HEALTH TECHNOLOGY Eduard Frosch – VAMED KMB
High-tech medicine and humaneness: no conflict
Patients often feel that high-tech medicine is cold and impersonal. However, when combined with gentler methods, high-tech medicine can be applied with compassion and therefore is of great benefit to patients.
Healthcare has undergone major changes in recent decades and is bound to face more challenges in the future. The main reasons for this include the demographic trends in Europe. The average life expectancy is increasing rapidly and with increasing age comes higher morbidity and multi-morbidity. The result is higher healthcare costs and higher costs of pensions. Another reason is the global financial
crisis that swept like a contagion over banks, industries and the economy as a whole. The legions of unemployed will no longer pay their social security contributions. Around one-hundred years ago, Ferdinand
Sauerbruch – probably the best known and most controversial physician of the past century, a genius surgeon and a master of improvisation – developed a revolutionary surgical technique that, for the first time, allowed interventions in the chest cavity.
In the course of World War I he
developed novel prostheses to help crippled soldiers to better move their arms and legs as required because he managed to get muscles involved, too. Moving back up to date, today’s
microprocessor-controlled arm and leg prostheses make complex movements and physical activity possible, as can be seen with the athletes taking part in the Paralympics.
A novelty in prosthetics The use of magnetic resonance imaging constitutes another novelty in prosthetics: based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a CAD system is used to construct a virtual femur model that accurately takes into account the anatomy. A CNC milling machine then uses the CAD data to directly produce the prosthetic femur. High-resolution MRI images are
revolutionising medicine. No physician today can do without radiological support. Since Wilhelm Roentgen, imaging procedures, for example, MRI, computerised tomography (CT) and positron emission tomography (PET), have developed dramatically and today can supply fantastically detailed images of the
‘High-resolution MRI images are revolutionising medicine. No physician today can do without radiological support.’
inside of the human body – in real time. MRI real-time imaging can, for example, show the act of chewing, the passage of food through the oesophagus into the stomach, and the emptying of the stomach. If stomach emptying is too slow, a radiologist will immediately recognise the presence of diabetes without using a gastroscope and without needing to expose the patient to radiation. Minimally invasive interventions in the
human brain under MRI real-time monitoring, as in the treatment of aneurysms, will come to replace surgery, which carries dangers and requires longer periods of hospitalisation for the patient. When examining the heart, MRI, apart
from the absence of radiation exposure, offers numerous additional advantages such as visualising the blood flow within the cardiac muscle; assessing the heart’s pumping capacity; and detecting movement disorders of the heart wall. Above all, the visualisation of the coronary
Eduard Frosch
Since 1979, Eduard Frosch has had a leading function in the healthcare sector in the City of Vienna. He established technical service centres in the five largest hospitals operated by the City of Vienna with responsibility for the technical sector as well as for planning and implementing new and additional structures, or the adaptation of existing ones. Between 1988 and 1992 he was Technical Director of the General Hospital of the City of Vienna – University Clinics, and was responsible for putting the new hospital into operation. He also initiated the outsourcing of technical management to VAMED KMB, whose managing director he then was for some 18 years, with responsibilities for total operational management and infrastructure services.
IFHE DIGEST 2015
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