The healthcare industry is eternally evolving, such as digitizing medicine to make it more accessible and efficient and revamping it to fight illnesses better. However, the last 2 years has taught us that the healthcare industry can be better. This has encouraged many tech and pharmaceutical companies to put more effort into overcoming past challenges. Healthcare and technology going hand in hand to overcome the global pandemic have led to several major changes in the sector. Whether you are a healthcare provider, a patient, or an insurance company, these healthcare technology trends will make your 2022 better. 

Interoperability to the rescue!

The current global pandemic demanded social distancing between people. Interoperability promises to help make doing that easier. A system where various healthcare-related units such as pharmacies, clinics, hospitals, insurance agencies function as one digital unit will be a win-win for everyone. You will be able to access all your data on your device without having to visit any of these institutions unless it’s extremely inevitable. However, interoperability has faced many challenges in its execution. Several tech and healthcare companies are making efforts to overcome it. Experts are expecting it to take better shape in 2022, which will do wonders for all parties involved.

Telemedicine will take center-stage

Telemedicine has been in the works for a long time, and the pandemic created the urgent need for accessible healthcare. According to WHO, almost 50% of the world population is still deprived of it. A study by Forbes suggested that 43% of medical consultations during the first few months of the pandemic were remote, i.e. online. Apart from that, a lot of COVID patients were suggested, or pushed, to recover at home. Telemedicine can help them by creating a centralized communication system such that healthcare providers can offer virtual care in real-time. Apart from that, encouraging patients to wear health-tracking devices to detect heart rate, stress, and blood oxygen levels can also make it easier for professionals to monitor them. The only major hurdle that telemedicine currently faces is people’s adjustment to it, since many patients still prefer an in-person interaction over an online one.

Welcoming the AI

The data inflow and exchange in healthcare is tremendous. The burden that it put on healthcare providers during the pandemic could have easily been dealt with by an AI system. It can send out the entire database of medical updates in the world,  such as information related to COVID, necessary precautions, symptoms, distribution of vaccines, and anything else that could be important, a lot more efficiently. Along with that, AI in healthcare can make a huge impact on interoperability, helping workers deal with CT scans, X-Ray, and MRI imaging. It could serve to help take the administrative load off of healthcare providers. Telemedicine could employ AI as a way of communicating with patients about their symptoms and relaying this data to the concerned doctors. This could help save patients and doctors a lot of time. 

Preventative Medicine

What if you knew where the next outbreak was going to happen or what the risk factors were for the health of the population of your area?  Preventative medicine aims at predicting diseases before they are contracted. A well-developed and smart AI could help identify events such as the next outbreak, how healthcare institutions can prepare for it, health risk factors for various geographical populations, and so on. History shows that outbreaks are inevitable but AI could help humanity manage them better. Not just that, it could assess populations to predict lifestyle diseases and mental health conditions too provided the population provides accurate data. Healthcare professionals hope to make health management and illness prediction more efficient in 2022 helping change lives for the better.

A (robotic) helping hand

Plenty of eager startups worldwide are investing time and money into revolutionizing robotic systems. The goal is to enable robots to help understaffed hospitals overcome the challenge they face when offering care. Surgical robots have been around since the 1980s and this year expects them to get better at mitigating risks and expediting recovery time. Autonomous robots can further this by taking up cleaning, transportation, and disinfection tasks. A study said that they could also be utilized to help admitted patients take their medicines on time, and even communicate with them. The idea is to reduce the pressure on the human workforce by delegating it to a robot.

Finding that finesse through AR / VR

For those who might not know, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) involve lenses and headsets that help create an altered world. This can either be entirely virtual (VR) or an overlaying of virtual elements of the world in real-time (AR). This can be of tremendous help to both surgeons and patients alike. Surgeons would be able to train without fear of putting the lives of patients at risk or using cadavers. A lot of healthcare institutions are looking to make AR / VR a part of their systems. Moreover, AR / VR systems have also been known to help patients with mental conditions such as psychosis, autism, and phobias. They can help create a safe and comfortable environment for them to help them work through their fears with much more ease. AR / VR systems can help other professionals associated with the healthcare industry too. For instance, an AR-integrated device can help create a traffic-free path for an ambulance or provide patients with directions to the nearest clinics or hospitals. 

