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Online Doctor’s Sick Visits Could Be Coming To A Computer Near You

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/online-doctors-sick-visits-2012-11

Could we be seeing the end of routine doctor visits?

Scientific American reports that researchers are testing a new system for electronic doctor visits that could potentially eliminate the need for patients to see a doctor for routine illnesses.

Patients would simply enter their symptoms and health record into an online system, and doctors would use this information to send a diagnosis and, when necessary, a prescription.

Early reports suggest that such diagnoses were just as accurate as those given in person, although there are still some kinks that need to be ironed out:

Researchers analyzed some 5,000 doctor visits for sinus infections and 3,000 visits for urinary tract infection. Less than 10 percent of all visits were electronic. One possible e-visit drawback: doctors were more likely to prescribe antibiotics after an e-visit than a face-to-face.

But patients with an e-visit had just about the same rate of follow up as those who had an office visit. Which suggests that there was not a higher rate of misdiagnosis or treatment failure online. E-visits were also cheaper.

Detractors will note that this program only applies to relatively routine illnesses, but even so, this is nothing to sneeze at.

One of the primary goals of Obamacare was to cut down on the use of expensive emergency room visits for routine medical care, which was clogging up emergency rooms and leading to millions of dollars in unpaid medical bills. This looks like a much cheaper and simpler way to accomplish the same thing.

Naturally, we’ll need to see more studies before these programs can be rolled out on a national scale, but this looks like a good place to start toward improving the ! efficien cy of the health care system. Massive, top-down reforms like Obamacare get most of the attention, but it is smaller innovations like these will do the most to shape the healthcare of the future.

It also seems clear that letting consumers benefit from cheaper prices is a way to push the health care system as a whole toward less costly methods. E-visits for routine problems (and ultimately, perhaps, e-visits to nurses rather than to physicians) can offer better, faster, more convenient service at a lower price. Moving in directions like this is the kind of health care reform we desperately need.

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What Is a Top-Level Domain?

A top-level domain is the last part of a URL, often something like .com or .org. It’s at the top of the domain hierarchy (hence the term “top-level”), and is the first thing your computer looks for when you type in a web address. When you type in lifehacker.com, for example, your browser asks your DNS server where it can find the .com nameserver. Your browser then contacts the .com nameserver for the lifehacker subdomain, where it finds this web site. You can see an example of this below, courtesy of Wikipedia.

These domain names are all managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), formerly a government organization but now a private, non-profit entity. ICANN not only manages which top-level domains exist, but also make sure everything is stable and runs smoothly.

ICANN Is Handing Out New Top-Level Domains, Lottery-Style

A few years ago, ICANN began expanding the number of top-level domains, so porn sites, for example, could use the .xxx domain. Recently, though, they opened this up so companies can create and apply for custom top-level domains. For example, Google wants to claim .blog, so all blogs created by their Blogger service would have an easy-to-remember .blog domain name. They also want .search for obvious reasons, while Amazon wants to claim .book, .music, and .cloud. Allowed domains can range from brands (like .ipad, .kindle, or .gmail) to generic words (.bank, .fun) and geographic locations (.nyc, .paris). Not all top-level domains will be exclusive, but when a company applies for one, they can choose to make them exclusive to their own pages, like Google wants to do with .search and .blog. Many of these companies have applied for hundreds of top-level domains (ready to pay millions of dollars for them), even ending up in battles over who gets what—both Google and Amazon are currently fighting over .cloud, for example, and you can bet everyone’s looking to get their hands on .app.

Why the Domain Lottery Is Sketchy

As you can imagine, some people think this lottery is a little ridiculous, and we tend to agree. It might seem innocent enough to give Amazon ownership of the .kindle domain, since the Kindle is their product, but you can easily see how things get more complex when they’re asking for an exclusive claim to the .book domain, or Google the .search domain. Not only that, but it opens the door for a lot of unfair treatment. It wouldn’t be out of character for Google to float .blog sites to the top of search results, or the company who owns the .news domain could give preferential treatment to sites that share its political biases. It ends up being a huge, confusing, and sometimes misleading mess—and the only ones who benefit are the companies and ICANN, who despite being a nonprofit, stands to make a ton of money from this endeavor. Photo by MoneyBlogNewz.

These controversial domain applications are still in review, but ICANN has yet to say or do anything that would lead us to believe they won’t accept them. All we can do now is wait and see. What do you think about the new generic top-level domains? Will they make the internet easier to use, or are they only going to benefit companies and confuse users? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below. And, if you’re interested in reading more, here are some other articles on the subject:

• Generic Top-Level Domain [Wikipedia]
• .blog, .lol, .foo: Google, Amazon Top List of Global TLD Applications [Ars Technica]
• Amazon’s Domain Power Play: We Want to Control Them All [CNET]
• New Internet Domain Names May Make for a More Tangled Web [Washington Post]
• Should Gooogle and Amazon Be Allowed to Control Domains? [GigaOM]

Tags: blog, com, control, domain hierarchy, generic words, Gmail, google, internet corporation for assigned names and numbers, Lifehacker, lottery style, new top level domains, org, profit entity, share, Spell, top level domain, top level domains, treatment, type, wikipedia