Healthcare is a frontrunner when it comes to connectivity. The development of IoT & renewable energy predictions is a trend at its peak point. The transition of healthcare institutions to IoT is not an overnight process – it might take the entire next decades before hospitals, wellness, and treatment centers embrace IoT entirely.
Expensive healthcare has a ton of negative implications worldwide. That’s why the FDA and other authority organs are working on decreasing the cost of treatment services. IoT is thought of as one of the most convenient means for healthcare cost reduction in a smart city project. As a result, the market will be demanded to hire IoT developer for such healthcare companies.
The implications for healthcare digitizing, however, are out in the open – growing health awareness among patients and need for independence when it comes to treatment. Also, modern healthcare is known for its notoriously high costs. According to Peterson Kaiser, the costs of healthcare doubled by $1.4 trillion in 2000 compared to 1970.
This post will focus on the effects of IoT for patients and healthcare professionals that will be the part of smart city networks. Also, we’ll go over particular use cases of technology in day-to-day medical operations.
IoT applications for healthcare providers
Treatment centers and healthcare institutions hugely benefit from implementing IoT, and so do physicians. In fact, the Internet of Thing opens up a ton of possibilities for doctor-patient relationship improvement, staff oversight, cutting down operating costs and increasing the efficiency of medical tasks especially if a hospital has a way how to switch to renewable energy. Here are the most crucial effects IoT has on healthcare providers.
1. Remote Patient Care
When it comes to medical treatment, time is everything. Treating diseases as fast as possible can be life-saving. At some cases, such as car accidents or heart attacks, every second counts.
At this rate, the residents living too far to quickly find a healthcare provider constantly put their lives in jeopardy. There are millions of such people by the way – statistically, 16% of Americans need more than an hour of traveling time to get to the closest trauma provider.
IoT software development can be a major improvement when it to providing remote patient care. Connectivity can be used to track and measure vitals remotely. Another use case of IoT is telemedicine – a possibility of giving face-to-face exams without physical proximity. Connectivity enables continuous care as doctors can remotely collect and analyze essential health data. Being constantly connected, physicians and patients will have a higher level of engagement and trust – both are crucial for productive doctor-patient relationships.
2. Cutting Operations Costs
Another useful implication IoT has provided healthcare with is reducing the operations costs of hospitals and treatment centers. Every healthcare institution is a whole that consists of hundreds of moving parts – healthcare professionals, maintenance, visitors, etc. There’s a lot of space for IoT to intervene and cut the costs of daily operations. For instance, stolen or lost equipment brings hospitals millions of dollars in damage each year. With sensors and other forms of tracking software, the location of important hospital equipment can be determined anytime.
Paying doctors and nurses is expensive as well – it would certainly come in handy for a hospital manager to know his staff works to the best of their abilities. A possibility to update doctors when a patient needs outright care and attention via IoT software is another smart way to avoid bottlenecks and operate hospitals more efficiently.
3. Drug Administration and Management
Drug administration is a challenging aspect of healthcare. For one thing, treatment centers circulate thousands of drugs every day – documenting every action regarding them is quite tedious. Also, there’s a set of governmental regulations to follow when it comes to selling pills and writing prescriptions.
IoT software aims to decrease the costs of drug management as well as fight the possible cases of fraud. Smart capsules, for instance, allow doctors to track how much medicine a patient has taken. Intelliguard, IoT software tested by San Diego Hospital, has proven to be efficient in inventory monitoring and detecting expired drugs.
Patients
A healthcare consumer of any level knows how much burden routine medical check-ups or surgeries might have. The lack of connection between different hospitals or within one institution, tons of paperwork to fill out, and slow movements of the treatment process are all the issues patients have to deal with on a daily basis.
IoT doesn’t offer a one-size-fits-all approach. There isn’t a tool or a method to solve all of the biggest issues healthcare consumers encounter. However, it’s quite effective at tackling the problem of healthcare speed and transparency.
1. Interoperability of Healthcare Records
Every visit to a doctor is paired up with filling in the paperwork with essential personal data. Some of these forms are fairly straightforward while others might force the patient to share the medical history of his entire family.
