Tag: healthcare industry
Over the next three years, 66% of healthcare executives are planning to increase their investment in digital twin, states a recent digital health technology report. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital twin technology has been playing a key role in aiding healthcare professionals. Digital twin is used to optimize the usage of ventilators for critical patients, support contactless temperature scanning, reduce person-to-person contact, trial drugs, and prevent the risk of disease transmission. In the post-COVID-19 era too, medical researchers can leverage digital twins to analyze the existing data and study the impact caused on the human body.
In this blog, we’ll take you through what is digital twin technology and how it’s creating an impact in the healthcare industry? Let’s checkout!
The Role of Digital Twin in Healthcare
Digital twin technology allows you to replicate the physical world in a digital layout. A digital twin is a virtual model of a device, object, or process that operates in real-time to update data when changes are made. Researchers rely on digital twins to test new scenarios in real-life environments with improved safety and cost-effectiveness. In the past, the application of digital twins was limited to sectors such as industrial engineering and manufacturing. It was economically unviable to build digital twins in other fields like healthcare and education. The proliferation and affordability of innovative technologies such as IoT, AI, ML, AR, VR, and XR are accelerating the adoption of digital twins in healthcare.
Read more: The Application and Impact of Information Technology in Healthcare
The healthcare industry is constantly striving to enhance patient outcomes, reduce operating costs, and address unforeseen medical crises effectively. The US-based Digital Twin Consortium observes that digital twin technology has the potential to improve patient turnaround, reduce patient wait times, optimize equipment utilization, cut staffing expenses, and minimize bed shortages. It helps personalize medicines based on real-time data and improve the operational efficiency and performance of healthcare organizations by identifying workflow bottlenecks and scheduling optimization.
Top 5 Applications of Digital Twin in Healthcare
Digital twins allow the creation of handy virtual models and medical simulations based on the data gathered from wearable devices, patient records, drugs and pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, and other healthcare departments. This helps streamline the overall clinical and caregiving processes. Listed here are the top five applications of medical digital twins:
1. Customize treatments and drug administration
Digital twins allow physicians, hospitals, and clinics to deliver patient-centric care by leveraging precision medicine. Data stored in healthcare mobile apps, medical software, wearables, fitness trackers, and other medical devices can be captured into digital twins which enables doctors and front-line health workers to address patients with persistent or critical conditions. For example, combining AI-powered anatomical analysis with the virtual model of a patient’s heart helps understand the progression of heart diseases over time. It enables medical researchers to identify how the patient will respond to new drugs, treatments, or surgical intercessions. Digital twin experiments are also conducted to analyze the progression of neurogenerative ailments such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
2. Advance surgical procedure planning
Digital twin technology enables brain and heart surgeons to run virtual simulations of surgical procedures prior to executing complex surgeries. Testing pre-operative and post-operative surgical procedures and outcomes on a digital replica of human body parts reduces the risk of hampering human health. Advanced, patient-specific computational models of human organs help plan and augment complex surgical interventions with improved precision and care.
Read more: How Virtual Reality Benefits Autistic Patients
3. Enhance caregivers’ efficiency and experience
Digital twins support caregivers to gain a consolidated view of patient data scattered across various medical applications, physicians, and specialists. Technologies like Natural Language Processing (NLP) help infer the data and summarize the medical history of each patient. Capturing patient-specific information onto your medical dashboard throws better light into the context of each patient. This improves your clinical decision-making ability.
Digital twin model of a hospital allows you to measure the impact of organizational changes. For instance, you can use the virtual model to test new operational strategies, care delivery programs, staffing rotation, appointment scheduling, hospital bed facilities, surgical schedules, and so on. This helps redesign your organization’s workflow, improve coordination among various departments, and reduce the treatment window.
Case Study: How Fingent’s healthcare technology solution helped improve collaboration between doctors, patients, and caregivers
4. Test new medical devices and drugs
Federal drug regulators such as the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) agency as well as the European Medicines Agency (EMA) propose using AI algorithms to determine the safety and effectiveness of pilot drugs. Digital twins can simulate the health traits of a larger number of patients which helps analyze how a drug’s usage will impact a wider population. Using several inclusion and exclusion paradigms, AI helps pace up drug trials by identifying the willingness and availability of patients. Digital twins can also mitigate the harmful impact of experimental drugs and reduce the number of patients who need to undergo real-world testing.
It takes more than $2 billion to manufacture and launch a new drug into the market. Trial phase alone costs heavily and over 90% of treatments fail during this period. Capitalizing on technologies like machine learning and computational modeling helps expedite the early stages of drug design, development, and safety evaluation. Digital twins integrate the test data across various samples to give a holistic picture of the drug’s effect on patients.
5. Improve supply chain flexibility
The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic weakened our supply chains due to the lockdowns and transportation bans across various countries. This resulted in the shortage of essential healthcare supplies. Digital twins allow healthcare organizations to create robust contingency plans to address such unpredicted events, increase bed capacity, manage emergencies during shutdowns or shortages, offer remote patient care, and design and construct new medical facilities to reach out to more patients. Hospitals, labs, and healthcare establishments can remodel their supply chain relationships to create alternative plans, improve collaboration with suppliers, and team up with authorities to plan and negotiate.
Read more: Why is it better to outsource custom healthcare software development
Make The Most of Digital Twins with Fingent
Healthcare application development experts at Fingent help you overcome the hurdles that defer digital twin adoption such as data gathering, quality of clinical trial datasets, and information security and privacy. We develop custom healthcare apps leveraging technologies such as VR, AI, ML, and IoT that enable you to virtually test innovations and deliver exceptional patient care. These solutions can be tailored to optimize both your clinical and operational functions. For instance, we help you develop virtual simulators for ACLS (Advanced Cardiac Life Support System), accident trauma care standard operating procedure, an orthopedic or cardiac surgical procedure involving complex tools, and Neo-natal Resuscitation Simulator (GOLDEN MINUTE PROTOCOL).
