Tech Inventions That Changed The Health Industry Forever

Medical technology seems like something that will be sterilized stainless steel and whirring centrifuges and miraculous machines that make us see and hear and feel better and longer than our parents imagined. But the reality of it is often more like a smear of penicillin in a petri dish that changes everything.

Inventiveness and luck alone aren't the secret sauce for changing the healthcare industry, either. These game-changers often improve aspects of treatment that aren't always part of the original goal. Innovative healthcare tech can be game-changing if it enhances accessibility of care, efficiency of care delivery in terms of the time involved, the accuracy with which diagnostics can be performed, the level of personalization technology brings to the table, and the cost-effectiveness of the endeavor, which is often enhanced by tech. You might not think of these factors as strictly healthcare pursuits, but they do improve and occasionally revolutionize healthcare outcomes

Of course, healthcare itself isn't always what improves and lengthens lives. That Aperion study credits sunscreen with saving twice as many lives as CPR, and synthetic fertilizers with saving more lives than just about anything else by simply enabling agriculture to produce more food. We will focus on the health industry here, but the biggest potential sometimes lies down other avenues.

A Nobel Prize was awarded in 1952 for work that would become the basis for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a technology that uses magnetic fields and non-ionizing radio frequency radiation to acquire stacked images ("slices") that offer superior soft-tissue contrast to other technologies. The ability to differentiate among many soft tissues and liquids, including distinguishing cancerous from non-cancerous cells, has been a boon to medical diagnostics.

Diagnostic medical sonography (ultrasound) is an imaging technique that can be employed to examine and monitor unborn children or regions of the body that might be more sensitive to radiation, such as the pelvic area. Ultrasound uses changes in high-frequency sound waves to image areas of the body without invasive surgeries or methods that require the use of radiation. Ultrasound devices range from the sort of large machines you'll find in hospitals to tiny modern devices like the Ultrasound Sticker. Ultrasound is a critically important diagnostic tool. Its reduced risk makes it practical for creating three-dimensional images, including 3D time-series visualizations that can show movement and changes in tissues over time.

Sometimes we develop brilliant technologies more or less by accident, or for entirely the wrong reasons (think leaches). Aperion estimates that blood transfusions have saved a billion lives, but its earliest practitioners weren't even clear about why it would sometimes work... or would fail disastrously. Fewer than 200 years elapsed between the discovery of blood circulation and the first successful human-to-human transfusion. This was executed by an American, the prophetically named Philip Syng Physick. 

By 1867, Joseph Lister had applied his knowledge of germ theory to develop antiseptics for controlling infections acquired during transfusions. In fewer than another 100 years blood banks had become common and fractionation into albumin, gamma globulin, and fibrinogen made possible new plasma-derived hemotherapies. Today, there are at least 23 therapeutic plasma products. Meanwhile, blood typing was discovered and refined, and transfusion as a medical therapy was common by the start of World War II.

The history of blood-related therapies is a stroll through our woefully incomplete understanding of the human body. Around the time Philip Syng Physick was transfusing blood on the sly, George Washington was being killed by the practice of bloodletting, a 3000-year-old practice that made little sense but was so broadly accepted that it was used on a former president without misgiving. Bloodletting was thought to help keep the body's four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) in balance to prevent or mitigate disease. Aside from a few specific applications of leeches, humoral medicine didn't contribute a lot to modern medicine. It did, at least, acknowledge that illness had naturalistic (rather than supernatural) causes, and in that narrow sense paved the way for science to turn secret experimental transfusion into a billion saved lives in two centuries.

You might not even think of anesthesia as a technology. It is, in fact, a handful of technologies that don't do much on their own except help with other things. And that makes anesthesia a candidate for the most important healthcare tech of all — because without its four forms (general anesthesia, twilight consciousness, local anesthesia, and regional anesthesia), many common (and life-saving) medical procedures would be impractical or impossible altogether.

The importance of anesthesia in modern surgery is highlighted by the fact that, in many cases, the anesthesia presents more risk to the patient than the surgery itself. Without it, of course, the surgery is out of the question, in most cases. The first modern general anesthesia was an application of diethyl ether by Dr. Crawford W. Long in 1841. Sources and authorities differ. You'll see 1842 as the date, or perhaps William Morton (1846) or Henry Hickman (1824) as the pioneer who first used ether as a surgical anesthesia. Whoever is to be credited, they saved a lot of lives and prevented an unbelievable amount of pain and suffering in the years since.

Of course, general anesthesia isn't the only form. Local anesthesia in various forms had always been mostly ineffective until the first use of coca leaves in the mid-1800s, starting a revolution in local anesthetics that lasted until the 1970s. It began with the synthesis of cocaine for use in blocking localized pain, but the cardiac toxicity and potential for addiction prompted the derivation of new amino ester and amino amide local anesthetics such as tropocaine, benzocaine, procaine, and lidocaine.

All anesthesia has improved dramatically, even in recent decades. According to Anesthesiologist Christopher Troianos, MD, speaking with the Cleveland Clinic, there is currently about a 1 in 200,000 chance of anesthesia-induced death during surgical general anesthesia.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of digital medical technology (that is, of computers in many forms) in conquering the information bottlenecks and insufficiencies that long hampered medical advancements. Attention first turned to the potential medical uses of computers in the 1960s. As computers' capabilities were expanded and interfaces were refined in the 1980s and beyond, the original dreams and many more slowly began to be realized. But the slowness of this adoption was painful, as noted in such reports as the President's Information Technology Advisory Council (PITAC) reports beginning in 1991. Security and interoperability issues and the lack of standards for electronic prescriptions, imaging, messaging, and reporting are gradually being tamed and the healthcare industry is reaping rewards in the form of better communications, improved medication monitoring, a higher quality of care, reduction of errors, and more protection of privacy.

What the patient sees of this information technology — such as digital charts/medical records — and telehealth/mHealth practices function well enough to handle the enormous complexity of the industry's underlying systems and their integrations with one another. The industry has famously clung to outdated fax technology because of I.T. failings in interoperability and communications. 

For all of those challenges, though, it's difficult to imagine a modern hospital functioning without the computer tech commonly used for readily available patient records, order entry, billing, and much more. And even with those in place, there's likely to be room for improvement and growth. A Johns Hopkins study published in BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) posits that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the U.S. — a situation ripe for I.T. solutions.