Member Article

How Technology Is Helping Healthcare Business

We have made many advancements in technology over the centuries and the medical field isn’t immune to the benefits of this. From simple yearly check-ups to more life threatening situations, you are sure to have noticed more than a few technological upgrades even if you aren’t in the medical field. However, let’s talk about new technologies in life support situations. What exactly has been developed to improve life support and how exactly is it making it better? Well, let’s take a look.

What Qualifies as Life Support?

We’ve all heard the phrase “life support” somewhere, but not everyone knows what that phrase entails. To help make better sense of it, we’re going to look at some of the technologies that are used today that qualify as life support.To simplify the general meaning, though, life support is the use of technology and techniques to keep a patient alive through helping them maintain bodily functions they couldn’t on their own.

Mechanical Ventilation

The purpose of a ventilator machine is to help a person who can’t breathe on their own continue to and in that way, live. Ventilators have become increasingly advanced over the years. These machines now allow you to control facets such as the rate, volume, sensitivity, and volume of breaths. These are often what most people think of automatically when they think of life support.

Dialysis

This is probably another form of life support that many of us have heard of. It is used when the kidneys of a patient fail. The kidneys’ function in the body is to filter your blood, removing waste and excess fluid, and turn it into urine. The dialysis machine is used to filter a patient’s blood for them when they can’t on their own. This usually occurs when a patient’s kidneys have failed, are dysfunctional, or are missing altogether.

Artificial Nutrition and Hydration

This concept is especially important in reference to comatose patients. Even if all of a patient’s organs are functioning fine, there is no way for them to last long if they aren’t getting any nutrients or water in their system. For this, these are introduced through the body via intravenous methods (an IV inserted into a vein) and intubation usually inserted into the stomach or intestine.

Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation

This section covers a rather large section of life support. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation deals with providing blood and oxygen to the tissues in the body, especially the brain, when someone stops breathing or their heart stops. This can include, at the most advanced level, the use of pacemakers, defibrillators, or even some drugs.

On a more basic level, there are some forms of cardiopulmonary resuscitation life support that can be done through more basic maneuvers. This would be where ACLS, or Advanced Cardiac Life Support algorithms, comes in to play. This can at its most basic form be CPR but it can be much more complex as well, even coming into the more technological side of this type of life support.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Kalyna Kapur .