Read more: How Virtual Reality Improves the Standards of Medical Education and Training
Besides VR, healthcare providers can benefit from various customizable solutions such as connected healthcare apps powered by IoT, integrated medical dashboard software, remote patient monitoring systems, and healthcare analytics applications. Improve your organization’s technology ecosystem with Fingent top software development company. Contact us to design digital twins and drive innovation.
How Can Custom-Made Software Provide Superior Customer Service In The Healthcare Industry?
Healthcare is a vast customer service industry that is trying to improve patient health and healthcare processes. This patient-centric approach has evolved, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. Virtual consultations and telemedicine practices have increased rapidly in the last two years. A report by PwC on global healthcare trends reports, 91% of consumers who used virtual clinical care in the past would do so in the future. Additionally, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows an increase of 154% in the use of telehealth in March 2020 compared to the same period in 2019.
As patients are demanding much more streamlined and seamless access to healthcare, most organizations are trying to get rid of old conventional systems that limit performance. Today, patients seek personalized treatment. That’s where custom-made software comes into the picture.
Read more: Is Augmented Reality the future of HealthCare?
Custom software is built to cater to the specific needs of the users. They intend to solve unique challenges. Emerging technologies have proved an immense benefit to the healthcare sector. When these technologies are integrated together they bring various benefits to doctors, patients, medical organizations, and the entire healthcare industry.
A few commonly known custom software solutions for healthcare are:
- Electronic Health Record (EHR)
- Hospital Management Systems
- Telemedicine
- Electronic Prescriptions System
- Appointment Scheduling
- Medical Equipment Management
- Medical Research
In this blog, we will further dig into how custom-made software provides superior customer service in the healthcare industry.
How is custom-made software boosting patient care?
1. Improved personalized patient services
Data-driven patient services are adding value to patient care. Data that is recorded, transmitted, and easily available is helping improve doctor-patient interactions. This allows healthcare organizations to personalize their patient services. Additionally, they can manage their interactions with thousands of patients without the need for administrative overhead.
2. Improved communication and organization
With custom-made software, different departments can communicate easily and improve the organizational culture of hospitals. Departments can share information without the need for manual entries and documentation. Also, patients can visit any department without carrying any document along as the information is already available electronically with the hospital.
3. Improved growth
Custom software digitally transforms the traditional medical record maintenance system and makes it paper-free. The Electronic Medical Record (EMR) can store data of thousands of patients securely host on the cloud. This decreases operating costs and eventually increases the ROI. Thus, custom software plays a pivotal role in improving business growth.
4. Integrated system
Custom-made software integrates different workflows that your organization requires daily. Custom software can synchronize several simple and complex processes such as finance, OPD, human resources, etc., in a single place. This helps reduce workplace stress and allows healthcare providers to invest more time in patient care.
Read more: Choosing Prescriptive Analytics over Predictive Analytics in Healthcare!
Why is Customer Service a priority in Healthcare?
Health issues can be stressful emotionally as well as financially. When engaging with healthcare organizations, most patients expect personal care in addition to the treatment. Thus, the more personalized the care, treatment, and engagement with patients, the more likely it is to have happy customers.
How can custom-made software improve customer service?
1. Scheduling appointments
Using custom-made software, healthcare organizations can improve the scheduling experience by reducing wait times and the time taken to capture patient data. It can also help provide appointment confirmations and reminders via text message or email prior to the appointment.
Booking appointments is the most elementary feature in most healthcare apps.
2. Service delivery experience
Custom-made software can provide healthcare practitioners with complete access to patient records health history along with diagnostic tools and systems. In addition, healthcare practitioners can use digital tools to record treatment notes, patient recommendations, queries, and diagnosis notes while interacting with the patient. This helps provide patients with tailor-made experiences and improve customer service in general.
3. Post-appointment follow-up
Healthcare practitioners can use auto-trigger feedback forms that allow patients to rate their experience, which will enable them to measure patient satisfaction. Doing so will improve customer engagement and foster a long-term relationship with patients.
Read more: Custom Healthcare Software Development: Why Is It Better To Outsource It?
How Fingent can help your healthcare organization improve patient care?
Whether your healthcare business is small or big, a custom healthcare solution is the only way to move ahead in the game and ensure quality and effective patient care services. Fingent is a trusted partner and has been proving efficiency in custom-made healthcare solutions for years. Here are some of Fingent’s success stories in enabling healthcare organizations to drive unique and streamlined customer experiences.
#1 A Custom Solution To Simplify Patient Care
Miscommunication between doctors, patients, and healthcare providers can turn life-threatening. That’s why it’s highly imperative that communications are streamlined. Although this itself could be a challenge!
That’s why Fingent helped develop a simplified patient-care solution, Encourage, that promotes effective communications amongst the various players in the healthcare ecosystem. A doctor can keep track of patients’ progress, assign tasks, and set reminders and care plans, as part of the patients’ profile. Patients can also get involved and also add selected caretakers to the care plan. The solution not just helps streamline communication, but also helps improve patient engagement and allows to better educate patients and families on various treatments.
Know more on how Encourage turned an apt custom software solution for simplified patient care!
#2 Healthcare Service Platform
Providing the right healthcare guidance, knowledge, or tools to the patients or their families can be time-consuming. Plus, it’s also imperative that the information shared is confidential and extremely accurate.
To streamline and solve such challenges in patient engagement and collaboration, Fingent helped develop an online platform, NovitaCare, that helps engage patients, providers, researchers, and NGOs to collaborate online and facilitate quality care. The solution equips many early-stage healthcare start-ups to streamline their workflow, improve patient-caregiver and caregiver-patient interactions, eliminate wastage, improve accountability and raise patient care quality.
Learn more on how NovitaCare turned into a top-notch solution for healthcare patient management.
#3 Improving Visibility on Hospital Performances with Data Visualization
It is vital for patients to choose the best hospitals and healthcare centers based on their performances. NHS wanted to create a platform that streamlined this search with metrics that compared hospital performances to showcase the best and those with good success rates.
