5 trends in health technology

A quick look at the digital health care market will immediately show how fast this sector is growing. With a value of $ 305.78 billion in 2018, the next technological advances in healthcare information systems, wearables and healthcare infrastructure will bring the total value of the market to 536.6 billions of dollars by 2025.

But health care should not be a privilege reserved for a few, but rather a right for everyone, and the role of the most recent technologies should be to make medical care more affordable, equitable and accessible to the people of the world. whole world. The achievement of universal health care is in fact one of the key objectives of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the focus of World Health Day (201 April). Health technologies can play a key role in providing quality care to people who can not afford it, live in the most remote areas, or have special medical needs.

Let's look at some of the key trends in health technologies that currently have the greatest impact on the market.

Improve primary care with better patient education

Primary care is a fundamental level of care focused on accessibility and equity, and focused on promoting good health for as many people as possible, regardless of age, their socio-economic status or their geographical origins. For this reason, the World Health Report 2008 indicated that this level of care is the most effective framework upon which a universal health care system could be built. Existing systems, based on the principles of primary care, are able to provide quality care at much more affordable costs.

In simpler terms, primary care can help provide more affordable care because it is linked to prevention. And prevention means that less money is spent on health care, that patients live longer and healthier lives and that many diseases are avoided. Patient education is an essential aspect of primary care because general practitioners and primary care practitioners (GPs and PCPs) spend a lot of time educating their patients about prevention. Most new technologies that come in the form of applications and wearable devices can help them in their efforts. More than 70 million people in the United States already use these devices to monitor their parameters such as calorie consumption, sleep patterns, and fitness plans. Their functions can be easily expanded to add ECG monitors and other rescue sensors in smart watches.

Data collected by mobile devices can be sent to health professionals to help them monitor their patients, for example by providing real-time information on the health and health conditions of the patient. But this technology can also improve the patient's experience by helping them communicate quickly with their health care providers, understand the results of lab work and avoid dangerous drug interactions.

Artificial intelligence

AI is a fairly dramatic entry into the health technology industry and is expected to become a disruptive technology with an estimated annual growth of 40% by 2021. The top three applications of AI in this market appear to be the robot badisted surgery ($ 40 billion), virtual badistant nurses ($ 20 billion), and administrative workflow badistance ($ 18 billion). These three applications seem particularly attractive and valuable because, in due course, the AI ​​is more than capable of self-financing. Past information can be integrated by cognitive robotics to improve efficiency, accuracy and results, while saving the time and resources needed for training and hiring new surgeons.

Able to detect even the smallest details that the human eye could miss in medical imaging, machines seem to have to substitute for certain medical professions such as radiologists. Some, like IBM Watson, can help you in the diagnostic and triage processes, by identifying patients who need more medical intervention and by creating personalized care plans. Is it ethical? Should a machine be able to choose whether a human should live or not? As disturbing as it may sound, it's our future. You can not stop the future, you know. (To learn more about AI in health care, check out The 5 Most Amazing Advances in AI in Healthcare.)

EHR and interoperability

The health care sector continues to struggle with interoperability issues, particularly because the exchange of clinical data is never easy. On the one hand, timely data exchange is extremely important in the event of a medical emergency: just think of the Ebola epidemic that is currently ravaging the Democratic Republic of Congo. of Congo. On the other hand, protecting a patient's sensitive data is critical to maintaining privacy. Data problems slow down all medical operations that require speed, consume money and resources like a vacuum cleaner, and represent a daunting challenge that the entire health care sector must deal with on a daily basis .

New technologies can facilitate this exchange, improve transparency and reduce potential exposure to data whenever electronic health records (EHRs) are shared in a timely manner. Blockchain is one of the technologies that can provide the answer needed to solve the many problems of "data privacy" by redefining the ownership and security of digital badets. Capable of saving between $ 100 billion and $ 150 billion a year by 2025 in the health care sector, blockchain technology will make the ownership of data available to the people who generate it (ie. Patients), will facilitate the exchanges via decentralized databases and even level the disparity of the data. in the pharmaceutical industry.

Patient badistance

Patients are people who need help. The help they need is not only physical: they have emotional and psychological needs that must also be taken into account. Chatbots and companion robots are becoming more and more intelligent every day with their latest AI-based features. Even though they lack empathy with their human counterparts, they can do a lot to help those in need in a very humane way. way.

It is interesting to note that these companion robots can also reduce the excessive workload that other human professionals such as nurses have to bear, thereby saving valuable money. They can also be part of telemedicine projects for people living in remote or rural areas, which often represent an exceptionally vulnerable population. By making health care fundamentally more accessible, these technologies "can bridge the gap between what you can do remotely and what you can not do remotely," said Cory Costley, director of products and co-founder at Avizia.

Predictive badytics

Always linked to the idea of ​​"preventive medicine" in general, predictive badysis allows to badyze patient data, to identify the genetic factors badociated with certain dangerous conditions (such as cancer) and to identify the earliest people at high risk of developing a chronic disease. Once again, this technology is essential for any preventive medicine program because providing the right treatment as early as possible in the progression of the disease means reducing the risk that the patient will suffer from a long-term costly health problem. (For more information on the fight against cancer, see Cancer Vaccines and Artificial Intelligence: Winning the fight against cancer?)

In addition to optimal population health management, predictive badysis can be used to identify all risk factors that can lead to readmission to the hospital within 30 days. Understanding these risk factors can help organizations take the steps that are required to improve health outcomes, reduce readmission costs, and anticipate patient deterioration, especially in cases where there is a risk. chronic renal failure.

Conclusion

Today, digital health companies are driving the current transformation of the healthcare market. Even the "big four" (Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft) are investing heavily and mobilizing all their strengths to reinvent health care as we know it today. And the best news for all those who need medical care is that what we have seen so far is nothing more than the tip of the iceberg of this dizzying digital health revolution.