Personalized medicine

With the help of AI and genomics (the study of genes), medicine will see a more tailored approach in its production. This means that prescription drugs will be modified to help people individually instead of aiming to treat a larger population. This can help mitigate allergies and cure other medical conditions such as  Alzheimer’s, Diabetes, and so on. This year will also see an increased investment in Nutrigenomics, a field that will help design diet plans based on your genetic dispositions. Read our post on Remote Patient Monitoring.

Healthcare in today’s day and age has grown multifold, offering the best medical facilities to patients. As an organization providing healthcare solutions – be it a clinic, a hospital or a pharmacy, keeping all your services linked can get hard. Interoperability in healthcare is an ideal way out from the tangled mess of organising your patients’ data for them. This system can help the multiple departments of your healthcare organization or entirely different collaborating organizations function as one unit and be beneficial for your business in many ways. That said, given the current pandemic situation, interoperability can also help reduce physical contact between the patient and the various service providers. However, it does come with its own set of unique challenges which can definitely be tackled without much fuss. 

What are the benefits of interoperability?

For healthcare service providers

As said before, interoperability helps you unify your business. Once you have the system running, it can help save a lot of time on the back and forth that can happen between two departments; say, the pharmacy of your clinic and the billing system. Moreover, if you’re an organization aiming to provide your patients with multiple services such as operation or treatment aftercare, routine checkups, financial management and so on, running everything can get cumbersome. Interoperability can help you serve your patients better. Added to this is the benefit of efficiency. A unified system can give you more space to grow and connect with more organizations that complement your goals. Your patients can now get timely treatment enhanced by the data you collect via a patient’s mobile phone, wearable device, telehealth checkups, online prescriptions and medical bills that can be sent directly to a pharmacy from the clinic/ hospital and so much more. Lastly, interoperability can take your clinic to a global level by enhancing the quality of care you provide and in the process also save you millions.

For Patients 

As a patient, interoperability saves you the trouble of having to repeat your medical history to multiple practitioners. You can be assured that all your data – be it medications, allergies, conditions, tests or doctor’s who’ve treated you – will be stored in one encrypted corner for you to access when need be. A healthcare organization that provides you with this service can help save you a lot of time. Furthermore, you can also effortlessly connect with your pharmacy, insurance provider and the hospital billing to keep track of your expenses and bill payments. By remembering all your medical data for you, it’ll save you some bucks that would have otherwise been spent on discussing it with new doctors. 

For others

Interoperability can be a big help to pharmacies. They can now receive prescriptions from the healthcare providers and ensure that they’re always stocked for the same. Pharmacies that deliver medications to domiciles of patients can also use this option to upgrade their services. Apart from that, it can also be helpful to specialty pharmacies that undertake routine checkups, follow-up visits and offer other such medical services. Apart from that, interoperability can also help a clinic’s administrative staff segregate and store the information of the patient better which in turn helps avoid any errors on their part.

What about the challenges in interoperability?

Interoperability in simple terms is the ability to integrate multiple services into one entity to expedite data transfer. Despite its many advantages, not many clinics have been able to successfully inculcate it into their systems. In the US, less than 40 % of clinics have attempted to utilise it and have partially managed to share the data with other organizations. There are a handful of factors that hamper with the success of interoperability, the primary being the standards of use. Each organization has a different standard at which they operate. Bringing together such organizations  under a common system can get difficult and sharing data with them more so. The mode of operation can vary in the means of storing data, the format of retaining information and even the use of language in doing so. 

Secondly, when multiple organizations collaborate in one single system, the data gets too much to handle depending on the size of these organizations. If a pharmacy is exchanging data with more than one hospital for instance, there could be an overload of data in its system. This could decelerate the workflow of the pharmacy instead of expediting it. 