Fingent designed an application that utilized data inputs from NHS to create interactive visuals and graphs to compare hospital performances. The solution drills down the minute of details to analyze hospitals across various parameters to deliver financial, clinical, and geographical insights, highlighting key performance issues and indicators.
Read more on how NHS used Fingent’s data visualization capabilities to identify the best-performing healthcare centers.
#4 Cutting-edge Web Application for Health Insurance Decision-makers
In partnership with Casenet’s ASG, Fingent helped simplify TruCare Insights, a nimble PHM platform that aids healthcare payer organizations.
Casenet’s Advanced solution group wanted to create an application that provides action-oriented dashboards and management ease to healthcare payer organizations. The platform, TrueCare did not provide integrated reporting options, and maintaining reports and reconciling them required excessive manual labor. Thus, Fingent helped the team build a highly scalable web application, with best-in-class UI/UX design, to seamlessly integrate the complex workflows of TrueCare, and manage 10 mn+ data records using custom filters.
Know more on how helping Casenet simplify their platform TrueCare streamlined their workflow and management!
Using our proven strategies, Fingent top software development company has helped many healthcare organizations and non-profit healthcare sectors boost performance and bring innovative ideas to life. Our experts help provide external perspective, agility, and understanding needed for real innovations. With us, you can get access to skilled software development professionals and all the ancillary roles to develop technology solutions that are apt and unique to your challenges. Additionally, we provide the best-in-class support during and after custom software development.
To know more about how we can help you deploy the top technologies for improved healthcare services, connect with us today!
With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare industry is spiraling at an unexpected speed and is continuously inventing healthcare solutions to drive streamlined operations. Medical organizations are now largely depending on custom healthcare software solutions to maintain medical history, electronic health records, patient’s personal information, and other medical data to provide better patient care and health services. This blog will take you through why your healthcare organization needs to invest in custom healthcare software development, and how it’s beneficial to outsource it!
What is custom healthcare software development?
Today, healthcare is driven by technological innovations such as big data, electronic patient record systems, interoperability, and machine learning. The need for this is to provide better patient experiences and improve health outcomes. To achieve this, there is a need for professionally designed tools and solutions that can help healthcare providers to deliver patient-first and cost-effective care.
Custom healthcare software development is the process of creating web or mobile apps for medical professionals so they can interact with patients better, use medical data analytics, and access patient health records.
Examples of how custom software development has transformed the healthcare industry include;
- Tools such as Hospital Management Systems (HMS) or Hospital Information System (HIS) are comprehensive integrated solutions that handle different aspects of hospital or clinic’s workflow efficiently.
- An Electronic Health Record (EHR) system collects a patient’s data and history and stores it in a digital format that makes sharing across different healthcare systems easy.
- Mobile apps and wearable devices are serving several health aspects.
Read more: Augmented Reality in Healthcare: The Industry Future!
Key benefits of custom healthcare software
1. Tailor-made solution
Software solutions built specifically catering to your organizational needs help deliver better customer services. Especially when it concerns providing patient-care services, it is always recommended to invest in custom or tailormade solutions. An off-the-shelf or packaged solution, in comparison to a custom software solution, may or may not be able to meet your organization’s requirements or even work well within a specific type of facility. A custom software solution will help solve your business-specific complexes and will help meet your business goals.
2. Streamline processes
Undoubtedly, technology enables us to get our work done efficiently and more accurately. A custom software solution can have a far-reaching impact. It frees your staff to allow them to focus on patient care.
3. Personalized care
Today, patients want to understand their health on their own and expect personalized services from their healthcare provider. This is why there is an increasing demand for telemedicine, at-home testing kits, and health apps.
4. Enhanced security
Custom healthcare software solutions are built in compliance with the industry standards and guarantee that personal data stays secure and confidential. An app must comply with Open Web Application Security Project standards and other certifications, to be approved.
When it comes to creating custom healthcare software, organizations can;
- Leverage any open-source platform to create a customizable solution without the need for coding
- Outsource the entire custom software development process to a reliable development agency.
Read more: Why Healthcare Prefers Prescriptive Analytics Over Predictive Analytics
Advantages of outsourcing healthcare software development
1. Economical and effective
By outsourcing to a third-party offshore company, you can save a lot of costs. It helps save largely on the cost of developing application infrastructure, recruiting professionals, training the recruits, and deployment and pre-installation set-up costs. Most service providers use advanced technology that would fit your budget.
2. Experienced team
While some projects require a large pool of software developers others may not. In such cases, it may be difficult to hire software developers and then relieve them after completing the work as it involves a huge cost to hire, set up infrastructure, and team. Therefore, outsourcing custom healthcare software development gives you the leeway to scale up or down resources as per your project requirements.
3. Agile and scalable solutions
In-house healthcare developers are usually burdened with several other tasks which cause them to lose focus and compromise on the delivery of the app. Collaborating with a third-party agency will provide you with the flexibility of managing the resources and whenever you need them. This will also help you include scalable software developers to build an app that is more agile and consistent.
4. Quick time to market
Outsourcing the custom development task will give you access to experts from healthcare domains to develop your applications. This will ensure your app be superior,well-grained, and reach the market faster so patients can be treated faster.
5. Increased productivity
As offshore developers are qualified and talented enough to develop your app, you won’t have to burden them with briefings and preparations. This will allow you to focus on improving the critical and core healthcare services of your organization thus improving the results significantly.
Read more: Healthcare Analytics Reaches New Heights with SAP HANA
Cost of outsourcing custom healthcare software development
When it comes to the healthcare industry, the average cost of an experienced developer is not cheap. That is why 59% of global companies outsource software development. While the costs vary from country to country, you will still save about 40-70% of the total costs. For example, the average hourly cost for a software developer in the US is $65–$130 per hour while the hourly cost of offshore developers in Asia and Africa is $20–45.
Why choose Fingent?
If you need custom healthcare software for your organization, Fingent top custom software development company is your trusted partner.
