For decades, there has been an ongoing conversation about ways we can rethink health to control costs and improve results. To that end, the Internet of Things (IoT) may be just what doctors need. IoT healthcare solutions can help reduce medical costs, improve quality, make healthcare more personal and affordable for patients.
According to Becker’s Hospital Review, 70% of hospital executives around the world attribute the growth to monitoring technological trends. However, if the healthcare industry is to better serve patients and deliver a truly connected healthcare experience, companies need to do more than adapt to growing trends. They also need to find out how to successfully implement IoT solutions at all levels of their organization.
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Connected devices and applications are fueling an explosion in medical data, bringing greater accuracy to patient diagnostics, medical care, and continuous monitoring. By 2020, medical data will be doubled every 73 days; each person will create more than 1 million gigabytes of personal health data; and 646 million IoT devices will be used by providers, payers, and consumers.
Rather than simply generating all of that data and sending it to the cloud, state-of-the-art IoT devices can process and analyze it for insights, so service teams can act quickly. This requires a new type of smarter software application that can not only gather data but also use distributed dashboards and analysis to facilitate data understanding and action. That way, healthcare employees can securely access and manage vital content from anywhere.
The success of digital healthcare devices and connected devices will also be determined by how well providers will be equipped to use the patient data collected by the devices. Healthcare organizations can integrate confidential patient data with other sources, such as health and fitness monitoring devices, sensors and implants to create rich and constantly evolving profiles. Or they can use predictive models to create personalized treatment plans and employ smart business tools (BI) to analyze and visualize the needs of the population.
In the end, it's simple. If healthcare organizations can successfully predict patients' future health considerations and care, they will require high-quality access to data on or off the premises, along with enhanced usability and the ability to analyze data.
And with 97% of patients expressing high expectations for their healthcare - including the expectation that all healthcare institutions will have access to their complete medical history - the need for healthcare connected to IoT has never been clearer.