Having to deal with paperwork repeatedly, patients remain unsatisfied with the quality of healthcare. Replacing paper records with HIPAA-compliant EHR (electronic healthcare record) is one way to solve the problem. Enabling the cloud storage of this data and allow hospitals to share it securely is even a bigger advanced. The Internet of Things makes the second option extremely feasible.
With IoT, patients wouldn’t have to fill in similar forms while visiting different hospitals because a bigger number of institutions will be able to access a real-time EHR.
2. Simplified Caregiving Model
While not being patients directly, there are a lot of caregivers involved in healthcare. Monitoring the health of a loved one – be it a child, a spouse, or an aging parent, is hard work, especially with geographical constraints involved.
The implementation of the Internet of Things allows caregivers to make treating a loved one easier. For one thing, there are tools that can inform a caregiver if a caretaker didn’t forget to follow along with his prescription or the doctor’s orders. The variety of tools is tremendous – sensors for pill drawers that are activated whenever a drawer is open, apps that have a patient record a video of himself taking a pill and allow his caretaker to confirm the action virtually, and many more.
All of these innovations make the burden of caretaking easier to carry and more comfortable for both parties.
3. Preventive Medicine Development
The opportunities of IoT – accessing remote areas, giving virtual exams, cutting the time needed to administer treatment – allow patients to boost up their healthcare awareness and enable the sprouting development of preventive care.
Preventive medicine is both cheaper and less invasive than post-factum treatment. Most diseases can be either prevented or easily treated when noticed in their early stages – that includes heart attacks, cancer, brain tumors, etc.
However, due to the negligence most people have about their health, they aren’t quick to conduct tests and check-ups until it’s absolutely necessary. With IoT, patients will be able to keep an eye on their health without having to go to a hospital.
If there’s as much a slight change in vitals, a patient can notify the doctor so that any illness is detected at its beginning stages. Blood glucose and portable ECG trackers are all powerful smart city examples of preventive IoT-enabled solutions.
Top Examples of IoT in Healthcare
As mentioned above, the Internet of Things has a lot of positive implications for healthcare. Some of the opportunities have already been tested and proved to be efficient. According to Aruba Networks, the use cases of IoT in healthcare are divided as follows:
Patient monitors – 64%;
Energy meters – 56%;
X-rays and imaging smart IoT devices – 33%.
A few impressive IoT healthcare innovations have been adopted by the hospitals and a patient’s smart home. Let’s take a look at them:
1. Wireless Pacemakers
Pacemakers are a highly popular medical device – worldwide, over a million people receive pacemakers every year. It’s been, noted, however, that traditional pacemakers tend to cause wire-related complications. The primary issue to tackle here is that of infections.
Wire-free pacemakers, on the other hand, allow solving this problem. The device has already been tested by Cleveland hospital, quite successfully. There are challenges still left to tackle – such as hacking – but wireless pacemakers admittedly have a future.
2. Activity Trackers
Activity trackers are another common application of IoT in healthcare. These include wearable fitness trackers, sleep hour counters, etc. The apps use IoT sensors to collect raw data – the number of steps, calories burnt, heartbeat, etc. Then, thanks to algorithms, this data gets converted into comprehensive messages and is later displayed via a mobile app.
While these apps are in no way as precise as medical devices are, they are very helpful when it comes to spreading awareness about wellness and healthcare.
3. Closed-loop Insulin Delivery
IoT can be deployed to tackle one of the most devastating diseases – diabetes. Incentives like Open Artificial Pancreas System project uses IoT to adjust the glucose level in blood. The app was tested and approved by the FDA and is now widely-used to personalize insulin delivery.
Conclusions
The Internet of Things is among rapidly developing smart city technologies. Healthcare is among the early adopters of IoT advancements. Both patients and treatment centers use the opportunities provided by IoT to increase the speed, efficiency, and comfort of treatment.
Seeing how far we’ve come thus far, one can predict that in the future, we’ll see autonomous IoT devices that’ll be able to perform autonomous tasks with little-to-no oversight. Perhaps, they will be operating on renewable energy sources as well. It’s mostly up to healthcare professionals to choose when the latest advancements will be integrated into treatment institution – all the technology needed to create fully autonomous medical software is already developed.