- We have a pool of experienced and skilled developers who can help you identify the right solution for your business complexities.
- Our agile methodology of development ensures client involvement at every stage so that the solution is scalable, cost-effective, as well as caters to specific client requirements.
- We offer transparent offshore development services in terms of overhead costs and recruitment fees.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for custom healthcare software development cannot be denied. Our developers are not only affordable but can add much value in terms of talent and skill to your organization. Connect with our experts today!
Top Healthcare Digitalization Trends To Look For In The New Normal
Healthcare digitalization is reshaping the way we interact with healthcare professionals, share medical data or make decisions related to treatment and outcomes. There are plenty of examples that substantiate the digitalization of healthcare today, such as Artificial Intelligence-powered medical devices, telemedicine, blockchain, remote-patient monitoring, and electronic health records.
The main aim of healthcare innovation is to streamline the medical professionals’ work, optimize medical software systems, reduce human errors, improve patient outcomes, and lower costs through integrated web and mobile experiences.
Read more: The Application and Impact of Information Technology in Healthcare
Let’s look at the state of healthcare digitalization in 2024 and beyond:
1. On-demand Healthcare Will Grow
With the COVID-19 pandemic restricting many people to remain indoors, more and more patients seek on-demand healthcare. It is convenient as it helps patients seek guidance at their own time and from anywhere they need it.
DMN3 reveals that patients obtain online medical information primarily for the following reasons:
- 77% for booking medical appointments
- 47% for searching information about doctors and healthcare professionals
- 38% for searching information about hospitals and medical facilities
That said, on-demand healthcare is rising due to the growth of the gig economy. Here, freelance professionals from various industries hire themselves out per job or ‘gig’ instead of sticking to one company.
Read more: Patient Engagement Platforms: 7 Must-have Features
Many online healthcare marketplaces link doctors directly with short-term tasks, making it easier for physicians to deliver patient care in specific circumstances based on their expertise and schedule. Simply put, doctors are becoming on-demand healthcare providers to meet the changing needs of their patients in a better way.
2. Big Data Will Be Used To Improve Healthcare Management
Big data is the information gathered from various platforms such as eCommerce, social media, online transactions, and financial transactions. It helps identify patterns and trends for future use.
Read more: 5 Ways Big Data is Changing the Healthcare Industry
For healthcare, big data offers benefits such as:
- Reduced medication errors: Patient record analysis allows the healthcare software to flag any inconsistencies between a patient’s health and drug prescriptions. This alerts the health professionals and patients in case there is a potential risk of a medication error.
- Simplifying preventive care: Many recurring patients stepping into emergency rooms are “frequent flyers.” These frequent flyers account for up to 28% of clinical visits. Big data analysis helps identify these recurring patients and create preventive plans to keep them from returning.
- Improved staffing: Using big data’s predictive analysis, hospitals and clinics can estimate future admission rates enabling these facilities to allocate proper staff to deal with the patient. This will help save money and reduce emergency room waiting time, especially when a facility is understaffed.
Case Study: How did a data analytics solution help NHS gain financial, clinical, and geographical insights to improve visibility over their KPIs? Read Now!
Big data analytics, visualization, and insights generation can improve healthcare operations management and transform the patient experience.
3. Virtual Reality Will Transform Medical Training & Care Delivery Models
Virtual Reality is one of the most outstanding healthcare digitalization trends that change the way patients are diagnosed, and medical residents are trained.
- VR in medical diagnosis & treatments: VR is increasingly used in treatment segments in healthcare, such as patient education, robotic surgery, physical and psychological therapy, etc. For instance, medical professionals can use VR to construct a 360° patient-specific video detailing how the surgery will help the patient cure and the consequent results. Virtual Reality has been found effective in treating anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and stroke.
Case Study: Find how Fingent developed a unique mixed reality application for a leading university that enables users to identify people using facial recognition. Download Now!
- VR for medical training: Other uses of VR technology include doctors and medical residents using VR simulations to hone their skills (learning in near-real situations) and safely plan complicated surgeries. In addition, VR headsets are used post-surgery to encourage patients to exercise and follow physiotherapies. The technology also enables autistic children to learn and navigate the world.
- Growth of VR in the medical field: From startups to established pharma companies, everyone recognizes the role of VR in healthcare. Experts estimate that by 2025 the global virtual and augmented reality in healthcare will reach $5.1 billion market value. So, if you’re a healthcare company wanting to improve your digital marketing strategy, you should consider investing in VR.
Read more: How Virtual Reality Improves The Standards Of Medical Education And Training
Virtual Reality technology offers a powerful communication channel that allows you to understand customers’ needs better and virtually engage them with your products and services.
4. Wearable Medical Devices Will Enjoy A Wider Market
Another major healthcare digitalization trend is companies collecting their health data from medical devices such as wearables. Previously, most people would check in with their doctors only when something went wrong and were used to undergoing physical check-ups once a year. However, technology is changing that. Today, people highly focus on preventive maintenance and are interested in knowing about their health status frequently. This trend forces several healthcare companies to invest in wearable technology devices that allow patients or family members to track health vitals and seek medical aid when needed. Wearable medical devices enable up-to-date monitoring of high-risk patients and determine the likelihood of any severe health risk.
Experts estimate that the wearable medical device market value will cross USD 27,200 mn by 2023.
Following are some of the widely used wearable devices:
- Exercise trackers (Google Fit, Fitbit, etc.)
- Heart rate sensors (Samsung Heart Rate Sensor, Pulse Sensor, etc.)
- Sweat meters: to monitor blood sugar levels of diabetics
- Oximeters: to monitor the amount of oxygen carried in the blood
Wearable devices in healthcare offer the following benefits:
- Personalized healthcare experience: Medical devices help patients improve their health and give them a sense of ownership regarding personal healthcare management.
- Insurance pricing: Wearable devices provide insurers with insights that enable them to rate a patient’s risk for illness more accurately.
