DWINDLING PROFESSIONALISM IN MEDICINE TECHNOLOGY"”A FRIEND OR A FOE

Abstract

In this era of intense and rapid technological ad- vancement and globalization, health care professionals (HCPs) are expected to work more professionally and deliver more passionately and successfully. Amongst all the professions that involve human contact, health care delivery, due to its inherent need of rapid decision-mak- ing skills involving serious health related, financial and social issues, is one of the most stressful professions in the world. The advent of computers in early sixties followed by the internet (world-wide web, www) and information technology (IT) in 19891, have completely revolutionized the way the world in general and health- care system in particular operate now-a-days. In this context, not only IT has proved its worth by providing a vast bank of digital knowledge/information and elec- tronic medical record of the patients but has also made its retrieval and processing incredibly easy that can be searched, accessed and analyzed just by a click. More- over, the processing speed of the computers is touching astronomical heights with each passing year. Because of this combination of the availability of massively stored digital data, lightening processing speed and the power of analysing this data through powerful softwares like SPSS, medical research is achieving cosmic dimensions.