Hospitals have been struggling to keep up with the rapid advances in technology over the past several decades. They’re even more challenged now due to an abundance of new and disruptive technologies entering the healthcare space at a rate of around 10-20 new products per year. Here we will see how technology is revolutionizing healthcare. This chapter provides an overview of some of the most prominent and disruptive technologies within the healthcare industry today. Along with case studies that demonstrate their impact on healthcare business models, operations, and services. You will also learn how these technologies are changing how we do business at home and away from home.
In this article, we’ll discuss how technology is revolutionizing healthcare.
1. Internet of Things (IoT) Technology
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly growing field that aims to connect all objects within our physical and digital environments. According to a survey, two-thirds of Americans surveyed said they would be interested in keeping an eye on their health condition or health symptoms through an IoT device.1 IoT device may be small enough to fit on your kitchen counters or large-scale health monitoring devices such as smart home appliances, medical devices, and financial services.
In this technology landscape, everything is connected. From our homes to our offices and our factories, we now have the ability to collect and process vast amounts of information. This data is then made available to healthcare providers to help them understand and manage patients’ health conditions. IoT devices also enable a level of centralization that allows for easier and more scalable access to patient data across an organization.
2. Data-Based Healthcare
The rapid growth of the oncology field during the last decade led to a renewed interest in data-driven healthcare. It also led to the development of new analytical and decision-making tools to enable the rapid collection, cleaning, and transformation of massive volumes of data. These tools enable healthcare providers to make informed decisions at every stage of a patient’s journey, including diagnosis, treatment, and care planning.
The most advanced of these technologies are based on data analysis and artificial intelligence, with machine learning and artificial intelligence being at the center of most modern healthcare technologies. AI can often help boost the strengths of data-driven healthcare by helping to identify and reduce unhelpful or erroneous data.
3. Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology
Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have been a part of the healthcare landscape for several decades, but they have only recently begun to be applied in a meaningful way. In the early 2000s, researchers developed the first commercial deep-learning neural network platform, which paved the way for the development of other AI technologies and this is how technology is revolutionizing healthcare.
In more recent years, the field of AI in healthcare has grown exponentially, with the adoption of computer vision and NVH (kinematics, navigation,human-computer interfaces) to enable more advanced technologies such as computerized tomography (CT) to help manage patient care.
4. Blockchain Technology
Blockchain technology is creating a decentralized network that enables trust and transparency in business operations across industry segments and even between organizations within the same industry. Blockchain was first described in a white paper in 2008, and since then, it has amazed and surprised the healthcare community by coming to represent an incredibly disruptive technology in healthcare. The blockchain technology space is still relatively new, and most of the breakthroughs have been in the software and business technology sectors.
However, this technology is now being recognized as a disruptive force in healthcare, and it has the potential to alter the way we do business in the industry. In a nutshell, the blockchain is a distributed public ledger that is used to track transactions across a decentralized network. The blockchain is distributed because each node in the network holds a copy of the ledger, making it tamper-proof and difficult for third parties to manipulate.
Conclusion
How Technology is revolutionizing healthcare industry and the most prominent and disruptive of these are the changes being brought about by IoT and AI. In order to thrive in this new landscape, healthcare providers and hospitals need to be prepared for change by learning how to effectively integrate and manage these technologies.