- Insurance incentives: Wearable devices allow patients to take preventive measures to improve their health. Such patients are more likely to obtain lower insurance premiums.
- Gamification opportunities: Fitness watches can help create competitive goals for users to achieve through diet, nutrition, and exercise.
Case Study: Read more about how Fingent helped create a fitness Regimen app for trainers.
5. Healthcare AI Investments Will Increase
By 2025, the healthcare AI-enabled tools market is expected to exceed $34 billion globally. This indicates that healthcare AI investments will peak soon as Artificial Intelligence is set to transform various segments in medicine.
AI-powered chatbots and virtual health assistants fulfill many roles in the healthcare industry, such as customer service representatives, diagnostic tools, or even therapists. Hence AI in healthcare is gaining immense popularity. According to a report published by MarketsandMarkets, the global healthcare chatbots market is estimated to reach $314.3 million by 2023.
Read more: 5 Leading Chatbot Use Cases Explained with Real-life Examples
That said, we can witness the real power of AI in diverse areas such as medical imaging, drug discovery, precision medicine, and genomics. For example, the first-ever drug designed by AI is showing some promise to help patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. The AI-made drug molecule, DSP-1181, is in clinical trials currently. Researchers and scientists expect that the use of AI will make drug development faster and more efficient.
Overall, AI is projected to bring USD 150 billion by 2026 in annual savings for the US healthcare economy. As start-ups are lapping up the opportunity, the number of active AI start-ups has increased 14 times since 2000.
Why Keep A Close Eye On These Healthcare Digitalization Trends
These five healthcare digitalization trends will spill over in the future as the industry will innovate and adapt to meet the patients’ demands. As a result, organizations that embrace healthcare digitalization will see dividends sooner.
Fingent top custom software development company, helps you navigate the digital healthcare space and adapt to the ‘Next Normal’ with our transformative experiences. Our custom healthcare software solutions have helped many of the leading healthcare providers worldwide. Contact us to learn more about how your healthcare organization or clinic can leverage healthcare digitalization effectively.
Technologies that help optimize revenue and performance of your medical practice
There’s no denying that revenue is essential for any business. Sustained revenue flow keeps the employees paid, leaves the doors open, and the patrons happy. It is the same for medical practice as well. However, it can be challenging to optimize medical practice revenue and increase avenues to bring in more money. It is crucial to find strategies that the medical practice can maintain over time to ensure a steady cash inflow.
Additionally, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to influence patient behaviors, it is pushing healthcare practices across the globe to re-evaluate their business operations and look for solutions that emphasize clinical efficiencies, improve patient revenue cycle management along with enhanced reporting and analytics tools.
Apart from the challenges related to the patient intake process during the pandemic, healthcare providers also have had to meet the sudden demand for virtual care by embracing digital healthcare technologies. Advanced technology in healthcare helps automate major processes, facilitate patient engagement efforts, and improve financial stability.
In this article, we share tips to optimize the revenue of your medical practice.
1. Robust financial management
Strong finance is the foundation of every business. You must consider what money is going out in the form of overhead costs, payroll, and miscellaneous expenses. Look for ways to cut unnecessary expenditures and save your practice some money.
There are chances that you are spending on something unnecessary at your practice or experiencing a small ROI due to a huge yet incompetent investment. If a service is not bringing you a good ROI, you should remove it. To overcome these issues, ensure you have a robust revenue cycle management system in place.
Custom RCM systems help improve the administrative and clinical functions associated with claims processing payments and revenue generation. The RCM system also facilitates the financial processes of identification, management, and collection between patients and providers. RCM helps you optimize your revenue cycle at all the points of the financial process. This enables you to collect and increase revenue whenever and wherever you should.
2. Leverage healthcare information technology
While the initial cost and ongoing investment may vary based on your practice, most of the following technological investments will help you save money and increase your revenue over time.
Read more: 7 Major Impacts of Technology in Healthcare
Example 1: Telehealth
Technologies like telehealth offer safer alternatives to in-person visits. With the ongoing pandemic, this technology helps provide safe care by connecting via virtual video visits. If your practice can allot for more appointments, then telehealth allows for more visits throughout your day.
Additionally, patient portals, self-check kiosks, and QR codes help reduce the risks of exposure and increase scheduling flexibility and clinical availability. Remote patient monitoring (RPM) helps bring about organizational resilience and stabilizes patient outcomes with better and safer alternatives to in-person visits.
Example 2: Appointment Management Systems
Most medical practices lose revenue due to no-shows, missed appointments, or late cancellations. Appointment management systems ensure that patients are notified well ahead of their appointment times. This will eventually provide your practice with a better chance of fulfilling appointment times and retaining revenue. It will also improve patient trust and credibility and allow your medical staff to stay organized at work.
Example 3: Practice Management System
This system includes all your appointment scheduling, billing, patient registration, claims processing, clearinghouse integration, and more. So, investing in an intelligent practice management system can bring billing in-house and retain previously claimed revenue from outsourcing.
Read more: Digital Tools For The Future Of Healthcare Providers
3. Intuitive reporting and automation
An Electronic Health Record(EHR) system includes an array of innovative tools that can significantly impact your practice’s productivity and profitability. The EHR technology should also have tools that offer flexible functionality and interactive engagement in addition to simple record keeping so that you can focus more on patient care and waste less time on troubleshooting staff errors or reconfiguring documentation notes.
Additionally, automated workflows, comprehensive reporting features, and insightful productivity metrics help simplify your practice’s workload and streamline task management. Picklists allow you to create templates, line-item defaults and define column choices so that information is readily available and easily accessible.
4. Optimize your medical billing
To maximize your medical practice’s revenue, you must include efficient and personalized medical billing software. It allows you to optimize the bills according to the prevalent industry standards. Most practices bill patients at allowable lower levels to avoid being audited. While you may not get audited, the practice leaves behind a lot of money. So, when you provide clinical service, make sure to document it properly and bill customers appropriately. Medical billing software makes auditing easy and relieves your admins from revenue management challenges. The software also ensures that your billing and coding staff are not making mistakes, leading to significant claims denial.
