How Tech is Changing Healthcare
Technology continues to have a positive impact on the healthcare sector. Massive investment in research and development has produced many healthcare technologies and products. Here’s how tech is influencing the healthcare industry.
Handling Healthcare Data
Implementation of information technology is a major challenge for the healthcare sector towards 2020. Internationally recognized interoperability standards have emerged, which in turn promotes the adoption of integrated electronic health records. Traceability systems now document activities along the patient pathway. Decision Support software will assist clinicians in adhering to best practices as the volume of available information escalates. Health care providers are catching up with the implementation of Internet solutions and are actively involved in using medical injection molding, which play a prominent role in healthcare.
Virtual hospital environments with patients and professional avatars are used to improve clinical skills and teamwork. New advances in web technology is providing powerful tools for online information retrieval. Internet technology enables patients to access their own health care information and to contribute to their own health records.
Remote Care
Advances in technology move healthcare delivery settings away from high cost hospitals and into alternative low cost settings. In developed countries, telemedicine enables patients to receive healthcare at home. In developing countries, telemedicine is used to overcome barriers to health care delivery, such as scarce health care resources and long geographical distances.
Small wireless biomedical sensors and ultra wideband radar technology enable monitoring of patients in non medical settings through wireless networks. Smartphone applications provide new ways for patients to communicate with their own healthcare providers. Point of care refers to medical testing near the site of patient care, providing rapid test results and enabling immediate clinical management decisions to be made.
So called lab-on-a-chip technologies improve healthcare accessibility and delivery through a shortening of the timeline between testing on the availability of results, thus enabling early diagnosis and a reduction in health care costs. Ultrasound technology has become portable and disseminates to most fields of clinical practice. A micro-nuclear magnetic resonance device enables portable and improved identification of malignant cells, facilitating early initiation and monitoring of cancer treatment. Portable identification of nucleic acids enables rapid and accurate identification of pathogens of infectious diseases at the point of care.
Personalized Medicine
DNA sequencing of the patient’s genome facilitates the switch from one size fits all to tailor made management drugs. Powerful and economical genome sequencing technology supports diagnosis of disease, and for some diseases, will be able to differentiate between different forms where today they are only recognized as one. Pharmacogenomics will use genetic information from patients to develop rational approaches to optimize drug therapy and ensure maximum efficacy while limiting adverse effects. Patients will use comparative genomics to develop diagnoses based at the molecular level. Genotypic information will guide the selection of the most effective therapy regime, and will help with the development of new drugs directed at novel targets.
Novel Treatment
Research and innovation ensure continuous medical advances which will improve treatment and management of disease. Therapeutic vaccines and nano medicine are used in the treatment of some cancers. Robotic assisted surgery improves surgical techniques, enabling microscopic precision. With the aid of high intensity ultrasound, some surgical procedures are performed without cutting into the skin.
Wearable Technology
Wearable health technology is one of the major revolutionary tech hacks affecting the healthcare industry. There’s immense potential for it to cut healthcare bills and change how medical services are offered. Many adults now track their weight, diet, or exercise using a smartphone app or digital fitness tracker. Better healthcare is probably going to push all sorts of wearable tracking into the mainstream. Epic and Apple recently announced a partnership where users of Apple’s health kit mobile application can automatically have their data synced into Epic’s patient portals. So if you are a patient at a hospital using Epic, your data can automatically be uploaded and your physician can look at it before you come in.
