Digital innovations make an impact on practically every industry, including healthcare. Leveraging the Internet of Things, advanced analytics, and Big Data, healthcare practitioners can improve their workflows and diagnostics methods, provide more personalized treatment, and, ultimately, enhance patient outcomes. Check this site intellipaat.com for a big data course.
Healthcare is becoming more interactive, connected, and complex. It leads to lots of opportunities and challenges. Big Data and IoT trends feature a significant force behind them. Wearables and better data algorithms are capable of identifying diseases faster.
How Big Data and IoT Impact Healthcare
With increasingly high costs of healthcare, the industry is trying to reshape traditional treatment to preventive medicine and value-based care. New technologies facilitate patient engagement and motivate them to pay more attention to their health.
Meanwhile, the healthcare sector is facing many challenges associated with the adoption and implementation of technology solutions. Below are the main areas of application of Big Data and IoT in the healthcare sector:
Medical research
Implementing real-time analytics helps process different types of data, which in turn accelerates drug research and improves the accuracy of clinical trial outcomes.
A patient’s everyday life
Connected wearable devices and online diagnostics make patients more conscious about their health situation and engage them to share this data with doctors for timely disease identification.
Patient experience
Concerning a significant focus on customer experience globally, the healthcare industry also invests in technologies. You can visit creativesafetysupply.com for technology based devices that can improve the patient experience in emergency situations. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things have already proved to be more effective than diagnosis made by humans.
Ongoing health care
Today, physicians can see their patients virtually by exploiting the benefits of telemedicine and mobile applications. These capabilities increase the availability of care for different categories of patients, especially those who live in rural areas. Now, they can access the doctor without the need to visit the hospital physically.
Along with these significant improvements, healthcare leaders are facing many challenges related to rising costs, data security, regulatory compliance, and electronic health records (EHRs) implementation, to name a few.
Diceus experts estimate that within the next five years, the healthcare industry will undergo a powerful transformation featuring significant advancements in value-based treatment, improvements in public healthcare services, and artificial intelligence technology disruption across the national systems.
IoT is Improving Patient Outcomes
Today, patients can reduce their visits to doctors by communicating via smart devices and mobile apps. The IoT-fueled products allow physicians to remotely monitor the factors affecting their patients’ wellbeing, e.g., temperature, heart rate, sleep, blood pressure. If there are any alerts, instant notifications are sent to healthcare providers who, in turn, can react as fast as possible.
Connected to Bluetooth, different aids serve the specific needs of patients. Some of those can track medication, the other – brain waves. For example, Verisense, a sensing solution, helps study breast cancer fatigue while patients wear bends that follow their fatigue-related health indicators. Diabetes patients, for instance, can currently wear contact lenses, which monitor blood sugar.
Some smart fridges can ensure that the vaccines are kept at the proper temperature. Asthma and other respiratory patients benefit from smart inhalers provided by such companies as Propeller Health, Novartis, Qualcomm, etc.
The number of real use cases of IoT is limitless, and we can talk about its benefits endlessly. Still, there is no doubt that all these solutions bring new value to the healthcare industry by improving patient outcomes.
Big Data Is Improving Patient Outcomes
Accurate data analysis has always been one of the top priorities of the healthcare industry. According to the Black Book survey, over 90% of financial executives working at hospitals state that they are actively looking for effective ways to better connect care with analytics. They also suggest that this confluence would help them achieve better patient outcomes.
Big Data adoption in hospitals can improve the accuracy of predictions on hospitalization risks for patients with chronic diseases. By analyzing this data, doctors can provide more personalized treatment and, ultimately, reduce the number of hospitalized patients.
Remote monitoring and advanced analytics allow quick collecting data from patients. Based on the gathered data, doctors can ask patients to visit hospitals to optimize the treatment if needed. Such advancements show that people become more engaged in getting appropriate therapy.
Enhancing patient outcomes is one of the significant Big Data challenges nowadays. Hospitals are investing in software solutions designed to provide a holistic view of their patients. Often referred to as Customer 360-degree, such systems can provide a complete view of patients’ social, medical, and environmental data.
With the help of that data, healthcare providers can see a full picture and provide proper prevention and treatment. Many software providers have already succeeded in creating robust technological solutions that ensure data integrity, predictive analytics, and data privacy.
Together with IoT, Big Data could improve the outcomes not only of separate groups of people but the entire human population globally. However, there are still many countries that lag behind others in digital transformation. Among the top barriers are low budgeting and sometimes poor understanding about how that should be done the right way.
Many countries still gather patients’ data using paper, although there is already robotic process automation (RPA) aimed to free human medical resources for more critical tasks. Great work should be done by national authorities and healthcare providers to overcome the roadblocks on the way to better patient outcomes. They need to unite their efforts in giving people seamless access to medicine in different parts of the world. Only then will it be possible to shift towards value-based healthcare.
Big Data and IoT give humans a lot of opportunities for healthcare, and that is the right time to start using those to the fullest. Healthcare providers, together with software vendors, can implement intelligent technologies to improve patient outcomes and business performance. The entire industry will continue changing since new solutions emerge, and patients expect hospitals react to the changes driven by technology evolution.
