Category: Healthcare

A list of 5 popular open-source ERPs that support healthcare equipment suppliers

The global healthcare expenditure is anticipated to rise at a CAGR of 5% till 2023. The healthcare industry can, therefore, look at a bright future. Medical equipment suppliers have to deal with various challenges. They have to ensure that all products comply with the regulatory guidelines, are of high quality, and are entirely traceable. Robust ERP systems can help medical equipment suppliers to gather insights from data to make quick decisions. Let’s take a look at some of the open-source ERP systems out there that are suitable for SMEs.

1. Odoo ERP

Odoo is an open-source ERP platform that allows ease of deployment. This is specifically helpful for SMEs that do not have dedicated IT infrastructure. The flexibility helps integration of different business processes and systems. Odoo for medical equipment suppliers is a comprehensive ERP solution that helps manage financials and operations with ease. 

The core modules of Odoo like Accounting, Project Management, and Inventory Management make it suitable for medical equipment suppliers. Developers can create custom third-party apps to meet the specific needs of a medical equipment supplier. Odoo offers more than 10,000 apps to meet most business needs. Fingent is an official partner of Odoo with years of experience in implementing, customizing, and providing consultation for clients. As an Odoo development company, Fingent has catered to the needs of various customers and streamlined their operations. Our motto of increasing efficiency and ease-of-use has made us a popular choice among various organizations for Odoo implementation requirements. 

Read more: 5 Salient Features of Odoo that Make it a Reliable ERP for Enterprises

2. ERPNext 

ERPNext is a contemporary ERP solution that allows you to focus on delivering medical equipment of high-quality by effortlessly managing your supply chains. It enables you to intelligently track orders, monitor stock levels, implement promotions, and minimize errors in inventory sourcing. You can leverage the numerous built-in integrations offered by ERPNext and start supplying in no time. With ERPNext, you can have real-time updates on the movement of equipment, control equipment transfers within different warehouses, and generate required reports quickly and easily. You can also create your customized software on-the-fly without any code. 

3. Epicor 

Medical equipment suppliers have to deal with difficult delivery timelines, complicated pricing arrangements, unique inventory, oversee seller agreements, and concessions. Epicor ERP solution enables you to carry out all your operations with ease. The Epicor Prophet 21 ERP is specifically designed for supply and distribution. This user-friendly ERP system can help suppliers maximize profits and scale without limits. Epicor allows you to integrate all your business applications with RESTful API. You can also automatically manage your warehouses with Epicor Prophet 21. This helps in the smooth running of all processes in your warehouse. This, in turn, improves precision enabling you to provide better services to your customers.   

Epicor Commerce Connect helps you to create and maintain an online presence which is the need of the hour. The increased visibility across the supply chain helps medical equipment suppliers even forecast demand. 

Read more: ERP or Digital Transformation: The Best Technology Solution For Your Enterprise

4. Microsoft Dynamics 365

Microsoft Dynamics 365 combines the best practices of Microsoft’s ERP, CRM, and BI solutions into a single product that is cloud-based. These features enable the system to scale and grow along with your business. Capabilities like Material Resource Planning and Vendor Self-Service Help minimize vendor lead times and inventory carrying costs. The fully automated warehouse management system (WMS) helps optimize your warehouse space, labor, and resources. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 gives medical device suppliers full visibility across the entire supply chain and the ability to track information and job at all touchpoints. This helps improve efficiency, reduce expenses, and promote smooth communication within different segments of the medical device industry supply chain. As a medical device supplier, you need to understand who has purchased the device from you and whether it has come back for service. You have to take information from different systems and combine those to give meaningful reporting. You also may have to rework your inventory according to changes in regulations. Microsoft Dynamics 365 allows you to be unique in the medical device industry because that’s what gives you the edge.

Read more: ERP E-commerce

5. Oracle NetSuite 

Oracle Netsuite is proven to be a very mature SaaS solution that brings in next-level integration and seamless nature to the table. Though NetSuite is ideal for SMEs who can leverage the relatively low-cost entry point, many enterprise-level companies are also considering Netsuite due to the scalability that it provides. Oracle NetSuite helps medical device suppliers to react to the diverse market and deal with different customer bases and different routes-to-market. NetSuite helps you reduce indirect costs and get through the maze of the regulatory framework by allowing modifications and customizations. You get one central source of information that helps simplify the complexities of the medical device business. The flexibility that Oracle NetSuite offers, helps the medical equipment industry to adapt to the changes in customer demand and provide them with what they want and when they want. 

Read more: 5 Reasons to Integrate Your E-commerce Application with Odoo ERP

Conclusion

Analyses of the medical equipment supplies and distribution industry show that companies that have demonstrated the ability to leverage cloud computing and ERP have increased their profitability and revenue. This was achieved as a result of seamless integration of all business processes which enabled real-time financial and operational visibility, better cost management structures, improved forecasting and revenue tracking, and the ability to access data from anywhere. 

A large number of medical equipment suppliers usually are small to medium-sized businesses, where the one-off system automation model proves to be inefficient. Cloud-based ERP systems eliminates the old standalone computer systems and replaces them with a single, unified software program. Thus, someone in Finance can easily look into the Warehouse software to check if an order is shipped. ERP cloud computing can help you see exactly where your business is, at any second of the day. You can see how much revenue you’ve earned for the day, how much inventory you have, how you are trending over previous days, months, and years. 

Read more: A 3 day Odoo CRM implementation story!

Cloud-based ERP systems becoming the rage for medical equipment suppliers, it’s high time that you too invest in one, if not done already. Fingent helps you leverage the benefits of the open-source ERP systems mentioned above by understanding your unique business requirements. Because we know that this uniqueness is what gives you that competitive edge. Contact us to know more about how your business can benefit from ERP integration. 

Transforming Healthcare with Predictive Analytics powered by SAP HANA

Predictive analysis has been helping businesses like Uber, Amazon, and Netflix to best serve their customers. They use it to predict what shows viewers would like to watch or what items they’d like to buy. It’s altogether a different story when it comes to healthcare. 

The stakes are higher when you recommend care based on predictive analysis. That’s why many healthcare organizations prefer prescriptive analytics over predictive analytics even now. However, the rewards are potentially much greater if organizations buy into this risk balance and ensure that predictive analytics is incorporated in an appropriate way to deal with the complex operations of a healthcare organization.  

