Many blossoming healthcare innovations are changing the sector, and essential technologies are laying the foundation for them. Healthcare organizations will need to adopt new technologies that will enhance health outcomes, make it more cost-effective, and provide value-based care to keep up with this constant development.
As the healthcare industry transitions to a paradigm of 24/7, anywhere, continuous, and personalized treatment, it’s critical to assess the key technologies that will shape the healthcare industry’s future in 2018.
“We believe that consumer health technology, such as apps, wearables, and self-diagnosis tools, has the potential to improve the patient-physician relationship and enhance health outcomes.”
– Family Medicine for America’s Health Chairman, Dr. Glen Stream
The combination of emerging new technologies and a number of new factors, such as technology-centric transformation, not only reduces healthcare costs but also ensures value-based treatment.
Automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence have all had a significant positive impact on the healthcare industry.
According to a University of Michigan research, digitising information from traditional paper to electronic health records cuts outpatient care costs by 3%. This equates to a monthly savings of $5.14 per patient, according to the study.
The healthcare business is undergoing revolutionary changes, and researchers are seeking for new and inventive ways to provide the best patient results while lowering healthcare costs. In 2018, what does the future of healthcare look like? Let’s take a look at six intriguing technologies that are poised to change the healthcare landscape.
AI stands for Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence is helping to reshape the healthcare industry. Artificial intelligence is gaining traction in the healthcare industry, and it is helping to solve a variety of issues that patients, hospitals, and the healthcare business face.
It will supply much of the foundation by enabling predictive analytics and clinical decision support systems, which will alert providers to issues far before they would otherwise notice the need to respond.
Every patient nowadays is digitally empowered and prefers tailored care that is more accountable and less expensive. Artificial intelligence has a wide range of ramifications in the healthcare industry, including illness management, clinical trials, diagnosis and treatment, patient engagement, patient monitoring, and wellness management, to name a few.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming healthcare treatments such as creating better treatment plans, analysing data to deliver personalised medicines, How to Implement Patient-Centered Care and monitoring operations.
Artificial Intelligence AI has the ability to follow chronic diseases using MRI, CT scans, ultrasound, and x-rays, cutting the time it takes for patients to receive a diagnosis from weeks to hours.
According to a 2016 survey from CB Insights, artificial intelligence is being used in healthcare by 86 percent of healthcare provider organisations, life science businesses, and technology vendors. By 2020, these companies will have spent $54 million on artificial intelligence projects on average.
Let’s take a look at how AI is reshaping the healthcare industry:
Artificial intelligence and digital automation aid in the compilation and analysis of data (medical records, patient information, and treatment history). To provide speedy delivery of healthcare services, robots collect, store, re-format, and trace data.
Robots can do tests, X-rays, CT scans, data entry, and other tiresome duties faster and more precisely.
Artificial intelligence systems have been developed to analyse data, evaluate reports from a patient’s file, and assist them in selecting a treatment plan that is appropriate for them. Early identification of life-threatening sickness is achievable thanks to AI.
AI assists in the monitoring of a patient’s fitness level and the transmission of health updates to the appropriate practitioner in order to modify or change the patient’s treatment plans.
The distributed ledger technology (blockchain)
The desire to make significant changes has always been an underlying ripple in all aspect of business, and in healthcare, this is done with an unmistakable feeling of urgency. One of the most significant difficulties in healthcare IT is creating high-value virtual records associated with a patient.
The blockchain is a distributed system that keeps track of peer-to-peer transactions, monitors network changes, and stores and trades data for cryptography. Blockchain technology has the potential to transform healthcare by putting the patient at the centre of the system and improving health data security, privacy, and interoperability. By making electronic medical records more effective and secure, this technology will provide a new model for health information exchanges (HIE).
Adoption of Blockchain in Healthcare in 2017, 2020, and 2025
The distributed ledger technology (blockchain)
The predicted distribution of healthcare blockchain usage across healthcare applications in 2017, 2020, and 2025 is depicted in this graph. By 2025, it is expected that 55% of healthcare applications would have used blockchain for commercial use.
“Organizations will be driven to use blockchain technologies if they are focused on providing higher quality care, similar to how the regional health information exchange concept sparked digital health data sharing. Data exchange worked well in several areas.”
In an interview with HITInfrastructure.com, Brian Behlendorf said:
What influence will Blockchain have on healthcare?
Privacy and security: Patient privacy and confidentiality are major concerns in the healthcare industry. Steps must be done by people in the healthcare industry to prioritise and improve security. Despite previous efforts, blockchain could be the ideal solution for healthcare.
Collaboration and management: The amount of data available has expanded dramatically in recent years and will continue to do so. Blockchain would improve data governance, increase data ownership, improve interoperability, and improve data-driven decision making.
Analytics and data: Blockchain technology is a shared, permanent record of peer-to-peer transactions that will give healthcare providers unprecedented insight into how they store and trade data, leading in better transparency and trust. Continuous changes will result from shared data within the virtual database, increasing real-time analytics.
Science of Data
The amount of health data being collected is rapidly increasing, and this trend is projected to continue in the coming years. Doctors and life scientists have an ocean of big data for their main research, with more than 1.2 billion clinical papers produced in the United States each year. Furthermore, the proliferation of wearable technology results in a large volume of health-related data being produced and shared. The influx of data creates new prospects for better-informed healthcare.
Data science is an excellent healthcare trend that can help hospitals manage their operations more efficiently. The industry may use data science to identify well-organized, cost-effective solutions to harness large amounts of existing healthcare data, enhancing its potential to change healthcare through precise diagnosis.
Gaining an in-depth understanding of the human body is a vital necessity for data scientists and machine learning experts all around the world, as is the capacity to gather, structure, and analyze a large number of data and evaluate a pattern.
Science of Data
Despite having access to a tremendous amount of health data, diagnostic failure rates remain high. According to a recent study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, around 5% of adult patients in the United States are misdiagnosed each year, totaling 12 million people. Furthermore, postmortem examination results research shows that diagnostic errors are responsible for about 10% of patient fatalities.
Data science plays a vital role in forecasting a patient with a tumour, the likelihood of re-admission, and the misclassified diagnosis in electronic medical records. Data science will change the future of healthcare by handling and organizing massive amounts of data, preventing healthcare issues and saving millions of lives.
