The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted every facet of the healthcare industry in a very short amount of time. Although the healthcare technology industry has seen slow growth in the past, we understand that ITÂ innovation is required to deal with the pandemic. AI in healthcare is critical to resolving the crisis and generating future growth.
To better understand where the healthcare technology industry is going, studying key tech trends is paramount. Although proven systems are often preferred for their reliability, businesses are continuously searching for new ways to enhance their performance, productivity, and efficiency.
IT Trends for Healthcare Industry
Now, let’s talk about healthcare technology trends in 2021.
Trend 1: Telemedicine
COVID-19 has greatly accelerated the use of telehealth resources. In April of 2020, 43.5% of Medicare primary care visits utilized telehealth methods instead of in-person visits. One of the major advantages of telehealth over in-person alternatives is that it reduces contact between patients, healthcare workers, and other patients. Wearable devices enable healthcare workers to have real-time information on patient data while they remain at home.
The most strong telehealth services are provided through telemedicine apps. One of the most important technologies behind telemedicine apps is WebRTC, an open-source API-based system to connect web browsers with mobile applications. One of the foremost necessary aspects of WebRTC that makes it essential for telemedicine apps is its versatility. This could enable helpful features like text and video chat, screen sharing, and file transfer.
Electronic health records (EHR) are important to integrate into your telemedicine app. this allows patients and healthcare suppliers to see patient medical records in the app. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is beneficial for the app to relay communication to patients through digital speech. Google fit and Apple HealthKit integration also presents valuable opportunities for allowing the app to access existing health information available on a patient’s own smartphone. Cloud-based server solutions are also critical for all of the above processes to function.
When building a telemedicine app, it’s important to consider what features it should have. some of the most important features are security, location services, appointment management, video/audio communication, secure messaging, healthcare supplier reviews, visit history, and wireless testing through wearable integration. From security to accessibility, these features are essential when considering the needs of a telemedicine app.
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Trend 2: Artificial Intelligence against COVID-19
Artificial intelligence plays an essential role in the fight against COVID-19, including areas like pandemic detection, vaccine development, thermal screening, facial recognition with masks, and analyzing CT scans.
Pandemic Detection
BlueDot, an application developed by a company from Toronto, Canada, was a major pioneer in early warning systems for identifying pandemics like COVID-19. BlueDot was the first to publish a paper that expected COVID-19’s spread worldwide.
Bluedot’s system scans over 100,000 media sources worldwide in over 65 different languages daily to determine dangerous outbreaks in nearly real-time. To predict the risk of disease becoming a pandemic, the following threat vectors are analyzed:
- Insect and animal populations
- Global and regional climate conditions
- Flight data and itineraries worldwide
- The capacity of health systems
- Vaccine Development
According to the Brookings institution, when developing new vaccines, the goal is to include strongly immunogenic viral elements that cause a response from the immune system. Machine learning has enabled great strides in immunology. AI will help identify viral fragments that have the properties required to accomplish these goals.
Machine learning permits advancements that humans wouldn’t be able to achieve otherwise. The precision, efficiency, and speed of these developments cannot be achieved with human work alone. With machine assistance, immunologists have identified over one million fragments of proteins on a cell’s surface that are discoverable by T-cells.
Thermal Screening
According to the FDA, non-contact infrared thermometers and other kinds of thermal screening systems use a variety of methods to determine the temperature of objects like humans. AI can quickly parse through folks at once to spot people with high temperatures. this could help to identify symptomatic people.
Facial Recognition With Masks
Deep learning systems in facial recognition technology have improved enough that they can identify people with masks with accuracy of up to 95%. even though large numbers of individuals are wearing masks, facial recognition isn’t concerned with whether or not they are wearing masks.
CT Scan Analysis
Human error is a problem in CT scan analysis. Artificial intelligence can detect respiratory disorder caused by COVID-19 in chest CT scans via multinational training data for machine learning.
Trend 3: The Internet of Medical Things IoMT(IoMT)
Various devices and mobile apps have come to play a critical role in tracking and preventing chronic sicknesses for many patients and their doctors. By combining IoT development with telemedicine and telehealth technologies, a new Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has emerged. This approach includes the use of a number of wearables, including ECG and EKG monitors. Many other common medical measurements can also be taken, like skin temperature, glucose level, and pressure readings.
