only the mandatory phase data was recorded in them.
Nowadays, various kind of medical devices, desktop, laptops and programs are integral part of my work, and sometimes I feel that a more suitable title for me would be telecommunications engineer. Sometimes i wonder do we treat patients or machines?. So is all the development good? Surely it is, when we find a balance between technological advances and patient encounters.
Digitalization has also developed outside patient care. In my work, I use various communication platforms on a daily basis, such as email, intranet, intranet workspace and WhatsApp. All the work instructions, orientation and teaching materials have also become electronic. Dect phones have been phased out and replaced by smartphones. So how far can technology still develop? and how much technology do we need in our jobs?. One positive thing in digitalization is that digitization has bring enabled information to be available.
Digitalization is also visible in everyday life at home. I rarely watch TV anymore, because I can stream the latest movies and series through my smart TV. Wearable smart devices have also become more common in everyday life. Smartwatches and Oura rings are part of our fitness monitoring. Even household appliances can be connected to the network, I can start my robot vacuum cleaner on my smartphone.
In the future, at the health sector the development of technology will accelerating even more. Robotics, artificial intelligence, virtuality and remote connections will become more common. We have already tested VR glasses in patient care planning, performed robot-assisted surgeries and taken steps towards remotely controlled surgeries. There seem to be no limits to development.
Personally, I hope that the development will also include mobile software for patient information recording. Desktop logging is time-consuming and unwieldy. Mobile devices are small and conveniently carry, so we could utilize more mobile digital tools at our work.
With digitalization, I have started to pay more attention to information security and my privacy. Different kind of scam messages and phishing attempts are normal in daily basis. So you need to be carefully. Thankfully every email has a spam folder that filters most of these messages. I have also deleted my Facebook account a few years ago, because i noticed that Facebook and other social media platforms followed my life by offering eg. targeted advertising. Nowadays, you can’t be too careful with security.
At my workplace, privacy and information security is up to date and the staff takes the information security exam regularly. ICT Administration’s guidelines on the use of computers and websites are strict.
The General Data Protection Regulation reflected in my work, so that we no longer keep paper records of patients’ surgical procedures. These papers contained patients’ personal data. The purpose of the GDPR is good because it gives people more control over their own personal data. But it also makes patient information recording difficult. In our jobs we have to think very carefully how we record these patient information, so that the patient does not find the records offensive.
Self evalution
With this assignment, I have learned many things about Digitalization. Mostly it`s a good thing and full of opportunities, but it involves a lot of risks. Im mostly worried these young people who are growing up at the peak of digitalization. I’m not sure that they understand all the risks of an open digital digital society.
I read and commented these two articels: