Digitalisation in my own field 

I graduated as a medical laboratory technologist over twenty years ago. I have worked almost my entire career in clinical physiology and nuclear medicine units. The work has always involved working with a lot of machines. In my opinion patient work has changed surprisingly little. People are still needed in many aspects. New machines help in the work, but they do not replace humans.  For example, a successful spirometry examination requires strong guidance from the technologist. The biggest change has been the transferring of patient data and results to electronic systems. At the beginning of my career at the turn of the millennium, patient records were still on a paper in a folder. The patient files were ordered from the archive before the research. After the study was completed, the statement was added to the patient file. The file was then sent to the unit where the patient had an appointment. About 15 years ago, the results began to record to electronic systems. A major improvement in the healthcare sector has been the digitalisation of resting ECG. Before digitalization the ECG was printed in the patient file and the file was in the archives of your “own” hospital. Getting an old ECG print from the archive was very slow. Especially when a patient was admitted to the emergency room. From hospital to another the films were sent by fax. 20 years ago technologists did a lot of analyses of isotope images. I was away from the nuclear medicine unit for more than ten years. During that time the analysis of the results had become almost entirely the work of physicists. The work used to be perhaps a bit more interesting when you also saw the results of the study. A big change in the future will certainly be the automation of analyses. It doesn’t apply that much to technologists’ job descriptions anymore because the analysis of results has already moved away from us. 

Radiation research substances are used in nuclear medicine examinations. Some research substances can be given with an automatic dispenser but many research substances still must be given manually. In the future it would be good if the administration of radiation substances to patients could be automated. The challenge is that nuclear medicine examinations use many different research substances with very different dosages. The market is not very large, so such a device has not come into use yet. Automating the processing of radiation substances would reduce the radiation dose that technologists receive. 

In a hospital, the weight and height of patients are important information, because many drugs are dosed according to weight. Measuring these things take a lot of working time. In the future the person entering the hospital could walk through a scanner and the measurements would be transferred directly to the patient records. 

The COVID-19 pandemic brought a major change to meetings. Time is saved enormously when meetings can be attended remotely. Nowadays there are office units hundreds of kilometers apart from each other. Before the pandemic it would have taken a whole working day to attend a meeting. Virtual meetings are not only a good thing. In my opinion it would also be good to see people face-to-face. Then people get to know to each other, which makes it easier to take care of many things. 

General data protection regulation (GDPR)/ The risks of digitalization 

While reading about the general data protection reform, I was thinking of the data breach at the psychotherapy center Vastaamo. The Vastaamo data breach is a good example of today’s cyber security threat. According to the General Data Protection Regulation, people have the right to receive information about a data breach affecting their own data. According to Wikipedia, the data breaches occurred in 2018 and 2019. According to Vastaamo’s CEO, the information security officer knew about the breach already at that time. More than 33,000 patient records were stolen in the data breach. The breach became public in 2020. There has been a lot of humane suffering and it is difficult to understand how data security could have been so bad. I wonder whether it is possible to ask for one’s own data to be removed from the corresponding health care registers or if the data must be retained by law. 

Based on the data protection reform you could ask the controller about the collected data. It would be interesting to know what information the bank and insurance company have collected about me. I would also be interested in the information stored by the store’s loyalty programs.  

As a relative of a person with Alzheimer, I have thought a lot about people’s own decision-making when their health starts to deteriorate. I have especially been thinking about the use of location information and filming with a “surveillance camera”. I don’t know if that’s allowed. In the future, the number of people with memory disorders will increase as the population ages. More and more people who are not capable, are living at home because there are no places to care for them. The life of the relatives becomes very difficult if it is not possible to locate a person with a memory disorder. Often a person with a memory disorder is physically fit and can get to many places on their own. This means that people with memory disorders also have to be searched for with the help of the authorities. My own family member had a tracking device on the keychain. It was found to be the best way for me to follow her location since she almost always took the keys with her. She was asked verbally for permission to locate her, but I’m not sure if she understood it anymore. A good way to locate people with memory disorders would be needed. Not all people with memory disorders have relatives to take care of them for example the tracking device needs to be charged. I even think that in the future, people could give prior permission to locate themselves if they develop a memory disorder. A tracking chip could be placed under your skin and a wireless charging system under the mattress in your bed. Over the years, we have also considered installing a camera in the apartment of a memory disorder patient, but in the end we decided not to.  

GPT 

My first question to Chat GPT was “what good ct brings to nuclear medicin”. Chat GPT’s response was good. The response identifies five areas where ct has brought improvement. Regarding the use of attenuation correction, artificial intelligence told us that it can be utilised in PET imaging. Damping correction is also used in SPECT imaging, but there was no mention of it. My other questions were ” what is technologist role in spirometry”, “what is technologist role in holter” and ” what is technologist role in spiroergometry” 

The answers to all questions were good. The responses comprehensively explained the areas of a technologist’s job. In the future, artificial intelligence could screen e.g. normal findings from long-term ECG registrations. Analysis of long-term registration of ECG takes a lot of time. Technologists could then focus on analyzing the most challenging registrations. 

Self evaluation 

The orientation material contained a lot of thought-provoking information. People share so much information about themselves on social media. There should be much more talk about data sharing. Children, in particular, should be protected more. Not all children have an adult to support them with these things. Adults may not even know enough about those things. School would be a good place to share the right information. In the orientation material, there was an important observation about location information. Even though only a few people want to share their address on social media, but location information is often left in a photograph. For example with a little research the address of your workplace and home can be found. I hadn’t thought about sharing pictures from this point of view, but now I’m going to at least talk about it with my children. 

I commented on Pete`s blog and Kaisa’s Blog