Lastly, corruption and lack of knowledge or resources also affect the success of interoperability. Some providers can input incorrect or faulty data for their personal gains which can affect the quality of services that the patient receives. Apart from that, there is also a possibility that providers can restrict information – in a process known as ‘information blocking’ – until the receiver pays a certain amount to be able to access it. Insurers can also sometimes be hesitant to provide a patient’s treatment and claim history to medical professionals. Apart from that a lot of providers are either rigid on sticking to the traditional systems or are unaware of the possibilities within interoperability. Moreover, the lack of financial resources for many organizations prevents them from investing in the same as well. Even if an organization does become a part of the system, its operators could lack the skills to exploit it in the best way possible. 

Is there a way to overcome these challenges?

• To start off, government funding towards standardizing interoperability in healthcare service providers could be helpful. 
• Secondly, usage of data integration tools and healthcare analytics solutions could help overcome the obstacle of data overload. These help with not just efficient allocation of resources but also cost-reduction for the healthcare service. 
• There also needs to be a standardization of the language used by the various integrated healthcare service providers. This can help avoid any misunderstanding and make interoperability more efficient by making it readable to both the sender and receiver as well as the computer. 
• Educating the operators on the availability of API (Application Programming Interface), AI (Artificial Intelligence) and healthcare analytics tools and on its utilization is crucial. They should also be made aware of the benefits of interoperability with regards to convenience and cost-cutting.
• Organizations standardizing interoperability need to also establish a privacy policy that has been agreed upon by all collaborators involved. Along with that, the interface for the interoperability software needs to be made user-friendly.

Patient Generated Health Data from Smart Watches Ensures Accurate Seizure Tracking and Reporting

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological illnesses with estimates of approximately 3.4 million people in the US experiencing active epilepsy in 2015. Despite advancements in treatment options and optimal medication management, nearly one-third of patients with epilepsy continue to have seizures. Seizures can negatively impact the overall quality of a person’s life due to their unpredictable nature, occurring at anytime and anywhere. Healthcare technology  has come to the aid of people who have seizures with the development of seizure monitors or seizure alert devices that can detect the onset of a seizure and make an alert so that the individual suffering the seizure can be aided quickly. Good seizure monitors can also provide clinicians with detailed seizure data that can be used in the management of epilepsy.

There are many seizure alert devices on the market including seizure bed alarms or mattress sensors, seizure bracelets and smart watches, and camera/video/infrared devices. The report, “Seizure detection, seizure prediction, and closed-loop warning systems in epilepsy,” explored various seizure detection and prediction systems and noted that accelerometers such as smart watches, detect changes in velocity and direction and may serve to detect motor seizures such as tonic–clonic or myoclonic seizures. The authors found that a smart watch was able to detect 7 out of 8 tonic–clonic seizures in a pilot study. It further noted that the SmartWatch, manufactured by Smart Monitor Inc.:

·         utilized pattern recognition and feature analysis in its built-in seizure detection algorithm

·         can synchronize with a smartphone application via Bluetooth to transmit seizure data to the user’s mobile phone

·         the app can then contact caretakers to alert them of ongoing seizures

It is evident that the patient generated health data collected by smart watches can provide accurate tracking and reporting of seizures. Seizure monitor technology and seizure alert devices are very useful for patient engagement and can produce improved patient outcomes through use of the patient generated health data that they provide. The use of seizure monitors such as smart watches allows for early intervention in patients experiencing seizures, preventing injury, lessening the severity of the seizure, and potentially preventing sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP). Seizure monitors also provide objective data that can be leveraged by healthcare providers to adjust therapy, allowing for better management of the patient with epilepsy and resulting in cost savings from reduced hospitalizations.

To find out more about how smart watches and patient generated health data can ensure better management of patient care and costs, download the Guide to Leveraging Healthcare Technology to Improve Management of High Risk Patients.