Everywhere we go in the healthcare business, new technology is being utilized to combat disease, produce new vaccines and treatments, and assist individuals in living better lives.
During the last two years, a large number of technology businesses have concentrated on applying their knowledge to the resolution of challenges generated by the worldwide epidemic. Simultaneously, many healthcare organizations that would not have been called tech firms in the past have shifted their focus to technology and its potential to revolutionize the delivery of their goods and services.
Evidently, the epidemic has hastened the digitalization of the healthcare business. According to the HIMSS Future of Healthcare Report, eighty percent of healthcare providers want to boost investment in technology and digital solutions during the next five years. Telemedicine, customized medicine, genomics, and wearables will continue to see expansion, with organizers using artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, extended reality (XR), and the internet of things (IoT) to create and supply novel treatments and services.
Remote Healthcare and Telemedicine
During the first months of the pandemic, the proportion of remote healthcare consultations increased from 0.1% to 43.5%. According to Deloitte analysts, the majority of us are satisfied with this and will continue to use virtual visits.
Even when communicable illnesses are removed from the equation, there are several compelling reasons to create remote examination, diagnosis, and treatment capabilities for patients. This movement has the potential to save lives by drastically extending access to medical care in distant locations and nations with a dearth of physicians (such as China and India).
In order to do this, next generation wearable devices are integrated with heart rate, stress, and blood oxygen sensors, allowing healthcare providers to correctly monitor vital indicators in real time. Even “virtual hospital wards” have been established as a result of the epidemic, where centralized communication infrastructure is employed to monitor the care of several patients in their homes. The “Virtual ER” pilot being developed by the Pennsylvania Center for Emergency Medicine is an example of this concept in its most sophisticated form.
In 2022, it is anticipated that technologies established during the pandemic to safely and remotely manage patients will be used to other areas of healthcare, including as mental health and the provision of continuing follow-up care for patients recuperating from significant surgery or sickness. Robots and the Internet of Things are important to this movement, and intelligent technology (machine learning) will inform specialists when sensors identify the need for assistance or when cameras detect that an old person has fallen at home.
In a society where half the population lacks access to basic services, telemedicine has the potential to enhance access to healthcare (according to the WHO). However, this is contingent on gaining the public’s confidence; there are still instances in which many individuals believe an in-person encounter with a healthcare expert is necessary, therefore service providers must take this into account while adopting services.
Understanding medical data with AI and machine learning
As in other industries, the primary use of AI in healthcare is to help make sense of the vast amounts of dirty, unstructured data accessible for collection and analysis. In healthcare, this may include medical picture data, such as X-rays, CT and MRI scans, as well as information on the transmission of infectious illnesses such as covid, the dispersion of immunizations, genetic data from live cells, and even handwritten doctor’s notes.
Current advancements in the application of AI in the medical area often entail the augmentation and upskilling of human personnel. For instance, the doctors operating with augmented reality, as described in the preceding section, are supplemented with computer vision – cameras that can identify what they see and transmit the information.
Automating initial patient contact and triage to save up physicians’ time for other important tasks is an important use case. Telehealth services such as Babylon Health use AI chatbots powered by natural language processing to collect symptom information and route enquiries to the appropriate healthcare personnel.
In the next few years, preventive medicine will also be profoundly affected by artificial intelligence. Instead of responding to sickness by administering treatments after the fact, preventive medicine seeks to forecast where and when illness will emerge and implement remedies beforehand.
This might involve forecasting where outbreaks of infectious illnesses will occur, hospital readmission rates, and where lifestyle variables like as nutrition, exercise, and environment are likely to cause health problems in particular populations or geographic locations (for example, predicting opioid addiction in communities, or which patients who self-harm are most likely to attempt suicide.) AI enables the development of systems that can identify patterns across massive datasets significantly more efficiently than conventional analytics techniques, resulting in more accurate forecasts and ultimately better patient outcomes.
LifeSigns’ Intelligent Monitoring System can monitor multiple or several patients continuously. It proves to be a one-stop solution for multi-patient, multi-parameter monitoring in India. The iMS biosensor accurately measures 2-channel ECG, SPo2, BP, HR, body temperature, and RR. The future of healthcare is wireless and digital, and LifeSigns envisions leading the industry in bringing forth technology solutions for improved outcomes across the board.
Schedule a DEMO with our specialists today to learn more about remote patient monitoring using the LifeSigns iMS biosensor.
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