If claims denials, coding errors, or any other billing issues keep your practice from optimizing the income, you may consider building customized software to handle your organization’s specific challenges. Fingent specializes in developing customized medical billing software and healthcare application platforms by working closely with your medical practice. It allows you to lower denial rates, reduce errors, and streamline your revenue cycle.
5. Security and compliance
When it comes to healthcare, efficiency matters not just at the surface level but in every single aspect of treatment, including financing, scheduling, and reporting. To ensure your EHR can keep up with the regular system, it should include an educational database that allows providers to quickly train their staff and give the patient access to explanatory articles and videos. Keeping these resources available will help bring about positive outcomes and hassle-free software maintenance. Fingent offers custom software development, testing, implementation, maintenance, and support services for healthcare service providers. We’ve partnered with organizations like NHS to help them improve clinical process management using technology.
While compliance laws ensure patient health information (PHI) and overall safety of practice operations, you must make cybersecurity a top priority. This is especially true now with the shift to working remotely. Employees are more prone to hacker’s attempts to cease connectivity and steal confidential data. To overcome this, you must use virtual private networks (VPN) and reliable firewall software to safeguard vital business information. Our network security and IT infrastructure management services ensure that your business-critical assets are protected from cyber threats, and your proprietary information is protected 24/7.
Read more: The Application and Impact of Information Technology in Healthcare
Advanced technology in healthcare has helped providers choose and select a system that benefits their business. For example, medical billing software, revenue cycle management, appointment management, and patient engagement systems are a few solutions that providers should consider when employing an EHR solution. Healthcare technology improves patient resolutions, avoids preventable errors, and expands clinical availability.
Practice is a step ahead of theory. Our healthcare IT system developers follow this rule of thumb. Connect with our team to learn more about the technologies you can adopt to gain business benefits and significant cost savings.
How is AI Transforming Various Industry Sectors?
From Siri to self-driving cars, Artificial Intelligence has been breaking into new realms, including industries that are late to adopt technology or that heavily rely on manual labor. Gartner predicts that by 2020, AI will produce more jobs than it displaces. By 2022, one in five workers engaged in mostly non-routine tasks will rely on AI to do a job.
The future of AI only looks bright!
According to experts, AI and the future of work will amplify human efficiency and productivity. AI may match or even surpass human intelligence and capabilities on tasks related to pattern recognition, complex decision making, sophisticated analytics, language translation, reasoning and learning, and speech recognition.
This article discusses how five major industries are benefiting from AI and its innovations.
1. Healthcare
No surprises here. AI in healthcare always comes first on the list. From doctors, surgeons, nurses to desk receptionists at clinics, Artificial Intelligence is enabling process automation across the healthcare community and ecosystem.
AI tools enable medical professionals to diagnose symptoms, identify trends, analyze data or information that would predispose a person to a particular disease.
AI-powered bots assist surgeons with heart, thoracic, and colorectal surgeries. Using bots for surgeries helps lower the risk of infection and blood loss, reduce pain, ensure higher accuracy, shorten hospital stays, and expedite recovery. Digitized health records (EHRs) help patients access their information on a shared online health portal.
Along with other technologies, Artificial Intelligence is being widely used in the ongoing fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote patient monitoring using AI-powered medical equipment or devices help doctors maintain a safe distance from the patients, while offering treatment. The massive amounts of data generated every second in the field of medicine can be utilized effectively to continuously train AI systems through which these systems acquire the capabilities to generate insights that can aid medical researchers.
Read more: How Emerging Technology is Transforming the Healthcare Industry?
The future of AI in healthcare could include everything from answering the phone to interpreting radiology images, and designing therapeutic drugs.
2. Manufacturing
AI plays a key role in helping achieve better productivity, efficiency, and visibility across manufacturing operations. AI systems can transform the way organizations run their production lines, enhance human capabilities, garner real-time insights, and facilitate the design and product innovation.
Read more: Digital Transformation in Manufacturing
Following are some of the ways by which AI impacts the manufacturing sector:
- AI systems help monitor every stage of the production cycle and machine learning algorithms can be used to predict the fill rate, thereby optimizing the manufacturing processes and production planning.
- Small, lightweight “cobots” help create safer working environments. Manufacturers can adopt robotics to perform dangerous jobs, thus sparing their employees for crucial tasks, thereby avoiding occupational health hazards. Cobots are considerably less expensive and easy to program than the usual industrial robots. Soon, machine learning algorithms can improve their capabilities and help the cobots take instructions from humans and interact with them in a better way.
Read more: What Are Cobots and How Can They Benefit Industries?
- Predictive maintenance helps companies understand when machines need to be attended and serviced. Using machine learning, predictive maintenance can generate valuable data that helps prevent unplanned downtime. Sensors and advanced analytics in manufacturing equipment allow manufacturers to respond to alerts and resolve machine issues on time.
- Engineers or designers can input design goals and other parameters into generative design software (a program that generates several outputs to meet specific criteria) to explore better designs. Using machine learning, designers can learn from each iteration and understand what works and what does not.
3. Finance
According to a report by Business Insider Intelligence, about 75% of bank respondents with assets worth over $100 billion said that they are using AI technologies compared to the 46% of banks with assets less than $100 billion.
As much as $199 bn is saved for the front office and $217 bn for the middle office. AI technologies in banking can help generate over $250 billion in value. Considering the significant savings opportunities, more and more companies are implementing AI. Simply put, AI helps financial services companies mitigate risk, reduce overheads, and generate more revenue.
4. Education
Thanks to the numerous AI applications, the academic world is becoming more personalized. Today, a student can access study materials easily through computers and smart devices. AI helps automate administrative chores and minimizes the time required to complete complex tasks thereby allowing teachers to spend more time with each student.
Teachers can assess both multiple choice tests as well as written responses easily. Robots are helping create smart content such as video lectures and simulations as well as digitized textbooks that can be customized to the learning requirements. Along with the learning aids, these digitized interfaces help students of all academic ages and grades.
