Reflection of the November 23rd class

During this lesson we learned about telemedicine. Telemedicine is an application of clinical medicine in which medical data can be transferred quickly and easily to many different locations over a network. This is related to the caBIG which is a network that transfers diagnostic images between hospitals.This is an advantage for doctors all over the world  because now many times they do not have to travel to meet or have the patients come meet them. They can just look at the data sent to them over the network and they can then make their diagnosis. This is also helpful because more then one doctor can look at the patients medical information and provide input into their diagnosis.  Social and Ethical Issues for this would first of all be reliability as well as integrity because if the data is altered even slightly the doctor would be unable to make the correct medical decisions. Another issue would be that of control because only the doctor should be able to make these medical decisions.