Technology Is Changing the Way We Deal with Illness

Maybe people are using the Web a little less for health information these days. But they’re finding it incredibly useful for other things, like raising money for medical treatment when they don’t have it, to having remote appointments with physicians to monitoring their blood pressure and glucose levels all the way from home.

Technology is changing the way we go about getting better.

The New York Times “Well” column recently reported that patients who need expensive medical treatments they just can’t afford are turning more and more to the Web to raise the money, ihealthbeat.com reports.

People are looking for help with illnesses as severe as cancer to non-life-threatening but expensive infertility treatments, The New York Times said. While some fundraising organizations do not allow personal appeals, a Web site called ,IndieGoGo, which bills itself as the “world’s leading international funding platform,” does permit patients and supporters to organize personal campaigns for medical expenses, according to the story, like Troy, who needed a kidney, and a young girl seriously injured in a car crash.

In The New York Times story, Slava Rubin -- a founder of IndieGoGo – told writer Tara Parker Pope that "the crowd" typically decides whether a cause is legitimate.” Rubin also said in the interview, as posted at ihealthbeat.com, "[H]ealth care issues and personal health campaigns make sense, because our health care system can be very expensive. Sometimes people just need to try a different direction to get funded what they need to get funded.”

Other Web sites also offer fund-raising help for transplants and other catastrophic illnesses .

 mHealth is another way technology has changed how we treat, and deal with, illness. A story at eweek.com puts the mobile health app market topping out at $400 million by 2016.

But along with technology that allows us to keep electronic records of our medical info so that it can follow us wherever we go, and regulate our blood pressure and insulin levels from home while being monitored remotely by a doctor, come drawbacks, like the recent stolen medical data debacle at Sutter Health.

The same thing happened at UCLA, which has had to offer its patients’ credit- and fraud-protection after a hard drive with confidential data, including passwords, was stolen from the home of a former employee.