There is also a rising interest towards smart campus initiatives. A smart campus is a physical or digital set-up in which humans and technology- based systems come together to create and deliver automated experiences across higher education institutions.
AI is eliminating the boundaries of learning regardless of the physical locations. Today, students can learn any course from anywhere across the globe, at any time. AI-powered education helps nurture the fundamental IT skills of students and soon, there will be a wide range of highly interactive and personalized courses available online.
5. Retail
The retail and e-commerce industry has huge volumes of customer information, sales forecasting, stock and inventory to be tracked. Artificial Intelligence helps simplify data management to a large extent. For example, while searching for a product on an e-commerce application, AI recommends similar items according to your budget, color preference, purchase history, browsing data, online behavior, etc.
Cart abandonment is a common issue in the e-commerce industry which occurs when a customer adds items to their shopping cart but does not purchase them. With the help of chatbots and predictive analysts, the likelihood of cart abandonment can be reduced. Chatbots can remind your customer of the items left in their cart before they choose to navigate away.
Previously, people had to rely on the FAQ section of the website to get their questions answered. However, this included unchangeable questions and static answers and most customers were not satisfied with the answers. Today, however, it is changing. A chatbot agent can respond to questions using Natural Language Processing or NLP in a much better way and ensure that potential customers don’t abandon your website. Integrating voice search features into e-commerce applications helps offer a seamless digital customer experience.
Read more: How Will Artificial Intelligence Transform The World By 2030
Final Thoughts
Artificial Intelligence and machine learning together are promising to help transform every industry by guiding, organizing, and automating work. AI is definitely here to stay! At Fingent top custom software development company, we have the expertise to help businesses of all sizes including startups as well as established enterprises to gain an edge over competitors.
From suggesting products or providing basic customer service or running software tests, developing apps, and completing extensive problem-solving procedures for industries, we use AI technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, and business rules that will provide you with optimal results. Get in touch with us to learn more.
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 top software development company for help.
Automatic control, which has been the foundation of automation, has been here for centuries. As far back as the 17th century, systems with automatic control devised for the regulation of steam engines, temperature control, and other applications. Automation has come a long way since then. Its application in the Health care sector that has been especially noteworthy since it has made huge strides in saving costs, labor, and lives! This blog will have an in-depth into how automation is revolutionizing the health care sector.
The Healthcare Industry – An Overview
Before we get into the role automation has played in the healthcare sector, it makes sense to have an overview of how the Healthcare Industry has been doing. Innovation and R&D in the past few decades have contributed to more effective medicines, improved diagnostic aids, and technological solutions to non-invasive procedures. These are naming just a few of the accomplishments in the healthcare industry.
Along with the accomplishments, there have been a few challenges as well. The availability of quality and affordable healthcare for its people is an important indicator of how well a nation fares on the Human Development Index (HDI). The problem is that even developed countries are struggling to meet this need effectively. There are many reasons for this and here are a few of them.
1) Rising Expenditures
There are huge investments being made in the healthcare sector in terms of funding drug discovery and providing facilities. This often translates into enormous hospital bills, which reaches down to patients.
A Research Gate study showed that supply expense per patient admission in the US was estimated to be $4,470! The disproportionate constraint of health insurance reimbursements makes the problem worse. The growing demand for procedures requiring medical devices is a further strain on the pockets of health care providers. For example, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) predicts that the number of knee replacements will expand by 673% by the year 2030. Identifying R&D opportunities for drug discovery also involves large expenses and involves several data assimilation and regulatory challenges. Large volumes of data and insights are involved, and this expends time and cost.
Balancing costs and health outcomes require an intelligent assessment by formulary committees, which takes into consideration numerous data variables.
2) Appointment Scheduling
A survey of nearly 500 healthcare professionals on the Top Challenges for Medical Practices showed that lost revenue from broken appointments was the top challenge with 49.5% respondents voting for this. Other challenges included:
- Low response to recall efforts
- Not enough staff time to call patients
- Keeping updated patient contact information
- Lack of an efficient way to reach patients via text message
- Not connecting with enough patients with a reminder phone call
3) Security
Patients entrust private information to health care providers, including social security numbers and financial details. The theft of such data could be catastrophic, to say the least. Reports show that the highest data breach resolution costs in the United States are for healthcare data breaches, which typically cost an average of $408 per record. The time taken to identify and contain a breach includes significant losses. Above all, the loss of trust and reputation with customers could deal a fatal blow to health care providers.
What is Data Automation
Automation is when manual tasks are reduced by the use of information technology. Repetitive tasks that require least human intervention benefit the most from automation. Data automation is the process when programming takes care of the assimilation, storage, and analysis of data.
Data automation usually involves:
- Extraction: Multiple open data sources are mined for relevant information.
- Transformation: The data is converted into a format that can be used by machines.
- Loading: The data is then fed into the system to serve as the raw material for automation.
Big Data Automation (BDA), is a broad concept that makes use of innovation and IT resources to create value. A few aspects of Big Data automation were brought out in a whitepaper by WhereScape. The WP has Barry Devlin describing Big Data automation as follows:
In addition to reducing manual labor in the collection and analysis of data, automation can help reduce administrative workloads and improve patient care on many levels.
How Automation Is Revolutionizing Health Care Sector
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the next level in automation. This uses machine learning and AI to effectively handle tasks that are done manually. RPA has made huge strides in Healthcare. A Deloitte article entitled “RPA in Health Care Can Improve Outcomes for All “puts it well: ‘RPA can help health care and life sciences organizations collect and translate patient and transactional data into meaningful, actionable formats; streamline compliance-related processes; and relieve employees of some tasks they now perform.’
