How Digital Imagery Technology Has Changed Medicine and Dentistry

The doctors and dentists working in the field today know that they can do much more for their patients when they are employing medical imaging technology. There was a time when doctors and dentists had to wait hours or even days for x-rays and scans to come back. Now, most of the technology that is being used in medicine is immediate. This means a medical professional can tell their patient what is going on right away and come up with a course of treatment.

Crowns At The Dentist

The idea of a same day crown is something that many dentists would have loved a couple decades ago. However, it took too long to get reliable imaging results back, and this delayed how fast the office could produce new crowns. Now, a crown can be made the same day a patient visits the dentist because the 3D imaging is so clear and immediate that the staff can begin working on a crown right away. The same goes for bridges and other dental implants.

Treatment and Urgent Care

Urgent care facilities used to help people who didn’t have major emergencies, and they would simply do the best they could for people and send them on their way. Now, urgent facilities are able to take medical images very quickly and come up with a course of treatment or recommendation for the patient. The patient may simply need a prescription or a splint, but the patient can also be sent to an emergency room or referred to another doctor when the imaging shows that that is necessary.

The Ambulance and Emergency Room

When time is of the essence and lives at stake, the imaging technology available today allows EMTs and ER doctors and staff to take quick medical images of all their patients so that they can quickly decide what they need to do and how they should do it. These imaging options are very fast, give the medical staff real-time images of the patients and this allows doctors to make split-second decisions that will allow for patient safety.

EMTs can do the same inside the ambulance. They can take live images and relay them to doctors when they arrive at the hospital so that the doctors do not have to take the images themselves. All of this saved time helps patients to stay alive and well.

The use of medical imaging technology speeds up patient care and keeps people safe.