The Healthcare Data Challenge

Healthcare data doubles every three years and the $7 trillion industry is unable to keep up with the staggering rate at which information is produced. The ever-increasing medical data generated/ collected in real-time from numerous medical records, clinical trials, research, personal fitness bands, wearables, implanted devices, sensors, and health apps will be equivalent to 300 million books. That means the average person is likely to generate more than 1 million gigabytes of health-related data in their lifetime (source: IBM Research). 

Related Reading: 5 Ways Big Data is Changing the Healthcare Industry

So, we require smart tools to use these massive data efficiently and derive clinically actionable results from them. While treating patients, we need to gain insights faster to provide specifically tailored treatments that are based on biological, genetic, and physical information. 

 SAP HANA Helps Unlock Massive Health Data

SAP HANA is the platform that integrates disparate and fragmented biological, clinical, and lifestyle datasets, helping users to analyze them and gain insights from them. SAP HANA enables users to conduct predictive analysis to examine and identify patterns across healthy as well as patient populations. 

Predictive analytics powered by SAP HANA combines the depth and speed of in-memory analytics with the potential of native predictive algorithms to process huge amounts of healthcare data on a real-time basis. In industries such as healthcare, most of the data is unstructured. Whether you use Enterprise systems, data warehouses, data marts, spreadsheets or Hadoop environments, Predictive Analytics solutions from SAP HANA combines both structured and unstructured datasets from any source. 

Leveraging SAP predictive analysis for visualization, R’s extensive library of statistical and data mining techniques, and SAP HANA predictive analytic library, data scientists get everything they need to predict the future in real-time. For instance, you’ll be able to predict the “patient footfall” in a hospital in a given period of time. Once you have the expected number of patients walking in, you can easily make arrangements to meet their needs like adjusting the bed capacity, maintaining stocks of critical protective devices, medicines, and so on. These proactive decisions can be extremely helpful in the current COVID-19 crisis situation.

Related Reading: Data Mining and Predictive Analytics: Know The Difference

Implementing SAP HANA Solutions in Healthcare

Does this sound too futuristic and hard to deploy? 

Well, you’ll be pleased to know that using SAP HANA for Predictive Analytics is also easy. You just have to use a drag and drop visual interface for data selection, preparation, and processing. You can create models by using native predictive algorithms as well as algorithms from R. So it’s not only for the experts. With SAP BusinessObjects and business intelligence integration, you can unlock predictive insights. Moreover, the stunning and advanced visualizations help to reveal valuable, hidden insights. The Mitsui Knowledge Industry has successfully used SAP Predictive Analytics to provide a one-stop-shop for genomic data analysis of cancer patients and support personalized therapeutics. 

Today, global healthcare industry experts are moving away from the one-size-fits-all approach. Personalized and preventive medicine is taking the center stage so that the right patient gets the right treatment at the right time. This, in turn, paves the way towards improved clinical outcomes and cost savings. Genomic research is gaining importance as it not only helps predict the signs of diseases even before they occur but also helps learn their physiologies. This can enable healthcare providers to determine the treatment plan on an individual basis thus greatly improving the efficiency and standard of healthcare. 

However, the challenge is to store the growing data. Only the genetic sequencing data would amount to approximately 5PB for 6 billion humans on the planet! Analyzing and interpreting this data is another challenge. Using SAP HANA researchers can analyze this data almost instantaneously. What once took 48 hours to analyze now takes only a few minutes with SAP HANA. This ultimately means a faster and precise diagnosis, better care, and fewer visits to the hospital.  

With SAP HANA, medical researchers and clinicians can integrate genomic data with clinical data to find associations with genetic markers and certain types of diseases. Once a doctor accesses this data in real-time, he can provide personalized treatment that is specific to certain genetic markers of the patient. 

Uncover hidden trends, take proactive actions, conduct new research on pharmaceuticals, and plan for future needs with Predictive Analytics from SAP. Fingent’s SAP experts help you take advantage of your SAP investments. Talk to us to know more.      

Focused Industry Templates and Automation In SAP 

Focused industry templates and automation in SAP can radically cut the time and effort required to transform the systems of various industries. Modern solutions that integrate business functions, data management and financial management can facilitate various industries. Recognizing this massive potential, both big and small industries are adopting industry-specific solutions. This article discusses in detail how industry-specific templates can benefit verticals such as healthcare, retail, logistics, utilities, and media.

Understanding Templates for Industry Specific Verticals

A standardized, industry-specific vertical approach is a fast and cost-effective way to implement an ERP solution. 

Related Reading: Unlock the Potential of Intelligent Enterprise with SAP Leonardo

When Do We Need Templates?

You need templates when your work is repetitive, such as filling in a monthly report. This speeds up mundane tasks and ensures accuracy and uniformity across all the reports. A business that performs the same functions across different locations would benefit from an industry-specific template.

How Does It Work?

Building an industry-specific template would require a typical implementation approach: gather, analyze and document the requirement. This is done in phases such as planning and blueprinting. Then it is tested and confirmed by the business before it is deployed across the organization.

If different parts of the organization work differently, there is no need to create a new template from scratch. SAP industry-specific templates allow you to create a version of the existing template to handle the task.

Related Reading: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

What Are the Benefits of Industry Focused Templates and Automation?

• Allows businesses to achieve quick return on their investments. 
• Minimizes ERP implementation expenses.
• Minimizes or avoids risks such as budget overruns.
• Allow you to control projects more accurately and easily.
• Give you the ability to repeat and refine processes. 
• Enables you to apply the best practices to the next project. 

Five Specific Industries That Facilitate Focused Industry Solutions

Many industries are looking for expert IT partners with a focused approach in providing industry-specific technology solutions. Here are examples of five specific industries:

1. Healthcare 

Throughout a patients’ journey in the healthcare lifecycle, the healthcare industry can leverage focused industry solutions to proactively approach the patient and provide individual, personalized content increasing patient satisfaction and building patient loyalty. With SAP industry templates, healthcare can increase efficiency with insight into costs and outcomes, improve customer experience and improve risk and compliance management. 

