Top 3 Technology Trends in the Healthcare Sector

Advanced healthcare technologies will remain the basis for the digital transformation of marketing in this sector. The healthcare industry should know the latest trends in the industry to remain a challenge. So, here are some of the advanced trends that can shape the industry.

While healthcare has traditionally been slow to adopt technology, the industry is around to witness meaningful and vital changes over the next several years. Leading organizations are already redefining themselves with digital transformation, applied to their main functional areas with a customer-centric approach.

Internet of Medical Things

Several devices and mobile apps are playing a significant role in tracking and preventing chronic illnesses for most of the patients and their doctors. By connecting IoT development with telemedicine and telehealth technologies, a new Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has emerged. This kind of approach comprises the use of several wearables, comprising ECG and EKG monitors. Many other general medical measurements can also be taken, like skin temperature, glucose level, and blood pressure readings.

Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality

By the advent of virtual and augmented reality solutions will lead to significant advances in healthcare technologies. The progress that can be imagined a decade ago is now being implemented.  Augmented reality systems in healthcare offer one of the most spontaneous options. By providing 3D information on real-world scenes, AR permits the surgeons and doctors to stay grounded in actual procedures while having ready access to all the data available through several other emerging technologies. Students can use overlays to access information in an interface where they can quickly explore.

Telemedicine

Telemedicine is enhancing the diagnosis and treatment by making it easier for the patients to get access to specialists, too. The availability of electronic records has made it simpler to forward documents to the specialists. Data exchange platforms are changing what the people think about telemedicine. At present, the available video chat platforms that dominate the sector serve immense purposes. For instance, hospitals have been able to minimize or restrict the readmission rates completely by offering real-time monitoring of patients outside the office. With the advent of wearable devices, it's typical for remote monitoring systems to include in post-discharge plans for patients.

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Technologies and trends that are shaping the healthcare IT sector

Healthcare industry is undergoing a digital transformation. The intelligent and sensors-based technologies are able to remove obstacles, form the methods of treatment easier, and deliver excellent customer experience. The technologies support medical research approach to increase the outcome quality, discovery processes to find new techniques to analyze the data. Also, advance computation techniques to provide patient-centric healthcare. Following are some of the trends that are transforming the industry in an exceptional way:

AI and data visualization: Healthcare providers see the increasing potential of applying artificial intelligence (AI) to the patient information. The technology assists clinicians with decision support, reduces financial risks, and establishes population health initiatives for chronic disease management. AI fetches information, processes it and concludes without human intervention. Also, it wipes out all imperfections when it comes to analyzing medical images by detecting anomalies in a better way.

Virtual care: Technologies have the ability to deliver care in the least expensive way with the most effective setting, which pushes to care to a virtual environment via telemedicine or use of remote patient monitoring devices. Patients can use a virtual assistant as a virtual doctor instead of consulting with doctors again and again. Virtual assistant allows patients making interactions with doctors in real-time and also keeps working on patients' data analysis. Doctors can prescribe medicines and diets for common medical conditions after seeing symptoms.

Influence of the cloud: The cloud improves the hospital management and patient experience through a decentralized approach. Hospitals come up with difficulties in managing millions of electronic patient records, securing them, integrating social and healthcare information. Cloud computing has changed this process by enabling hospitals quality and cost-effective services.

Total care management: Technologies undergird payers efforts to migrate from claims administrations that help insurers offer care management and health optimization for the patients, who they cover.

Interoperability: Healthcare providers face pressure to increase efficacy with which digital information is shared across critical systems and teams that use them. The correlation increases efficiency in care and improves clinical decision support.

Technology solutions can be transformative for the growing complexities in the healthcare hospitals. The trends seem to be promising in paving the way for doctors, physicians, and patients so they can deliver better healthcare services. 

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Digital Transformation in Healthcare: 3 Trends to Keep an Eye On

Advanced health technologies will remain the basis for digital transformation in the medical field.

For healthcare business owners, keeping up with digital transformation can feel overwhelming. Deciding which advancing technologies are worth investing in and getting the team on board with change is often the daunting part. Besides, adapting to the digital age requires a shift towards flexible and risk-taking mindset. Innovation is the game here, with the goal of streamlining physicians’ work, optimizing systems, enhancing patient outcomes, eliminating human error, and reducing costs. Here is a better look at the state of digital transformation and trends in healthcare in 2020.

• Rise of On-Demand Healthcare

The healthcare industry is entering the age of digital innovation, as patients demand on-demand healthcare because of their busy lifestyle. Mobile is especially important when considering this. Healthcare providers are making it seamless for physicians to offer on-demand healthcare to patients in specific circumstances that match their expertise and schedule. Doctors themselves become on-demand healthcare providers to better meet the dynamic needs of their patients, a significant benefit of digital transformation in the healthcare industry.

