The book provides an overview of new technologies in medicine. It defines each technology and gives an account of its history, and the principles, technical problems, and applications as well as controversies involved. The goal of the book is to provide a comprehensive overview of the emerging medical technologies in a simple way that is understandable to non-specialists.Biomedical science and medical technologies are developing at such a fast pace that it is hard to follow even for specialists. In addition, they have become more and more complex. This book provides readers with a basic understanding of these technologies and helps them to keep up with new developments. The value of the book is that it is comprehensive and yet concise, which makes the learning process fast and easy.

This collection of essays emphasizes society’s increasingly responsible engagement with ethical challenges in emerging medical technology. Expansion of technological capacity and attention to patient safety have long been integral to improving healthcare delivery but only relatively recently have concepts like respect, distributive justice, privacy, and autonomy gained some power to shape the development, use, and refinement of medical tools and techniques. Medical ethics goes beyond making better medicine to thinking about how to make the field of medicine better. These essays showcase several ways in which modern ethical thinking is improving safety, efficacy and efficiency of medical technology, increasing access to medical care, and empowering patients to choose care that comports with their desires and beliefs. Included are complimentary ethical approaches as well as compelling counter-arguments. Together, the articles demonstrate how improving the quality of medical technology relies on every stakeholder -- not just medical researchers and scientists -- to assess each given technology’s strengths and pitfalls. This collection also portends one of the next major issues in the ethics of medical technology: developing the requisite moral framework to accompany shifts toward patient-centred personalized healthcare.

New medical technologies--pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and procedures--often allow great improvements in the outcomes of medical care, but they are also widely believed to be a major cause of increasing costs. Selective adoption of new technologies is crucial in the quest to control health care costs while preserving or enhancing the quality of care. This report focuses on evaluation and adoption of innovative procedures and medical devices by managed care organizations (MCOs). The project had two primary objectives: (1) to understand current MCO processes for making coverage, medical-necessity, and payment decisions and how device developers and manufacturers prepare for and participate in these processes; and (2) to identify ways that private, voluntary action by the managed-care and medical-device industries might improve--for the benefit of society--these processes. The core data are from confidential interviews with eight companies that develop and manufacture medical devices and medical directors of nine MCOs. The findings should be of interest to medical-device developers and manufacturers, managed care organizations, public-policy makers, and researchers and analysts. A major impediment to socially appropriate adoption of emerging medical technologies is limited information about the performance of these technologies in day-to-day medical practice. The authors discuss prospects for improving four elements of information availability: --Developing better information before market introduction --Learning more from experience after market introduction --Evaluating and synthesizing clinical information --Disseminating information. They also discuss several other issues that warrant consideration: --Aligning private incentives of MCOs and payers with social values --Enhancing MCO capabilities to evaluate technologies and make decisions --Improving decisions by physicians --Reducing use of inappropriate or obsolete technologies --Reducing costs of decisionmaking for manufacturers and MCOs --Improving manufacturer understanding of the market environment --Helping MCOs and employers anticipate what is in the pipeline.

What information and decision-making processes determine how and whether an experimental medical technology becomes accepted and used? Adopting New Medical Technology reviews the strengths and weaknesses of present coverage and adoption practices, highlights opportunities for improving both the decision-making processes and the underlying information base, and considers approaches to instituting a much-needed increase in financial support for evaluative research. Essays explore the nature of technological change; the use of technology assessment in decisions by health care providers and federal, for-profit, and not-for-profit payers; the role of the courts in determining benefits coverage; strengthening the connections between evaluative research and coverage decision-making; manufacturers' responses to the increased demand for outcomes research; and the implications of health care reform for technology policy.

This book reports cutting-edge cases of emerging health technologies. Some health care fields are experiencing paradigmatic shifts because of robotic technologies and the new relationships that they create in r-Health (r-Curing and r-Caring) activities. The book explores emerging health care technologies such as image-guided surgical robotics, pharmacy robots, new visualisation methods (3D, 4D & ′′5D′′) and home telehealth management systems and their acceptance in the workplace but also, more generally, their special role in business and society. These technologies allow health care professionals to effectively reach far beyond the current service offerings, providing new methods for communication, diagnosis, and treatment. The relocation of certain knowledge areas from physicians to patients in self-care management or the reconfiguration of health care expertise from one health profession to another are examples of topics developed in this book. The book describes the emerging relocation of innovative visual knowledge and expertise within health care organisations and beyond, such as in the patient’s home environment.

In the past 50 years the development of a wide range of medical devices has improved the quality of people's lives and revolutionized the prevention and treatment of disease, but it also has contributed to the high cost of health care. Issues that shape the invention of new medical devices and affect their introduction and use are explored in this volume. The authors examine the role of federal support, the decision-making process behind private funding, the need for reforms in regulation and product liability, the effects of the medical payment system, and other critical topics relevant to the development of new devices.

This stimulating collection of essays, a product of face-to-face dialogues among anthropologists, sociologists, and philosopher-historians, focuses on the newly created biomedical technologies and their application in practice. Drawing on ethnographic and historical case studies, the authors show how biomedical technologies are produced through the agencies of tools and techniques, scientists and doctors, funding bodies, patients, clients, and the public. Despite shared concerns, the contributions reveal that the authors have achieved no consensus about the objectives of their research. Deep epistemological divides clearly remain, making for provocative reading.