SAP solutions increase workforce engagement, agility, and overall results. By means of invoice-to-pay, invoice-to-cash, and other features, the healthcare industry can enable their departments to collaborate efficiently.

2. Retail

Today, it is critical for businesses to treat customers as they want to be treated. This is possible only by customizing their experience and selling to them in a personalized way. SAP solutions are suitable for both small and large enterprises. It can be mapped for all company techniques and scenarios, and business features. Since they are exceedingly customizable, SAP solutions are best utilized for business strategies involving seasonal goods. Aggregates and indexes can be replaced by central tables ensuring that steps are transparent from order-to-delivery.

3. Logistics

Certified SAP focused industry templates and automation simplifies the process to avoid the need for designing a full business process from scratch. This can double the performance speed by accelerating user productivity and reducing frustration. It can also eliminate the use of printed paper, reducing your carbon footprint and costs. Automation in the logistics industry leads to faster decisions and instant actions. 

4. Utilities

Utility firms undergo substantial changes across the world. This increases competition, thereby putting immense pressure on utility companies to provide a high degree of customer satisfaction. SAP solution templates and automation helps them by providing operational efficiency, steering utilities to their desired destination and beyond with minimum expense. It can also reduce implementation effort and time, thus realizing a higher ROI for the industry.

5. Media 

Media industries such as newspapers, television, and internet-based social media applications face the challenge of delivering information at the right time to attract their target audience. Implementation of SAP solutions will ensure that all service processes are handled efficiently. It can help in better planning of which information should be broadcast at what time. SAP-based solutions enable the media industry to make instant changes and take quick action according to an on-going scenario. Such agility can provide better commercial outcomes for the industry.

Related Reading: SAP Preconfigured Solutions Boost Efficiency Among Industries

It’s the Right Move!

Agility, quick ROI, streamlined processes – what are you waiting for? Businesses are moving on to Focused Industry Templates and Automation as we speak. Fingent has helped many of these businesses with a host of SAP services that help to improve operational efficiency. Give us a call and let’s get talking. 

What are preconfigured solutions?

SAP Preconfigured solutions are implementations featuring standard functionality or common patterns. Since they include common enterprise features such as supply chain, finance, and inventory management, preconfigured solutions can be deployed rapidly. In simple terms, SAP preconfigured solutions are simple, ready-to-consume solutions that adapt to your business needs.

SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions allows the development of preconfigured solutions for specific functional areas, complete with pre-built reports, preconfigured content, and predefined best practices. Such suites enable enterprises to deploy software easily, with accelerated implementation times, and predictability in cost and scope.

Each preconfigured solution is a complete, end-to-end implementation. Enterprises may adopt it as such, or use it as a base for developing a full-blown customized solution. Open source solutions allow enterprises to download the source code and customize the solution.

Traditional preconfigured solutions came on-premise. The SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud heralds the cloud version of preconfigured solutions.

Related Reading: What is Business Process Expertise in SAP and Why You Need it

How preconfigured solutions enhance industry operations?

Preconfigured solutions spare enterprises from “rediscovering the wheel.” When solutions exist for standard requirements, it avoids the wastage in development efforts. Preconfigured solutions save time, trial-and-error, and labor. The in-built accelerators allow rapid implementation and configuration. The shortened time to market delivers a competitive advantage to firms.

A preconfigured solution offers a working model with glitches removed. These solutions connect key functional areas, to streamline operations and improve communication flow across departments. It automates routine and repetitive functions and offers well-structured content that improves visibility into key fields.

SAP offers built-in support for industry best practices. Solutions developed using SAP combines the latest technology, industry best practices, and processes in a single package.

Developers using SAP to build preconfigured solutions can adopt a modular and scalable approach. They mix modules to create targeted solutions such as CRM, field management suite, ERP and more. Clients may choose the most relevant reporting tools for their reports using SAP Business Intelligence Adoption rapid-deployment solution. SAP Predictive Analytics Content Adoption rapid-deployment solution helps to implement a predefined predictive analysis use case.

Transforming various industry verticals

Preconfigured solutions deliver efficiency improvements in several industries and verticals. Five of them are mentioned below:

1. Real Estate

Unstandardized information, inefficient processes, and weak communications often affect the real estate industry. Preconfigured solutions enable enterprises to streamline data and workflows. 

Developing preconfigured solutions for key functional areas of the real estate industry allows business owners to access information in real-time, prevent opportunities from slipping through the cracks, and remain in control of the business. Here are a few key functional areas where pre-configured solutions can come to the rescue of real estate enterprises:

• Document management with powerful search and sort functionality.
• Process automation functions to streamline operations.
• Contact maintenance to keep track of customers and upcoming tasks.
• Reporting and analytics to generate and share data and other critical information.

2. Supply Chain and Logistics

Preconfigured solutions make the complex supply chain relationships simple and easy to handle. SAP’s Model Company for supply chain planning offers a ready-to-run, comprehensive solution, complete with relevant business content, accelerators, and enablement services.

The suite co-opts:

• Demand planning to manage demand streams and increase productivity.
• Response and supply planning.
• Supply and allocation planning.
• Deployment planning.
• Sales and Operations planning.

The inbound and outbound integrations with SAP S/4HANA ensures seamless integration with other functional areas, such as sales. Businesses gain improved visibility to the upstream and downstream business value chains and can visualize the entire supply chain network. The preconfigured solution aligns demand and supply plans with financial targets and key performance indicators.

Related Reading: Seamlessly migrate to S/4HANA with these tools and methodologies

3. Healthcare

The healthcare industry is under pressure to innovate while keeping up with regulations. Preconfigured solutions automate regulatory concerns and compliance. Ready-to-run process models and scenarios enforce standardization with tight quality controls. It improves efficiency in research and development. Accelerators support rapid design and implementation.

The most popular modules of SAP’s preconfigured solutions in healthcare are meant for:

• Research and development
• Production
• Regulation
• Quality and traceability
• Logistics and transport
• Purchases and provisioning
• Marketing and commercial

4. Sales and Marketing

SAP preconfigured solutions infuse efficiency to customer-facing functions and increase customer satisfaction. Its most popular implementations in the sales and marketing domain include:

• Predicting customer demand based on real-time data.
• Tracking sales history.
• Automating sales operations. The solution tracks all processes, from ordering of raw materials till the delivery, and takes care of auditing, notifications, and reporting.

