The evolution of the Internet and its application in Medicine have made “the new technologies become the new stethoscope for internists, above all, for the COPD“. This is the conclusion that specialists have reached following analyzing and exemplifying the use of these advances in Internal Medicine. And it is that the mobile apps have become their favorites to offer the patient a more personalized therapeutic management.
This is the case of the iCodex application that you told us regarding Ramon Boixedahead of the Internal Medicine Service at the Mataró Hospital in Barcelona, at the last ‘COPD and technologies’ table at the XV Meeting of the COPD Group of the Spanish Society of Internal Medicine (SEMI). This initiative stems from the need for internists to “provide personalized treatment for patients.”
According to Boixeda, the app iCodex is a ‘calculator‘ that manages the data of comorbidity, obstruction, dyspnea and exacerbations. A tool that is “very designed for the clinician, but can also be used to monitor patients,” says the internist. All this has been achieved thanks to these new technologies that “have converted the figure of the internist doctorwho has gone from having an image of an older person with his phonendoscope and notebooks, to modern young people with tablets or mobile phones”.
A whole series of advances that, obviously, are also observed in clinical practice. This is the case of chest ultrasound in the treatment of COPD. to talk regarding it, John Torresan internist at the Infanta Leonor Hospital in Madrid, has warned that “the scarce scientific evidence of the use of this technique in respiratory disease“.
A situation that has been strange for all attendees since, according to Torres, “lung ultrasound is very easy to learn and very accessible.” This adds to the fact that, increasingly, “devices are cheaper and more miniaturized“. Likewise, he has given the example of various clinical scenarios, highlighting, for example, “the dyspnea of uncertain origin where the history, physical examination and basic tests have limited specificity”.
And it is that thanks to lung ultrasound you can see “interstitial involvement, pneumothorax, pneumonia, pelural effusion, evolutionary control of pulmonary congestion and guided thoracocentesis”. In short, for the specialist, “the Clinical ultrasound is necessary for the internist in the approach to COPDbut as it is an unknown field, it encourages further studies and evaluation of its application”.
The life experience of an intern outside the hospital
Is XV Meeting of the EPOC Group of the SEMI has put an end to it with the closing conference ‘Life experience of an internist outside the hospital’. In this meeting, Carlos San Roman, director of the Journal of Clinical Cases in Internal Medicine, has highlighted “all the therapeutic weapons that internists have to treat COPD patients”. And so he has presented the one who has put the icing on the cake of this meeting, Robert Hurtadointernist and writer.
Hurtado has more than fifty works published in high-impact journals and, above all, he has “many patients behind him who have shaped his professional career as a clinician”, San Román highlighted. During this closure, Hurtado reviewed his entire life, from childhood to adulthood, “and how he always wanted to be doctor and writer. Two areas that the specialist has managed to unite and make of them what today is his passion.
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