• The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)

The integration of IoT and telemedicine has brought a variety of wearable devices and mobile applications to track and prevent diseases. IoMT comprises smart devices like ECG, EKG monitors, smart beds, connected inhalers, and many more. IoMT provides doctors to a focus on prevention. Besides, patients can gain health updates more frequently. As a result, healthcare providers depend on wearable technology to access the real-time health monitoring of high-risk patients.

• Mixed Reality Aided Treatment

Virtual Reality (VR) is the core of digital transformation in healthcare. Its myriad of applications is profoundly changing the way patients are being treated. Simulated environments are helpful in relieving pains, coping with stress, and post-traumatic effects. VR also gives access to tasks and visual experiences that are otherwise impossible during therapy. By deploying an additional layer of information on real-world scenes, augmented reality screens will allow surgeons to access life-saving information during emergency procedures.

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Trends as a Healthcare Service Provider

A 360 degree view of customer

Achieving a 360 degree view of the customer, as rightly pointed out, isn’t an easy thing to do. In fact, most consider it as unattainable for simply the reasons that the touch points with which a customer interacts with an enterprise have increased multifold with the proliferation of mobile devices, video customer support, online communities, social media, etc.

"In the current digital landscape, power has shifted from sellers and brand efforts to buyers who use social media to influence each other"

And due to the increase in these customer touch points, enterprises are leveraging various tools to develop this 360 degree view. Tools such as social media listening, predictive analysis, customer relationship management and marketing automation software are in vogue.

What becomes a key here is the role of data analytics to have a view that draws up on the integration of these tools and customer touch points. It demands a holistic approach that combines data exploration, data governance, data access, data integration and analytics in a solution that harnesses the volume, velocity and variety.

But the key question that one should be addressing is on the amount of information needed to create this 360 degree view  what is too little information? Where you still don’t know enough about your customer to provide an engaging experience? This is the line that each company needs to define for themselves and their customers.

It should be about personalization so that businesses can offer the right service at the right time, the customer shouldn’t have to repeat their information to 5 different people when calling their support line, visibility into their purchases across locations to anticipate the evolving needs and make smart recommendations for effective cross-sell and up-sell.

Key Insights on Technology used

In the overall technology play for an enterprise, technology leveraged for infrastructure, compliance, security and disaster recovery are the minimum requirements to stay in the game. Competitive advantage occurs when a company acquires or develops an attribute that allows it to outperform its competitors.

Companies can leverage technology for competitive edge across different category of activities within the company, such as in business productivity and communication, physical creation of the product or its marketing and delivery to buyers and its support and servicing or line of business applications that tend to be ‘mission-critical’.

Having said that the customer-driven IT is one area that can give companies that much required competitive edge. By treating customers with kindness, compassion and offering a highly personalized service and experience, a company can trump efforts by competitors to acquire them.

And in the current digital landscape, the power has shifted from sellers and brand efforts to buyers who use social media to influence each other. This is where contextual technologies such as mobile, Internet of Things, big data and location allow businesses to treat customers to positive experiences.

These technologies have to be integrated well in to the linked and interdependent activities or categories within an organization’s value chain.

Pain-points as a technology providerto healthcare businesses

In my opinion, there can’t be a day where we can ever say, all is fine. Customer demands are ever changing and evolving, adapting to the technological innovation in the last couple of decades. The technology is simplifying business processes at one end helping companies deliver better experiences for the consumer.

As a technology provider to healthcare businesses, we feel that there can be a better platform for communication and flow of patient record between doctors, nurses and staff in a hospital environment to drive cost savings and improve the quality of care delivered. At the same time, there needs to be innovation in the communication between the doctor and the patient to engage patients in their healthcare. We’re now starting to build several solutions in this space where organizations are adopting these efficiencies.

Trends in Healthcare businesses as atechnology service provider

As a technology service provider to the broad category of healthcare businesses, I would say there are two things that I feel will have a significant impact. Firstly,the wearable technology while it’s still in its infancy, it has already started to have widespread influence across many industries. As wearable technology continues to improve to better, its use will impact both the experience of patients and practitioners to better receive and administer care. In fact, wearables can have a significant impact on telemedicine, where many don’t survive a medical condition or emergency each year because the right patient needs to be at the right place at the right time and this isn’t often the case. The second is cloud-based provider relationship management software that integrates with mobile devices. From referrals, progress updates and insurance authorizations  these types of communications result in huge amounts of money and time being wasted and a liability to every healthcare provider.

.NET Integration in healthcaredomain

We’ve created a solutions integration platform for our enterprise customers in the healthcare domain that help businesses go mobile seamlessly, saving cost and time during integration with their ERP or CRM. While the platform was originally created in Java, we’ve also built on ASP.NET with Web API for enterprises that use .NET technologies leveraging our dedicated .NET teams. The end points of this integration platform, is easily consumable by the mobile devices (phones, tablets) as well as wearable devices.