5. Financial Services

The SAP Model Company solution for Financial Services offers a ready-to-run, comprehensive solution to support the core financial processes, including:

• General accounting
• Cash and treasury functions
• Planning and forecasting

These preconfigured solutions come with relevant business content for a specific use-case, accelerator, and enablement service. These solutions enable gap analysis, address resource bottlenecks, and support lean implementations.

Today’s enterprises seek efficiency improvements and cost savings without compromising quality. Fingent uses SAP to build pre-configured solutions that enable enterprises to realize such goals. Implementing these custom-built pre-configured solutions helps you transform your processes across various business areas and improve your customer relationships. 

Contact us to get a free consultation with our SAP Experts. 

How is AI poised to transform our future?

“Artificial Intelligence is the new electricity. It has the potential to transform every industry and create huge economic value”, says Chinese-English scientist and entrepreneur, Andrew Ng. The impact of artificial intelligence on our daily lives cannot be overlooked. From smartphones to ride-sharing apps, smart home devices, Google search, and Social media- there is hardly any industry or sector that is left untouched by AI. 

There has been a huge surge in patenting of artificial intelligence in the last few years. PwC estimates that by 2030, AI would contribute a whopping $15.7 trillion to the global GDP. Analysis by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) states that the number of AI-related patent applications rose from 18,995 in 2013 to 55,660 in 2017. WIPO Director-General, Francis Gurry says that “We can expect a very significant number of new AI-based products, applications, and techniques that will alter our daily lives and also shape future human interaction with the machines we created”.

Industries such as healthcare, automotive, and financial services were the fastest to adopt AI.

Following are a few key domains that would be impacted most by AI in the coming years:

Related Reading: How AI Integration Helps Maximize Your Business ROI

AI will transform these areas in the coming years:

1. Transport

The general public would widely adopt self-driving vehicles. Apart from cars, self-driving vehicles would also include delivery trucks, autonomous delivery drones, and personal robots. Commutes may shift towards an on-demand approach like the Uber-style “cars as a service approach”. Commute-time would be viewed as a time to relax or just another way to work productively. People would live further away from their homes, reducing the need for parking space. This would change the face of modern cities. 

However, enhanced connectivity, real-time tracking, traffic gauging, route calculations, peer-to-peer ride-sharing, and self-driving cars would be impossible without personal user data. This calls for the need to implement more stringent measures to secure the data and privacy of citizens.

2. Home/ service robots

Robots have already entered our homes in the past fifteen years. Recent advances in mechanical and AI technologies substantiate the increasing safety and reliability of using home robots. In the foreseeable future, we can expect special-purpose robots to deliver packages to our doors, clean offices and enhance security. 

We are already familiar with the vacuum cleaning robot – Roomba, which has gained its place in millions of homes across the world. The AI capabilities of these kinds of robots are being increased rapidly with drastic improvements in the processing power and RAM capacity of low cost embedded processors. Low cost and safe robot arms are being used in research labs all over the world. Further advances enabled by deep learning will enable us to better interact with robots.

3. Healthcare

Healthcare is a promising domain for the use of AI technologies. AI-based applications have started gaining the trust of doctors, nurses, and patients. By revising the policies and other commercial regulations regarding the development and usage of such applications, AI can be used to improve health outcomes and quality of life for millions of people in the coming years. Patient monitoring, clinical decision support, remote patient monitoring, automated assists to perform surgeries, and healthcare management systems are some of the potential applications of AI in healthcare. 

4. Education

AI has the potential to enhance education at all levels, by providing personalization at scale. While computer learning will not replace human teachers, Massive open online courses (MOOCs) will help students learn at their own pace with techniques that work for them. AI technologies such as Natural language processing, machine learning, and crowdsourcing are giving an impetus to online learning. If these technologies can be meaningfully integrated with face-to-face learning, AI will find more applications in our classrooms. 

5. Entertainment

AI has already transformed this domain to a considerable extent. AI-driven entertainment is gaining huge traction and response from the masses with overwhelming enthusiasm. AI-enabled entertainment will become more interactive, personalized and engaging by 2030. However, the extent to which technology replaces or enhances sociability is debatable. More research is required to understand how to leverage these attributes of AI for the benefit of society.  

Related Reading: Building Incredible Mobile Experiences by Combining AR and AI

Concerns about AI

Advances in AI have already impacted our lives. However, you may also have heard of the dire predictions regarding AI made by some of the brightest minds such as the late scientist Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk (Tesla and SpaceX chief). Pew Research Centre surveyed some 979 technology experts to find out whether advancing AI and related technology would help or harm humanity. 63% of the respondents were hopeful of a better future in 2030. Many of them said that all would go well only if the concerned authorities paid close attention to how these tools, platforms, and networks are engineered, distributed and updated. 

Following were the concerns that were mentioned most often:

1. Individuals would lose control over their lives due to the use of AI
2. Surveillance and data systems that favor efficiency over human betterment would be dangerous.
3. AI would cause millions of people to lose their jobs leading to economic and social upheaval.
4. As people continue to depend on AI, their cognitive, social and survival skills would be diminished. 
5. Cybercrime, cyberwarfare and the possibility of essential organizations being endangered by weaponized information would open new facets of vulnerabilities. 

Overcoming the concerns

Following are a few solutions to take positive advantages of AI:

1. The global population should join hands and create cohesive approaches in tackling AI’s challenges.
2. The development, policies, regulation, and certification of autonomous systems should undergo essential transformations to ensure that any kind of AI development would be directed towards the common good.
3. Corporate and government organizations should shift their priorities towards the global advancement of humanity rather than profits and nationalism. AI advances should be aimed at human augmentation, regardless of economic class. 

Nicholas Beale rightly said, “AI done right will empower.” As artificial intelligence continues to be embedded in most human endeavors, let us make broad changes for the better. Let us be more thoughtful about how these technologies are implemented constructively.   

If you would like to know more about Fingent’s development and implementation approach on AI, give us a call. 

How Extended Reality Is Transforming Business Environments?

