Curated Engineering Insights

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) Act was signed in 1996 for smoother and secure health insurance transactions. Later, with the emergence of electronic sharing of records, more policies were added to protect patient data during electronic transactions.

Over 75% of consumers are interested in receiving virtual healthcare services but only 1 in 5 can have access to it, according to a survey results by Accenture.

Certainly, tech-enabled virtual healthcare system has been offering some creative ways for care delivery. However, affordability and accessibility has been the biggest challenges, still waiting to be addressed. Amongst the various, existing models of virtual care delivery, one that is reaching the plateau of productivity is Patient Portals.

Technology is disrupting every industry, in the most significant way. And today, it is impossible to shrug off technology’s ability to let us live longer, healthier lives. From smart hospitals to surgical robots, we could see digital healthcare system transforming the patient care, pronouncedly.

Blockchain technology is making the headlines, almost everywhere. It is likely to have a mention about it, irrespective of the industry. However, setting aside the massive scope of opportunities that Blockchain brings in, its prominent use cases are still concealed under Bitcoin.

Internet has found its relevance in all fronts and is poised to disrupt almost every sector with its benefits. Amongst the various domains that exert the influence of internet is healthcare.

With internet, evolved the concept of Internet of Things (IoT), which involves connecting anyone, anything, any service, or any network, via internet. Basically, IoT deals with interaction between machines, devices, or applications for solving or automating tasks, without human intervention.

“Over 2.3 billion users across the world are using smartphones. There are 4 billion mobile apps and 325 million connected wearable devices used worldwide.”

This steep rise in adoption of mobile platforms and smart devices has broaden up ways for physicians, hospitals, and other healthcare associations to deliver real time care and information to the users.

For 2018, the mHealth market is forecast to be valued at around 33.59 billion U.S. dollars and it’s expected to reach 58.8 billion USD by 2020. Moreover, the number of telehealth users are expected to reach 7 billion by 2018. These figures unveil the fact that people confide in mobile applications and devices to manage their health and fitness routines.

Despite the fact that our brain has got immense storage and processing power, we prefer storing our data on digital space. In consequence, the digital data is enlarging in size and is estimated to reach 44 trillion GB by 2020. Surely, such big data is impossible for humans to handle and thus Artificial Intelligence (AI) would be needed to track, manage, and probably, process it as well.

With evolving technology and awareness about healthcare, mHealth apps have become a necessity than an option. If a research done by statista is to be believed, the number of downloads in health care, medical, and fitness apps have seen a steep rise from 1.7 billion to 3.2 billion. This clearly forecasts the fact that mHealth apps are being accepted, used, and trusted by users worldwide.

Thanks to the evolving modes of connectivity, virtually delivering patient-centric care has been made possible. There are virtual health kiosks and portals, EHRs, remote consultations etc. that are bridging the gap between the patients and physicians in the most prominent way.