By 2025, the IoT industry will be worth $6.2 trillion. The healthcare industry has become so reliant on IoT technology in 2020 that 30% of that market share for IoT devices will come from healthcare.
With the arrival of new delivery methods, like the first smart pill approved in 2017 by the FDA, practitioners can have many interesting options for providing care in a more effective manner.
Providing consistent and effective communication with various medical IoT devices is one of the largest challenges that the sector faces. Manufacturers still regularly utilize their own proprietary protocols for talking to devices. This can present problems, particularly when trying to collect large massive amounts of data by servers.
Connectivity issues are still common, as the collection of information by microcontrollers and smartphones can be disrupted by a number of factors in the environment. Buffering methods on local microcontrollers need to become more robust in order to maintain better connections.
Potential security concerns also need to be addressed, as indicated by a report from the Ponemon Institute’s Sixth Annual Benchmark Study on Privacy and Security of healthcare data that showed that 89 of healthcare operations had been the subjects of a minimum of one data breach.
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Trend 4: Privacy Issues
Privacy is an especially important issue in health technology, especially with regards to HIPAA compliance in 2020. though cloud computing will create storing and retrieving data more economical, regulations to secure Protected Health Information (ePHI) are very strict, and complying with them is very tough.
Remote communication with patients is especially important during the COVID-19 public health emergency. Some telehealth technologies aren’t fully compliant with HIPAA which can raise challenges for patient privacy. Although the office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services is currently exercising discretion on how these rules are enforced, it’s still important for these technologies to be as compliant as possible.
The slack in the enforcement of HIPAA rules is only in good faith. Healthcare providers should ensure that they’re still following the regulations as best as they can, only missing the bar where they have to. For example, there are some non-public facing technologies in use by some providers to communicate with patients like FaceTime and Skype.
If a healthcare provider needs to use an existing system to exchange ePHI with patients through third-party software, they will have to obtain a business associate exception with the vendor which can be tedious and difficult. There still is no guarantee that the third-party program can fully protect patient data.
In addition, keeping data secure through remote doctor calls is difficult. ePHI information should be transmitted in structured formats, and these calls can make the process complicated. Without compliance with HIPAA, patient privacy can’t be guaranteed. Beyond HIPAA, the general data Protection Regulation should be considered in order to secure personal data from European Union citizens.
Trend 5: Blockchain
Blockchain is a trend that stands to vastly improve the healthcare industry in 2020 and coming years. Digital ledgers can enable healthcare suppliers to distribute transaction records to patients securely and will greatly improve data security. Blockchain’s peer-to-peer system permits large numbers of users to securely have access to a common ledger.
Thanks to blockchain, there is no need for a basis of trust between two parties. As healthcare technology continues to boost, portability, security, and accessibility are all desired objectives that blockchain can help complete alongside other trends like IoMT and cloud computing.
One of the best advantages of blockchain in healthcare technology is interoperability.
Through public-private key methods there’s greater integrity within the use of healthcare info. An example of this would be that a specialist providing a consultation may be granted access to information quickly through a secure system that all parties are victimization. The flexibility of anonymity can be controlled so that patients can opt into providing information for research purposes. Ultimately, this would comply with HIPAA and GDPR regulations.
Integrity, security, accessibility, and portability of data are all features in high demand during the COVID-19 public health crisis in 2020. Blockchain could be a critical technology that can help provide these features to help healthcare providers communicate with COVID-19 patients efficiently and remotely.
Blockchain improves transparency and integrity through full visibility through the digital ledger. If there are concerns about counterfeiting or the supply chain, all transactions are logged through the blockchain system. Since this is so easily consolidated, this also saves costs that would have gone into tracking these transactions manually.
It remains to be seen how blockchain will be implemented industry-wide. In 2017, IBM began a research initiative with the FDA to use Watson Health to check how a blockchain system could help handle clinical study info, patient records, and patient wearable information. On October 13th, 2020, IBM Watson Health introduced Digital Health Pass, a blockchain certification solution. This will allow companies to privately check the health status of their staff.
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