Picture yourself diving into crystal-clear Grecian waters or taking a walk on the moon, all the while sitting in the comfort of your home.  As fantastical as this may seem now, Extended Reality is making this possible as we speak. What is Extended reality and what are its powerful real-world applications? Let’s check.

Understanding What Extended Reality Is

Extended Reality is a blanket term that encompasses all virtual and real environments generated by computer technology. This includes components such as Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality. Extended Reality is poised to completely revamp the way businesses interact with the media and has the potential to allow seamless interaction between the real and virtual worlds allowing its users to have a completely immersive experience. 

Three Remarkable Components of Extended Reality

These components fall under the category of immersive technologies that can affect our perceptions. Here is a little bit about them:

Virtual reality: Virtual reality transposes its users to a different setting through a simulated digital experience. It makes use of a head-mounted display (HMD) to create an immersive experience by simulating as many experiences as possible.  Industries such as healthcare and real estate have started using virtual reality significantly. 

Augmented reality: As the word suggests, augmented reality takes the existing reality and overlays it with various types of information, enhancing the digital experience. It could be categorized as marker-based, marker-less, and location-based. It has proven useful in medical training, design, modeling and numerous other areas.

Mixed reality: Being the most recent advancement among reality technologies, mixed reality is experienced through mixed reality glasses or headsets where you can interact with physical and digital objects in real-time. 

Related Reading: Augmented Reality Vs. Virtual Reality – The Future Technology

The implementation of these technologies through extended reality is enabling businesses to create innovative solutions and increase customer engagement, reduce human error and improve time efficiency. 

5 Powerful Real-World Applications 

“The market for Extended Reality is expected to have a compound annual growth rate of more than 65% during the forecast period of 2019-2024,” says Mordor Intelligence. 

Check out these five real-world applications of extended reality:

1. Entertainment and Gaming

The entertainment and video games industries are the foremost users of Extended Reality. Camera tracking and real-time rendering are combined to create an immersive virtual environment, allowing actors to get the real feel of the scene, thereby improving their performance. The extended reality also allows for multipurpose studio environments, thus reducing the cost of an elaborate movie set.

Video gaming is enhanced by the ability of Extended Reality to create a comprehensive participation effect. This allows users to dive into a completely different reality. Other entertainment events such as exhibitions and live music can also be enhanced by the capabilities of Extended Reality. 

2. Employees and Consumers

• Training: Extended Reality allows employees to be trained and educated in low-risk, virtual environments. Medical students, surgeons, firefighters, pilots, and chemists can closely simulate risky scenarios with minimal risk and less expense. The experience they gain will prove invaluable when they handle real-life situations.
• Information: Replacing physical manuals, Extended Reality can enable technicians to focus on the task without having to flip the pages of a manual. It can even connect an expert remotely to the real-time issue for his expert advice. This would save organizations a whole lot of money, and more importantly save them valuable downtime as they wouldn’t need to wait for experts.
• Improve customer perspective: Simulating virtual experience brought on by specific diseases and impairments can help doctors and caregivers receive empathy training. 

Related Reading: How Top Brands Embrace Augmented Reality for Immersive Customer Experiences

3. Healthcare

Extended Reality is improving healthcare by streamlining medical procedures while enhancing patient care. Allowing surgeons to visualize the complexities of the organs in 3D, it is enabling them to plan each step of a complicated surgery well in advance. Essentially, it is ensuring that surgeons can perform surgeries in a more safe, effective and precise way.

4. Real Estate

Extended Reality makes it easier for real estate agents and managers to close a deal by enabling prospective homebuyers to get a real feel of the property. The layout scenarios that are enabled by Extended Reality enhance customer experience while providing strong business opportunities. 

Related Reading: AR and VR- Game Changers of Real Estate Industry

5. Marketing

Extended Reality enables marketers to give their consumers a ‘try before you buy’ experience. It allows consumers to be transported to a place, immerses them in that world and motivates them to explore it. As an example, Cathay Pacific used a 360◦ video with hotspots to help potential customers experience the brand firsthand. That increased customer awareness by 29% and brand favorability by 25%. 

Face the Future with Extended Reality

There are many more advancements and applications to be discovered with Extended Reality, and it is soon going to be imperative to competitive advantage. Make sure your business isn’t left behind. Talk to our expert today. 

3 Reasons to Embrace Prescriptive Analytics in Healthcare

From flagging an unsafe drug interaction to activating a yearly reminder call for a mammogram, healthcare providers are leveraging patient data for a wide array of healthcare tasks. Yet, a worrying number of healthcare providers struggle to understand which one of the big data analytics methods, prescriptive or predictive, is most effective for their business.

Related Reading: 5 Ways Big Data is Changing the Healthcare Industry

Understanding the difference between prescriptive analytics and predictive analytics is the key to finding the right path to viable and productive solutions for your healthcare industry. This blog discusses why you should consider prescriptive analytics rather than predictive analytics to drive value to your business.  

Predictive Analytics: The Ability to Forecast What Might Happen

Predictive analytics has been helpful to healthcare providers as they look for evidence-based methods to minimize unnecessary costs and avoid adverse events, which can be prevented. Predictive analytics aims to detect problems even before they occur using historical patterns and modeling. As the word itself suggests, it predicts. It gives you collated and analyzed data that could serve as raw material for informed decision making. 

Related Reading: Data Mining and Predictive Analytics: Know The Difference

However, the healthcare industry demands a more robust infrastructure. It needs access to real-time data that allows quick decision-making both clinically and financially.  It also requires medical devices that can provide information on the vitals of a patient up to the nanosecond. Based on the information available for the individual patient, clinical decision support systems should be able to provide an accurate diagnosis and the treatment options available. This must take into consideration the latest advances in medicine available as well. That is where prescriptive analytics comes into the picture.

Prescriptive Analytics: Reveals Actionable Next Steps

Prescriptive analytics takes it a step further by providing actionable next steps. If predictive analytics sheds light on the dark alley, prescriptive analytics reveals the stepping stones that would help map out the course of action to be taken. It empowers you to make more accurate predictions and gives you more options so you can make well-defined split-second decisions, which is critical for the healthcare industry. 

