Technology is optimizing healthcare resources more efficiently, which means easier healthcare access for individuals who cannot afford or do not wish to travel long distances for treatment.
New technology is helping healthcare providers close the distances between patients and physicians, deploy artificial intelligence-powered analysis tools in remote areas, and turn bulky life-saving equipment into portable devices.
1. Telehealth
Telehealth refers to the use of digital information and communication technologies for healthcare delivery, enabling patients and clinicians to connect remotely in order to care, educate, intervene, or monitor healthcare services.
Asynchronous or “store-and-forward” telehealth involves collecting health data from personal devices like smartphones, thermometers, and blood pressure monitors and transmitting it for interpretation by medical personnel. Remote patient monitoring is another form of asynchronous telehealth.
Private payers and Medicare are major obstacles to the widespread adoption of telehealth, due to the limited reimbursement flexibility offered. A recent KLAS-CHIME study identified these reimbursement restrictions as impeding program growth and sustainability. Furthermore, culturally tailored telehealth services must also be made available in order to overcome sociocultural barriers and enhance accessibility.
2. Remote Monitoring
Remote monitoring in healthcare entails collecting and transmitting patient data to medical professionals for monitoring. This helps avoid errors while increasing productivity.
Advanced telemedicine devices and communication technologies enable patients to monitor their own health in their own homes using digital equipment, enabling constant dialogue with healthcare providers that fosters engagement and empowerment for both parties involved.
Healthcare practices that utilize an RMM service can centrally monitor their clients’ endpoints to ensure compliance with HIPAA regulations and detect issues before they cause serious disruptions, thus providing fast support decreasing downtime, and increasing profitability for themselves as well as their clients.
3. Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence’s potential to revolutionize healthcare lies in its ability to mimic human cognitive capabilities and can assist with medical diagnoses, drug development, patient monitoring, and telemedicine services.
AI technologies present numerous obstacles when applied in clinical practice. These challenges include data privacy, bias, interpretability, and ethical considerations. To ensure successful integration, multidisciplinary teams of experts should collaborate in designing, validating, implementing, and monitoring these systems.
Healthcare professionals should prioritize continuing education to stay abreast of AI developments, enabling them to work effectively with AI technology rather than seeing it replace clinicians. Doing so will prevent job redundancy and the risks associated with unsupervised AI technologies.
4. Drones
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), more commonly referred to as drones, have quickly become popular tools among healthcare organizations for various applications. UAVs provide logistical support while offering other advantages like expedited product delivery and security surveillance.
Drone technology provides an innovative last-mile solution, quickly delivering medicine supplies in remote terrains. They can also transport lab samples such as blood or biopsies for faster testing – expediting patient care or emergency decisions quickly and easing decision-making during critical situations.
Drones can enhance efficiencies in warehouses and consolidated service centers by tracking inventory and redesigning workflow pathways. Furthermore, their invulnerability to theft and damage makes them less expensive to operate compared to ground vehicles thereby cutting operating costs significantly.
5. Mobile Applications
Healthcare mobile applications feature versatile functionality to increase the accessibility of healthcare services. They facilitate effective collaboration among medical professionals and streamline data management processes. In addition, these apps simplify patient appointment scheduling and communication while helping maintain comprehensive EHRs.
Health information apps provide critical health resources and information to individuals in remote locations, significantly reducing transportation challenges while breaking geographical barriers. In addition, these applications enable telemedicine consultations – eliminating the need for patients to travel physically to healthcare facilities for care – promoting medication adherence, as well as featuring symptom tracking functionality to track patients remotely and track symptom updates – helping doctors respond instantly in cases of emergency and enhance healthcare service efficiency as well as patient outcomes.
6. Exposure Tracing Applications
As the COVID-19 pandemic has progressed, digital exposure notification systems have been implemented to augment traditional contact tracing strategies. These apps use smartphone sensors to identify people who may have been around someone who tested positive for COVID-19; exchanging anonymous identifiers over Bluetooth allows these notification systems to identify such individuals.
States across the U.S. have released apps like California’s CA Notify and Virginia’s Covidwise that utilize technology developed by Apple and Google; however, these applications do not serve as true exposure notification tools and do not capture all possible ways that people may come into contact with.
This study seeks to explore the global landscape of COVID-19-related mobile applications with exposure notification capabilities or that focus on managing infection spread.
7. Health Data Analytics
Healthcare data analytics enable organizations to make sense of the vast amounts of patient-related structured and unstructured data they gather, to improve patient outcomes, increase operational efficiencies, and meet strategic goals.
Healthcare analytics can also be utilized to anticipate demand trends. For example, hospitals may use predictive analytic models to determine which patients pose the highest COVID-19 mortality risk and thus better prepare for patient surges and optimize staffing levels.
An author from Vie Healthcare Consulting’s blog notes that healthcare data analytics can promote preventative care, which both lowers healthcare insurance costs and promotes patient well-being. Examples include cancer screenings, well-child visits, and counseling on smoking cessation.
8. Personalized Medicine
Personalized medicine refers to medical practices and treatments tailored specifically to each patient, taking into account factors like genetic makeup and other influences on health.
Predictive medicine is an emerging field within medicine. The definition varies, but one approach could include “using information (genetic or otherwise) on individuals to predict disease susceptibility, prognosis or treatment responses and improve overall health”.
Personalized medicine has seen some notable successes. Notable examples include immunotherapy for cancer, which has contributed to sharp decreases in death rates from melanomas over recent years; and targeted therapies which aim to target specific cancer cells.
