There are some major advances taking place in bionics these days (in part due to the Iraq war). Most recently, there’s the i-Limb (I hope Apple doesn’t sue), featured in this cnet article slideshow. The i-Limb costs about $18,000 dollars and is much more human-like than other prosthetic hands. For one it has 5 fingers, each with their own motor. It also features some very impressive artificial skin.

On page 6 of the article, the CEO of Touch Bionics (makers of the i-Limb) places their customers into two categories: those who want their prosthetic hand to look as normal as possible and those who want it to look like it came out of the movie Terminator. Perhaps that’s why in addition to highlighting the hand’s optional artificial skin, Touch Bionic’s website has a video of someone using the i-Limb to load a shotgun.

The future is on its way!

Today Ezra Klein highlighted this recent study, which questions whether EMRs really improve patient care. The study looks at whether patients seeing private doctors received improved care when EMRs were available (the study used NAMCS data). In most cases, the answer was no, but I think the study misses the best part of what EMRs have to offer.

If EMRs become widespread, they open the door to a huge new area of medical research. Computer-aided diagnosis is going to get a lot better if millions of anonymized medical records become available. A few years ago I went to a talk by MIT professor Peter Szolovits. He was able to use a computer to diagnose certain heart conditions from audio recordings better than most doctors. EMRs would greatly facilitate the development of automated screening procedures. More importantly, when new procedures are developed, they could be applied retroactively to data collected years earlier, even when a patient stops seeing a doctor. There’s absolutely no way to do this now.

EMRs would also be a huge boon to public health research. Researchers could be given access to a huge data base of anonymous medical records, all in a standard format. It would be trivial to check if two conditions are correlated, or if one disease occurs more often in some segment of the population. The amount of data would be so large, a doctor could even search for records similar to their patent, and use those records as a guide for what health problems to watch for.

Finally EMRs make much better use of healthcare we already provide. If you go in for surgery, all sorts of equipment is used to monitor your well-being. This data should be recorded and reviewed by a doctor who isn’t busy cutting you open. If you go in for a 3D bodyscan, even more data is collected. The scan could easily be reviewed by experts in other parts of the country, provided they have access to your EMR.

EMRs allow for a much more reliable and efficient healthcare system. Also they save a bunch of money, which is good too.