According to Research and Markets, the global prescriptive and predictive analytics market is expected to reach $28.71 billion by 2026. The reason for such an increase is because prescriptive analytics has the capacity to analyze, sort and learn from data and build on such data more effectively than any human mind can. Hence, the most outstanding benefit of prescriptive analytics is the outcome of the analysis. 

Three Reasons to Consider Prescriptive Analysis

MarketWatch states that Healthcare prescriptive analytics market is poised to grow significantly during the forecast period of 2016-2022. Here are 3 reasons why.

1. Sound Clinical Decision-Making Options

Unlike predictive analytics which stops at predicting an upcoming event, prescriptive analytics empowers healthcare providers with the capability to do something about it, helping them take the best action to mitigate or avoid a negative consequence. 

To illustrate, a healthcare service provider might be experiencing an inordinately increased number of hospital-acquired infections. Prescriptive analytics wouldn’t just stop at flagging the anomaly and highlighting who would be the next possible patient with vulnerable vitals. It would also point to the nurse who is responsible for spreading that particular infection to all these patients. It could also prevent similar outbreaks in the future by helping healthcare providers develop a sound antibiotic stewardship program.  

2. Sound Clinical Action

Prescriptive analytics doesn’t limit itself to interpreting the evidence. It also allows health care providers to consider recommended actions for each of those predicted outcomes. It carefully links clinical priorities and measurable events such as clinical protocols or cost-effectiveness to ensure that viable solutions are recommended. 

To illustrate, a healthcare provider might be able to forecast a patient’s likely return to the hospital in the very next month using predictive analysis. On the other hand, prescriptive analytics would be able to drive decisions regarding the associated cost simulation, pending medication, real-time bed counts, and so on. Or, it could help you decide if you need to adjust order sets for in-home follow-up. It empowers the hospital staff to identify the patient with a greater risk of readmission and take needed action to mitigate such risks.

3. Sound Financial Decisions

Prescriptive analytics has the capability to lower the cost of healthcare from patient bills to the cost of running hospital departments. In other words, it helps in making sound financial and operational decisions, providing short-term and long-term solutions to administrative and financial challenges. 

Gain the Benefits of Prescriptive Analysis

Prescriptive analytics provides enormous scope and depth as developers improve technologies in the future. It is making truly meaningful advances with regard to the quality and timeliness of patient care and is reducing clinical and financial risks. Are you ready to get on board? Contact us for help. 

Mixed Reality Promising a New Improved Healthcare Industry

Mixed Reality makes it possible for surgeons to perform an operation on a patient thousands of miles away. It makes it possible for nurses to hone their skills and perform hundreds of operations virtually before even touching a patient. Mixed Reality is making the impossible possible. 

Mixed Reality combines the real world with the virtual to create solutions that we never thought possible. It enables effective collaboration between physical and digital objects and has found an integral place and application in healthcare. This blog explores some radical ways in which healthcare is using Mixed Reality for better quality treatment and customer experience. 

Mixed Reality Working Wonders in Healthcare 

By 2026, AV/VR in the healthcare market is expected to reach 7.05 billion USD showing that Mixed Reality is finding increased application in the healthcare industry.  From enabling pre-procedural planning and visualization before surgery to training nurses as they virtually workout challenges they could encounter during real-life procedures, and improving the collaboration and communication between doctors and patients – Mixed Reality is making great things happen.  Here are some ways in which this is becoming possible. 

1. Immersive Learning for Nurses and Medical Students

Skilled nurses are critical to the healthcare industry. Simulations are the most effective method of educating and preparing nurses to respond appropriately to a variety of situations they might encounter. Mixed Reality can place a nursing student in those specific or rare situations, which may be difficult to arrange for in real clinical settings. Such immersive simulations are much more cost-effective than traditional nursing simulation devices. The education company Pearson has collaborated with Microsoft to launch apps called HoloPatient and HoloHuman. These tools use holograms of patients and help in training healthcare professionals as they diagnose and treat medical problems. 

As another achievement in Mixed Reality, St. George’s University in Grenada worked with SphereGen Technologies to develop what is called the ‘Learning Heart.’ The Learning Heart is a study aid that enables users to view the hologram of the heart from all directions and examine its functions. It responds to touch and voice commands and allows users to separate all the parts of the human heart, thus making learning immersive for medical students.

2. Reduced Time and Reduced Human Error in Reconstructive Surgery

Reconstructive surgeries enabled by Mixed Reality with the use of HoloLens have proven to be very successful at the Imperial College at St. Mary’s Hospital, London. According to the team guided by Dr. Philip Pratt, Mixed Reality helps surgeons locate and reconnect major blood vessels. With HoloLens, surgeons are able to use holographic overlays to see the bones and identify the course of blood vessels which aids them in their surgery, improving the outcome for the patient. An article in The Times entitled Holograms to get surgeons under the skin of patients showed examples of a 41-year-old man and an 85-year-old woman on whom such reconstructive surgeries were performed successfully. 

3. Revolutionizing Surgery

In December 2017, Dr. Thomas Gregory undertook a live transplant surgery with the help of HoloLens. It helped him access the patient’s medical information and anatomical pictures in 3D during the surgery. Since HoloLens is a standalone computer worn like a helmet by the surgeon, his hands are free for surgery. Additionally, the use of microphones and sensors allows the surgeon to communicate with other surgeons in different parts of the world making collaboration easier. All these features, along with the simulations and information it can pull up, make Mixed Reality a valuable asset in improving surgical performance.

4. Improving the Patient Experience

Building trust through efficient communication is an important aspect of a doctor-patient relationship. Mixed Reality makes this possible in a more immersive way.  For example, in a recent interview with Sirko Pelzl, CEO and CTO of apoQlar, he spoke about Virtual Surgery Intelligence (VSI) and said: “physicians can use VSI to show patients their own MRI scans and explain the surgical procedure in visual detail. We were able to illustrate in a recent study how greatly patients appreciated this education and communication.”

Mixed Reality also helps in reducing response time and improving surgical accuracy, which contributes to the smooth and successful patient experience. For example, when the surgery is complicated or the patient is critical, diagnostic images with Mixed Reality can serve as a twin of the patient. This helps doctors discuss, plan, and walk through their treatment protocol, thus reducing response time in patient care.

