Smartphones And Its Effects On Health Care

Although cellphone use can provide drivers with various benefits, such as optimized commute time, navigation, and entertainment, the risks far outweigh any perceived advantages. Acts of multitasking, such as texting while driving, divides a person’s attention (Konig et al., 2005). This places substantial demand on a person’s restricted cognitive resources (Konig et al., 2005). For example, 14% of all American adults say they’ve physically bumped into another person or an object because talking or texting on their phone distracted them (Madden & Rainie, 2010). This shows that being engrossed by ones cellphone can affect even automatic processes like walking. As

Social media rules our world today and provides instant resources that keep us informed and connected. Advancement in technology has provided multiple resources and valuable information that is literally available at one’s fingertips. The availability of information is endless and provides for fast, more effective learning within the nursing and medical world. There is mass skepticism and question within the nursing environment regarding the use of technology, whether it is via cell phone use, computer, laptop, or internet usage. There is a serious concern regarding HIPAA laws, patient privacy acts, and the legalities tied to an individual’s rights while under medical care.

Even though smart phones are supposed to make working easier, studies have shown that they actually hurt our performance. In 2015, a Journal of Experimental Psychology study had 166 people to test. The experiment was to have the participants work on a challenging task while their phones start beeping and buzzing. The results showed that the worker became messier and had their attention elsewhere, whether or not they checked their phone. Dr. Adrian Ward is a psychologist and marketing professor at the University of Texas at Austin, he has been working with the effects of smart phones on our thoughts and decision making. Dr. Ward believes that we have grown so attached to our phones that they reduce our intelligence with their presence. To test this theory, Dr. Ward and three colleagues began a clever experiment to test his idea. They decided to enlist 520 undergraduate students at UCSD and make them perform two standard tests of intellectual acuity. The first test evaluated “available cognitive capacity”, it’s a test to measure how fully a person’s mind can focus on a single task. The second test gauged “fluid intelligence”, a person’s ability to understand and answer an unfamiliar problem. The only difference was the location of the student’s smart phone. Some students had their phone on the desk, while others had it in their bag or pocket. Others were even asked to leave their phone in a different room. The results of this test showed that “As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased” (pg.3).

Gill P.S., Kamath A., & Gill T.S. (2012). Distraction: an assessment of smartphone usage in health care work settings. Risk Manage Healthcare Policy 5(9), 105–114. doi: 10.2147/RMHP.S34813

……A recent survey by Kluwer Kluwer Health’s Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 71% of nurses are using smartphones for their job. It’s becoming the norm in the nursing workplace nowadays and the range of phone apps are moving beyond leisure. It’s not an exaggeration to say that smartphones are moving the nursing practice into a much greater height. From drug references, medication interaction disease, laboratory and safety information, nurses have access to all kinds of data to help them improve patient care.

The emergency department in the modern hospital is one of the most complex clinical settings to operate. According to Johnson, Sensei, & Capasso (2012), this department is an intersection of the diagnosis and treatment of emergency cases. As a result, it experiences immense volumes of patients every day. However, in most hospitals, patients visit the facilities with an indication of what they might be suffering from. Specifically, they use their iPhones to get a list of conditions that they might be having (Boncana, 2016). This method of detection has come to be known as mHealth. In this regard, mHealth, rather mobile health, is a method that patients use to enhance their health and medical practices via the use of mobile technology. The cell phones used in this approach are equipped with medical/health software, a personal digital assistant (PDA), and patient monitoring devices.

As you may know social media and texting have become a part of life and we often think of it as for friends, family, and net-working, but what about doctors and nurses using their phones to text or take pictures of your vital information. How are we as consumers protected? Let’s see what HIPAA has to say about doctors and nurses using phones to text, take a picture, or use the social media to transfer information.

The message from this section sticks out to me because I am surprised about the average smartphone user checks his or her phone around 150 times a day (Huffington, 2015). The statistic shows that how often smartphone users check or use their phones per day. Moreover, it also tells us how our brain is forced to distract attention continually, and it becomes difficult for us to focus on certain things when we use the smartphone too often. Technology products are like the serpent in the digital garden of Eden, which gives us what we want, but not necessarily what we need. Technology devices will not be helpful for people when we either overuse it or become addicted to it. My

Nurses never know what their day is going to consist of, from the number of patients, to the amount of medication being administered. Nursing is a critical thinking career that uses rules and regulation to keep it well organized, safe, and in order. Use of technology in healthcare has taken root, and this has its benefits and disadvantages. Smartphones and other similar gadgets have become so common in the society and healthcare is not an exception. Use of these gadgets by healthcare personnel especially nurses has key legal and ethical issues that need careful evaluation. From the scenario, the use of smartphones has several implications on the performance of the nurse who is also on a night shift. The ending of the scenario entails representing the previous experience to social media and posting of photos that compromise the privacy of the patient. In this discussion, the ending of the scenario is discussed based on moral and ethical issues of the case study.

Distraction is one of the most detrimental effects of technologies on our daily life. While these devices such as computers,

According to a recent survey of physicians, an estimate of 83% own at least one mobile device and one in four doctors use smartphones and computers in their medical practice (Barrett, 2011). There is a great concern that protected health information (PHI) may be compromised by the use of mobile devices under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The HIPAA law is in effect to secure patient medical records are kept confidential and safe. The increase of patients and health care practitioners communicating not only with the patient and other medical professionals using mobile devices raises security issues of protected health information (PHI). The HIPAA Security Rule requires reasonable safeguards to protect

Over the past few decades, technology has greatly improved. Computers have advanced from being the size of a room to a portable item we can carry in our pockets. The vast majority of Americans carry a cell phone at all times, or at least have one within arm’s reach. In today’s technology oriented world, people can be easily susceptible to an overuse of their cell phone; this susceptibility causes multiple distractions in the key settings of our daily lives.

These include less meaningful patient interaction due to computer use in the room and possible data breach. Ensuring privacy and security of patient information is crucial in building trust. However, due to the ease of access to sensitive information, there is a risk of privacy violation. This violation may be intentional or accidental which may affect patients feeling insecure about disclosing important health information. Having a computer in each room may be valuable in situations but it may also create a barrier in nurse-patient relationship. Patient care may be hindered because nurses are constantly documenting and referring to the computers seemingly

Technology is the leading distraction in the United States. “The average teenager sends or receives about three thousand three hundred texts a month…that breaks down to one text about every six minutes throughout your entire waking life” (Carr video.) “When people have computers in front of them at work, they glance at their email INBOX about twenty to thirty times an hour” (Carr video.) An adult will pull out or look at his/her smart phone about one hundred and sixty times throughout the course of the day. This simplifies to about once

At first, I was going to analyze and write about smartphones, however I found it more efficient to write also about a particular smartphone to narrow it down from such a broad technological artifact, such as answering who designed it, what for, what their position and the impact they want to have on society was, and their future visions. Therefore, I chose the iPhone as the centerpiece of smartphones I will be analyzing and an emphasis on applications. However, some of this information is relevant and interchangeable to all other smartphones. IPhones and smartphones allow us to access constant information and offer it the way we want it, as it is completely customizable now to fit our learning style. They keep us organized, send information to us in different ways, even shape and offer solutions such as for politics, economies, problems whether individual ones or globally. Smartphones capitalize on shared knowledge and has opened the door to inventors and those who have the knowledge to make our world a more connected place and lives easier by sharing it with us to use. We are able to communicate with other people far off, through space-time compression or shrinking-space to gather news and information.