In today's ITGS class, we learned and discussed about online diagnosis including it's advantages, disadvantages, IT issues, and IT systems. One example site for online diagnosis is WebMD symptom checker.
Online Diagnosis
Online diagnosis is a relatively new service that is offered on the Internet for patients to identify their medical conditions by themselves with no cost. By prompting the the age, height, weight, and symptoms, the service makes the best guess of what the patient may have.
Advantages
- Entirely free
- Reduces medical costs
- eliminates transportation (as patients don't need to go to hospitals)
- Very accessible
Disadvantages
- The system guesses; can not entirely rely on the results
- The doctors wouldn't get as many patients to examine
IT Issues
Reliability - The quality of results is poor. The system guesses the medical conditions of patients based on prompted data. If the given data is prompted is mistyped, the system may conclude with misleading results. If the patient then relies heavily on the service, it may cause more health problems in the future.
IT System
Hardware - Computer, input devices (i.e. keyboard and a mouse)
Software - A software to access Internet