Mixed Reality also gives doctors all the information they need about a patient and enables real-life simulations to help him in his decisions and actions. Commenting on a prototype application called “Cinematic Rendering for Surgery” Christian Zapf, head of the Syngo Business Line at Siemens Healthineers said, “The error rate dropped from 14.1 to 0.8 percent for surgeons in training and from 11.1 percent to 0.8 percent for qualified surgeons.”

https://www.fingent.com/insights/portfolio/future-communication-security-using-augmented-reality/

The Future of Mixed Reality

Mixed Reality has already made deep inroads, especially in medicine. It will continue to improve the quality of healthcare and medical training as it positively impacts the medical industry. Fingent has helped many clients build custom healthcare software solutions, which integrate applications with the latest technologies like Mixed Reality. Get in touch with us and let’s discuss how we can make Mixed Reality possible for you.

Patient-Generated Health Data – A Powerful Tool To Enhance Healthcare

Remember a time when patients would queue up in line with a big dossier in hand, waiting for their time to be examined by the doctor? Lengthy queues, paper-heavy records to be maintained, time wasted as doctors reacquaint themselves with the patient’s entire history – no more of all of that. Today, a patient wants to be involved in his care and he doesn’t want to be waiting around wasting precious time. With innovative health technologies, patient-generated health data is making that possible by enabling patient-centered, citizen-engaging care. 

Let us consider how improving patient care through technology is possible. We will also see how the use of information technology in healthcare is allowing the healthcare industry to deal with patients as valued customers, improving their experience. But, first of all, what is patient-generated health data?

Patient-Generated Health Data

Any valuable information a patient can garner about their health status is referred to as Patient-Generated Health Data [PGHD]. PGHD is much more than just a person’s health history with information on his symptoms, medication and treatment information. It also includes his biometric data, as well as information about his lifestyle choices. These records will provide a clearer picture of a patient’s actual health status, better than the patient can describe in his own words. 

The use of information technology in healthcare is making it possible for healthcare providers to understand their patients better and in making better medical decisions. It also aids patients in receiving an increased understanding of their health condition. The importance of health information technology in healthcare today cannot be over-emphasized.

How Does The Use Of Information Technology In Healthcare Help Healthcare Organizations?

Patient-generated health data can improve the quality of patient care. When integrated into clinical care, patient-generated health data enhance shared decision making and patient engagement. The use of information technology in healthcare can provide an assessment of the patient’s symptoms and well-being, preferences and values, and goals for healthcare. Here are a few specific benefits of the use of IT in healthcare:

1. Improves nurse-patient relationship

Low health literacy can strain the nurse-patient relationship. When a patient comes to appointments armed with their health research, the nurse-patient relationship improves. 

2. Clinical benefits 

PGHD plays an important role in assessing a person’s health and monitoring treatment effects. It connects patients and healthcare providers during a care encounter. PGHD can be used to monitor a person’s overall health and allows healthcare professionals to detect potential health dangers.

3. High-risk patients

Keeping a track of PGHD helps providers identify and treat high-risk patients at the earliest. Leveraging PGHD proves extremely valuable in chronic and acute care.

4. Patient engagement

Patients have ownership over their data and control on how and when that data is shared with their care team. They are empowered to contribute to their care and can share insights. It improves communication and contributes to shared decision-making. 

5. PGHD provides independence to seniors 

PGHD can be used in assisted living to mitigate the risk of falls. It gives confidence to the elderly for independent living and it improves adherence to complex medication plans. PGHD also alerts healthcare providers when required, avoiding the need for expensive assisted living facilities and nursing homes.

Fingent Technologies worked with NovitaCare, an early-stage healthcare startup, in setting up an online platform to enable easy administration, streamlined workflow for many healthcare services and HIPPA compliance. Improving patient and caregiver interactions, eliminating waste, enhancing accountability, and raising the quality of care were the main accomplishments of this tool.

Related Reading: Read more about the case study here.

Innovative Health Technologies To Help The Patient

Innovations in health technologies go beyond just PGHD. It includes various devices and systems designed to streamline healthcare operations, lower the costs and enhance the quality of care. Among the most promising healthcare technologies are Artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality, chat-bots and so on. Let us consider a few.

1. Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence with machine learning is proving to be essential for healthcare organizations. It is capable of reducing the risk of preventable medical situations in three ways. 

• • Reminders: It can provide automated reminders to help a patient, reminding him to take his medication within a certain time-frame.
  • Identify and alert: It helps to identify potentially dangerous situations and triggers alerts for the medical staff making timely medical intervention possible. 
  • Personalized dosage: Dosage recommendations are made depending on each patient’s body chemistry while considering environmental factors.  

2. Blockchain in Healthcare

Blockchain can create and maintain a transparent and tamper-proof transaction ledger. This technology could change the way huge healthcare sectors operate. Personal data collected in blockchain remains with the patient instead of being stored on servers, thus enhancing confidentiality.

3. Voice Search

According to research, 46% of Americans use voice-assistance on their mobile devices. The figures are not much different for the rest of the world. We can expect that soon many more would be inclined to search for health-related information using voice search. Since it is increasingly used, the healthcare industry is also making good use of voice search. This technology would be helpful to both patients and caregivers who try to locate hospitals or clinics either near their homes or offices. 

4. Chatbots 

Chatbots in healthcare provide various benefits. They assist with medication management, first-aid or in emergencies. Chatbots offer a personalized service to patients and caregivers.

5. Virtual Reality in Healthcare

Patients are often anxious about hospital stays and procedures. Virtual reality helps calm their nerves and improve the patient experience. 

6. mHealth Apps

Mobile applications provide patients with control over the options available to him. These apps can assist in making an appointment, uploading medical history or even checking into a hospital for medical care. Mobile apps ease the load of the non-medical staff at hospitals and reduce the patient’s waiting period thus reducing operational costs considerably. 

An online platform Encourage was developed to empower patients with information related to their healthcare and educational material about procedures and illnesses. The tool further helps doctors keep track of a patient’s progress, assign tasks, reminders and care plans for the patient. It also gives patients the ability to include people as their caretaker and manage their engagement with them and the doctors through a rewards system and more. 

Related Reading: Read more about the case of simplifies patient care here.

What is the Future of PGHD?

