According to a 2017 report by the World Bank and WHO, almost half of the world population can’t access basic healthcare services. The report further highlights that there is an inconsistency in the availability and affordability of healthcare services even in the developed world. For example, in America, a study conducted at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance founded that uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death.
What if a medical condition can be prevented with real-time remote monitoring of the patient?
Then, the cost spent on surgery and medicines for treating the condition can be avoided. This means a lesser number of the patients would actually need to visit hospitals (that are less in numbers and for some patients, remotely located). If this can be achieved, even the uninsured patients will be able to avail health services.
What is IoMT?
The Internet of Medical things (IoMT) or Healthcare IoT is a collection of internet-enabled medical devices and applications that can communicate with each other autonomously (machine-to-machine communication) and are connected to a cloud platform like AWS. The data from these devices can further be analyzed to make future predictions.
1. IoMT can enable Remote Patient Monitoring
With internet broadband penetrating even the most remote areas of developed countries, and the availability of cheap internet-connected devices & internet plans, the remote monitoring of the patients can be a reality soon.
The data collected from the IoT devices having sensors that can detect/measure changes in temperature, pressure, etc. are stored on the cloud. This data can then be used to develop Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems that have a detailed history of vital signs of the patient, treatments/prescriptions, diseases diagnosed, etc. These EHR systems can help in predicting and hence, preventing the future medical conditions which may harm the patient.
Remote patient monitoring is beneficial for the human cause, but it is equally advantageous to the healthcare service providers. With remote patient monitoring, they can provide services to so many more patients and are not restricted by the physical capacity of an institute like a hospital.
The largest healthcare technology company based in Germany uses an iPad app for remote monitoring of Ultrasound machines. Read more.
2. Smart Hospitals
Hospitals today are like small cities, spreading across hundreds of acres of land. Locating a person or a machine in such a big area can be challenging sometimes. And what if there is a scenario in which availability of a person or a machine is urgent for saving the life of a patient? This is where IoMT comes into the picture. It can help in locating various things and people across a medical campus. By utilizing this data, a lot of administrative tasks and inventory management can be done more efficiently, cutting down the cost for healthcare service providers.
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3. Collection of Clinical Data
Apart from Electronic Health Records, there is a lot of clinical data that is stored in silos. It includes administrative data, health insurance claims, disease registries, health surveys, clinical trial data, etc. IoT devices make collection and integration of this data seamless and autonomous, saving a lot of time and cost for the healthcare service providers.
Apart from the benefits mentioned above, with the different types of sensory devices such as ingestible pills, heartbeat monitors, IoMT can even help in monitoring data from Intensive Care Units (ICU), ECG, detecting abnormalities in Kidneys, treatment of diseases like cancer, and more.
A UK-based leading healthcare centre streamlined and automated medical practices for clinical staff, general practitioners (GPs), and consultants with a multi-clinic Practice Management System (PMS) for their network of clinics. Read more.
Conclusion
Technologies like IoMT, AI & Machine Learning and Big Data are going to transform the medical landscape forever, affecting the lives of every human being on the planet. The implementation of IoT has already become mainstream and is generating rich data at a rate much faster than ever before.
Affordable healthcare services are the need of the hour. According to NCBI, the healthcare costs in America are going to rise by 4.2 per cent a year, from $7.1 trillion starting in 2015 to 8.7 trillion by the end of 2020. The situation is similar in other parts of the globe as well, that makes it completely infeasible for the people living in developing countries that are struggling with economic challenges to avail these services.
Thus, healthcare service providers must work in collaboration with healthcare IT software solutions partners to bring the prices of healthcare products and services down. Daffodil understands the criticality of the data generated by healthcare organizations. Our developers have experience in designing a plethora of healthcare solutions and can design the right IoT software systems for your organization. You can send us your query at info@daffodilsw.com.