CONNECTED HEALTHCARE: THE NEXT LEVEL TO PROVIDING CUTTING-EDGE SMART SOLUTIONS

CONNECTED HEALTHCARE: THE NEXT LEVEL TO PROVIDING CUTTING-EDGE SMART SOLUTIONS

We live in a world driven by data. Every single thing we do can be recorded, analysed and made available to us with a click of a button. Be it shopping (a variety of e-commerce sites), eating (foursquare), traveling (Uber, Ola), etc. Companies that never paid attention to healthcare are now forging alliances with start-ups to capitalize on the new digitally connected world. Businesses are restructuring to adapt to the growing influence of technology driven customers.

The healthcare industry is not far behind, from tele-medicine robots, toilet sensors, fetal monitors to remote patient monitoring, connected healthcare – a concept elevated by the “Internet of Things (IoT)” is driving the healthcare industry to a new high, to create services with or without direct human intervention. ‘IoT’ are expected to become active participants in Healthcare monitoring, business, information and social processes where they are enabled to interact and communicate among themselves and with the environment by exchanging smart data and actionable information, crunched out of real time analytics.

The idea that you can now collect, monitor and transfer data over a secure network with absolutely no human interaction is just mind-blowing. What is even better is that this will only increase efficiency, cut costs and improve patient-care by a 100 fold. In fact, IoT is revolutionizing healthcare as we speak!

It is unimaginable how with technology, you can get unique, remote, life-critical data in real-time, analyze it, and provide the necessary prognosis without putting the patient through multiple tests. Here are a bunch of innovations that indicate how we have progressed beyond belief with IoT:

• Cardiac diagnostics is acquiring a significant amount of interest today. With remote cardiac monitoring, you can now monitor your heart from home and helps speed diagnosis and time to treatment.
• Reduced hospital-acquired infections due to hand hygiene compliance monitoring.
• ECG just got simpler! You don’t need to go to a hospital any longer. The bluetooth-enabled ECG electrodes can now gather, record, analyze and upload your heart diagnosis into the cloud.
• The fetal monitors, electrocardiograms, temperature monitors, etc. not only track vital health information, but also make it available to your physician anytime, anywhere. Thus, decreasing direct patient-physician interaction, while at the same time ensuring great medical care.
• “Smart bed” is another stunning invention. It detects the patient’s behavior in and around the bed. It indicates whether the bed is occupied or not. It also adjusts itself to provide the best support to the patient without any manual intervention.
• Now the doctors can keep track of your health and progress without being physical present. In fact, innovation in smart technology indicates that we might be looking at medication dispensers that automatically upload data to the cloud. So, once this becomes a reality, your doctor is going to know if you have not followed his advice! Also, in case of emergency the care team monitoring the patient will be alerted immediately.
• Research got faster! It has single-handedly helped to advance research, management and care in the industry. There is actually a protein research and analytics tool** that checks reliability and accuracy and provides standardized, quantitative and reproducible analysis of proteins in research samples while reducing work-flow.

Who could have imagined that there would come a day when we actually design smart solutions to improve health and our environment with the intelligent use of data. Whether it is crowd-sourcing physicians for medical advice, developing mobile apps to guide patients on their visit to a hospital, or consulting with patients, who aren’t even in the same room. Going forward, the healthcare world is only going to get smaller and more intimate.