Here are some ways in which automation is revolutionizing the healthcare industry:
1) Solving Rising Costs
As we discussed earlier, a major cause of rising healthcare costs is the growing demand for medical devices and the innovation costs involved in drug discovery. Automation can greatly aid in this. Recently, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb revealed a budget action plan, which focused on modernizing drug and device production and using innovation to minimize costs and advance public health priorities. Some of the highlights were to enlist “as many as 10 million electronic medical records to speed the regulator’s ability to address emerging safety concerns for drugs, biologics and medical devices.” This would help in fast-tracking the assessment of safety and effectiveness of the drugs and devices. The collection and analysis of data would also support drug discovery and new product functions.
2) Appointment Scheduling Solutions
Consider the savings in cost and time if tasks like scheduling appointments and reminders would be automated. Apps that automate these tasks have freed up valuable staff and resources allowing them to concentrate on patient care. Some features that these apps make possible:
- Schedule, Cancel and Book Appointments
- Email or SMS appointment notifications
- Feedback mechanism.
- Extensive Reporting to minimize cancellations and refine processes.
- Patient management through email and mobile.
3) Security Solutions
A manual error is often the cause for most security breaches. By automating data processing and sharing, healthcare companies can ensure that handling of data by humans is minimized. With the help of AI and automation, healthcare providers can enable alerts, monitoring, and prioritization of abnormal behavior. Predictive analysis, diagnosis, and recommendations can also be automated ensuring that the system continuously learns to detect and eliminate security vulnerabilities.
While we considered just three challenges and the ways in which automation is helping to resolve these challenges, there are many more. Fingent works with various clients in the healthcare sector to design customized applications to help automate their critical processes. Drop us a message to learn how we can help.
What better place than Hollywood to see some “futuristic technology” in action, right? I’m talking about the hit science fiction series by James Cameron, “Terminator”! How many of you remember “Skynet”, the global intelligence machine that set out to destroy all of mankind in Terminator?
I’m sure none of you would have missed watching that evil machine with sensors everywhere, sending out terminators on its quest to destroy humankind.
The fact to be noted here is not that Skynet is an evil machine, but the level of technological advancement brought into light. We are more interested in the rich, sensor-driven network portrayed in the movie and what it could do. The Internet of Things (IoT)! Something that we’ve all been hearing about for quite some time now.
Now imagine having that kind of a network in our healthcare industry. The one industry that we all rely on, for our well being at all times in life. Imagine having that kind of sync and connectivity among all devices and people in a healthcare organization! We‘re talking about the Internet of Things working to save the lives of millions of people.
According to a report released last year by Swiss research firm, Soreon Research, by 2020 connected wearable devices alone could be able to save an estimated 1.3 million lives. Another report from MarketResearch.com says that by 2020, the IoT market value in healthcare will be close to $117 billion.
As exciting as that sounds, it is also likely to bring with it a huge revolution for the industry. And the good news is that, it’s here finally and it’s here to stay. Revolution is just around the corner and it’s time for healthcare organizations to gear up to facilitate the change.
Advocates of IoT say that it will make treatments much smarter and better suited to the needs of each individual patient and will also eliminate medical errors. It is also expected to change the way that severe and costly conditions, like heart diseases and diabetes are treated.
Now the real question is, how should healthcare organizations prepare and plan for such technology oriented future? Especially when concerns related to cybersecurity still remain.
Bill Betten, Principal at Sysgineering Solutions, who has also worked for firms like Nonin Medical, Logic PD and 3 PM says, “ One should definitely take advantage of the connectivity by building it in; it is hard to add it in after the fact. But I would encourage device companies to have a conversation around the strategy for incorporating into the future product offering.”
According to Betten, there are some things that could help organizations prepare for the future.
- Looking back – According to Betten, a historical perspective can go a long way. He says, “I would argue that a lot of medical connectivity started in the late 80s and 90s. Looking back to this time period can give useful perspective in understanding what is happening in with IoT in healthcare.”
Back then there was always the urge to digitize radiology-based imaging, but there were obviously technological and standard based obstructions for it. But in the later 90s, there were several manufacturers that came up with several methods for the same purpose and in 1997, the New York Times finally declared that digital x-ray systems were beginning to replace film-based x-rays. This was because of the DICOM standard, which evolved from the ACR/NEMA 300 standard finalized in 1985. Before the standard, all radiology images used to be disconnected. But with DICOM, images could be shared worldwide, they could be duplicated and machines from different manufactures could communicate. Other devices, such as blood pressure cuffs and oximeters, have also been advanced because of such support from the standards.
Hence, Betten says that the first lesson of the IoT is interoperability. - Value proposition – Betten feels that there is definitely a need to study the value proposition of integrating IoT into medical devices and also the entire IoT healthcare landscape, to understand how much money is being spent on using the technology for different applications. There is a need to determine the exact utility of using the technology and not just the benefits.
Although there is a lack of sufficient data supporting this fact, the most money is likely to be spent on taking care of the chronically ill. Forbes in January of 2013 had stated that 5% of the sick population is responsible for 50% health care costs. Betten feels that utilizing the IoT to bring down these figures and make the treatment of chronic diseases much more effective and efficient could be a possible investment. - Questions – As with any technology, there may be a dozen promises on the benefits of using it, but there is a need to consider the physical, social, economic and political environments as well before going ahead. When EMRs came, they had the promise of an annual savings of $81 billion annually, but in reality, they actually failed to bring down the healthcare costs. It was not a technological problem though.
Any technology like the IoT, as well as, the EMR may have great potential, but the fact remains that they may not be able to deliver the said promises because of other factors like the ones mentioned above.
The strategy needs to be thought out well and hard before deploying any solutions, considering all possible factors that can influence productivity and efficiency.
Security concerns also need to be addressed, as these days, along with the growth of technology is also the growth of ways to break in. Financial institutions are looking for advanced ways to protect the customer’s money and so are hackers for utilizing identity theft to steal important data. Medical-related data always forms a huge part of such important confidential information as they can lead to Social Security Numbers and the like. Hence, it is extremely important to use high level security features with IoT.
“For the IoT to be meaningful, you need interoperability, security and a reason for putting it together. And a knack at coming up with good answers to tough questions.”-
Betten