With no signs of slowing down, it is estimated that in a couple of years AI is expected to grow annually at the rate of 48%. Other technologies along with mobile apps help in communicating with patients even after they leave the healthcare facility. With such promising technologies, patient-generated health data will surely benefit patients and caregivers and aid healthcare organizations to provide better care. 

Yes, the partnership of healthcare organizations with technology is a match that brings out the best in each other. We can confidently look forward to this relationship growing and maturing in the days to come. To empower your healthcare organization with the budding technologies, get in touch with our experts now!

How Face Recognition Apps Are Defining The Future Of Competitive Industries?

There has been a lot of talk about Face Recognition Apps recently. It has received accolades for its use in enhancing security as well as flak over privacy concerns. Speculations aside, there is no denying that face recognition software has revolutionized the way we perceive technology. It is no longer a faraway concept as it finds a place in our pockets through mobile technology.

In this blog, we will look at the technology behind face recognition software, what makes it tick and how it has found application across industries.

What Is A Face Recognition App?

Face recognition is a biometric technology that creates a face print of an individual by mapping out his or her facial features mathematically. This face print is stored and used to compare a digital image of a person verifying their identity.

This mapping is done by identifying 80 nodal points on a human face. These nodal points are used to measure different variables of the face. The width of the forehead, the length of the nose, the shape of the eyes – these measurements are captured on a digital image of the person’s face and stored as a face print. Deep learning algorithms are then used to identify a person in comparison with the face print.

This technology has been used in various ways from automatic photo tagging by apps like Facebook for authentication and identification by Apple’s iPhone X. The way in which Apple has used this technology is interesting. Face ID technology, which allows users to unlock their phones using the stored face print, is designed with 3-D modeling. The software compares over 30,000 variables to fine-tune recognition capabilities. This face print or Face ID can be used as authentication for purchases done with Apple Pay and other Apple stores. Amazon Rekognition, Google Cloud Vision API and other image analysis APIs can be now used to add facial recognition capabilities to other applications.  

The inclusion of technologies like augmented reality, mixed reality and more have made face recognition software a powerful force. At Fingent, we developed a mixed reality application using Microsoft Hololens. This application helps in the identification of a person and also links the face print to the biodata of the person. It will also be able to capture images and compute similarities between the captured image and all the other images in a secure database.

Read More: The future of communication and security using augmented reality.

The Role of Face Recognition Apps in Safety and Protection

According to a Javelin Strategy and Research study, identity fraud hit a record high with 15.4 million U.S. Victims in 2016 and an increase of 16 percent from previous years. In a connected world where such vulnerabilities exist, face recognition software is proving to be an invaluable asset. The software is helping law enforcement and corporate to put a name to the faces of criminals who have been playing havoc with stolen identities. Some applications of face recognition software in ensuring safety are:

• Identity validation at ATMs and prevention of identity theft with photo IDs.
• Face recognition surveillance systems in schools to protect students from expelled students or parents who have been flagged as dangerous.
• Equipping law enforcement personnel with identification of criminals and contextual data to warn them of dangerous persons before they approach offenders.
• Automated facial recognition (known as AFR) helps in forensic investigations by identifying individuals on surveillance cameras and videos, as well as in recognition of dead/unconscious individuals at crime scenes.
• Protecting retailers from shoplifters by warning security personnel of known criminals with a record. It also helps them avoid potential violence in the store by warning them when dangerous criminals or disgruntled former employees enter.

How Various Industries Can Benefit from Face Recognition Apps

Apart from ensuring safety and prevention of identity theft, face recognition software has many commercial applications as well. Many organizations across industries are recognizing the vast potential of face recognition apps and exploring different ways to capitalize on its features. Let us look at the Healthcare and Retail industries as an example.

Healthcare

Healthcare is constantly making giant strides with technology and facial recognition is contributing in unexpected ways. Researchers from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in the United States have come up with a face recognition system, which can diagnose a rare genetic disease called DiGeorge syndrome. People with this syndrome exhibit particular facial anomalies, which give them characteristic expressions that can be detected by facial recognition software. Despite the many challenges associated with effective detection, the team has developed software with an accuracy of 96.6%.  

Another example of face detection software being used in healthcare is the facial recognition app developed by Listerine. This app enables a blind person to detect when somebody is smiling at them, by setting off vibrations when the face recognition app detects a smile. This helps the blind respond better in social situations, thus contributing to their quality of life.

Speaking about the further possibilities that technology can bring to healthcare, Christoffer Nellaker, of the Medical Research Foundation’s Functional Genomics Unit at Oxford says: “A doctor should in the future, anywhere in the world, be able to take a smartphone picture of a patient and run the computer analysis to quickly find out which genetic disorder the person might have”. This is already coming true with the help of face recognition.

Related Reading: Check out how modern healthcare is revolutionizing with automation.

Retail

Retailers have been using augmented reality to improve the customer experience for a while now. The retail giant Sephora has gone one step further and added a live 3D facial recognition feature to its Virtual Artist application. This enables a more accurate facial tracking and rendering, allowing users to virtually try on Sephora’s various products while they are moving in real time. Parham Aarabi, CEO of ModiFace, which is the developer of this function for Sephora says: “We believe the ability to see yourself with products can impact sales online … and thus the integration on Sephora will, based on our expectation, result in increased conversions and user engagement.” The goal with this move is to enable customers to try on their products in a fun and more interactive way. The accuracy enabled by this technology will go a long way in enhancing the customer’s experience and boosting sales.

By using face recognition software in making educated guesses about a potential customer’s gender, age, etc., big retail giants are optimizing their ad campaigns to specific target audiences. Such advertisements are more effective as they help deliver a targeted message that has a powerful effect on consumers. An example is the “Because I’m a Girl” campaign rolled out by children’s charity Plan the UK. The charity created bus billboards, which would scan the viewer’s face and display an ad depending on the viewer’s gender. This was done to highlight the plight of women who are denied rights based on their sex. Brands like Virgin Mobile, Nike and others have also used face recognition software to create a more immersive ad experience for their customers.

Related Reading: Find top ways to leverage smart IT solutions for your retail business. 

Implementing Face Recognition Technology

Face recognition software is closer to home than we think, and it is apt to look at ways in which your company can capitalize on its capabilities. Talk to us and let’s discuss how.