Healthcare
Table of Contents
Technology development could not evade such a vital industry as healthcare. The aging population, understaffing healthcare system, and increased workload stimulate people to find solutions for effective and accessible healthcare institutions' work and management, better ways for patient treatment, and disease prevention. Implementation of healthcare technology trends is one of the bright approaches to follow.
When we think about information technology advancements in healthcare, AI is probably the first thing that comes to mind. And for a good reason: today, artificial intelligence is widely used for diagnostics and disease detection, medical data management, and analysis.
Let's discover the main areas of AI implementation in healthcare.
Many healthcare EHR, EMR, and CRM systems use AI at one point or another. AI facilitates automation, document processing, wearable device data, and medical imaging analytics, improving workflow and health-related decision-making. It also assists with creating personalized care plans and can identify harmful drug interactions.
Information technology advancements in healthcare also touch the pharmaceutical industry: here, AI is used to predict 3D protein structures, simulate biomolecular structures, and determine the drug's appropriate composition and stability. AI facilitates the discovery of new drug formulas that potentially can become cures for rare diseases. In addition, this most advanced medical technology reduces drug development time and cost.
Outstanding examples of AI use in big pharma include the drug discovery platform AtomNet for deep drug pipeline creation, Exscientia's platform that helps design molecules, the Cradle generative AI solution for protein engineering, and many more.
Overall, the key aspects of AI applications in pharmaceutical companies are:
Recent technology trends in healthcare bring AI to mental health, providing better diagnosis, therapy development, and personalized treatment. It can monitor symptoms and reactions to treatment, helping to adjust individual treatment plans. AI also introduces personalized mental health exercises based on the user's activity, can detect illness symptoms based on chemical changes in the brain, and uses human speech analytics to search for early signs of dementia.
On the other hand, the World Health Organization (WHO) is less enthusiastic about implementing AI in mental health diagnosis and treatment. It points out that AI still lacks transparency and encompasses methodological flaws. Yet, it accepts that AI is one of the cornerstones of the digital revolution, including healthcare.
Great examples of AI use in mental health treatment include the Woebot Health Platform. Built for professionals, it helps them increase patients' engagement and identify their rising mental health needs. Another example is Tess. The chatbot provides 24/7 emotional support and self-help chats. It can be customized for various audiences, such as patients, healthcare professionals, and non-profit organizations.
AI challenges in healthcare:
More practical applications of AI in healthcare include:
AI is a powerful tool that will bring more advancements in healthcare. Nevertheless, currently, it is widely used as a supplementary tool to professional human expertise due to AI challenges, such as the possibility of biased outcomes, data privacy and security issues, patient safety, and ethical concerns. The further development of AI is expected to overcome these challenges.
Quick refresher: Telemedicine delivers healthcare services remotely via modern communication means. This healthcare technology trend grew fast during COVID-19 and has not lost its position since then. So, what's new in the field?
Today, the use of telemedicine is forecasted to increase continuously in the coming years. Statista predicts that between 2024 and 2028, the online doctor consultations segment of the global digital health market is expected to grow by 13.7 million users, representing an increase of 11.74 percent.
You cannot imagine future trends in healthcare technology without augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), which continue to develop and find more and more applicable scope. Let's take it more generally first.
Extended reality includes augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality. They are all prospective for use in surgery assistance, improving telehealth apps, and remote patient support.
AR can help patients and medical staff to achieve better results through advanced training and exercises. The technology facilitates wound care management, access to real-time patient records, and seamless hospital navigation. The other functional areas include:
VR can provide training scenarios for doctors and nurses to enhance their skills, from surgeon training with detailed anatomy visuals to blood sampling and CPR. The technology is a perspective for helping individuals who deal with phobias, creating an immersive digital experience.
AR and VR technologies also optimize healthcare workflows by streamlining data visualization and patient monitoring. VR is also quite helpful in patient education and effective communication — hyper realistic virtual models allow doctors to show information with great detail, facilitating patients' understanding of their condition.
Overall, the emerging AR/VR healthcare technology trend is expected to become more effective and accurate over the years, creating even more application areas.
In healthcare, the IoT concept involves connecting devices such as medical sensors, smartwatches, and fitness trackers to the Internet, enabling them to send and receive data. Wearables, as the name suggests, include devices you can use as accessories or wear on your body. They continuously collect patients' vital signs and other valuable metrics and transmit them to healthcare providers.
Wearables enable remote patient health status monitoring via a fitness tracker or smartwatch. The data generally include heart rate monitoring, blood oxygen saturation level, and blood vitals measurements, such as volume and composition.
IoT implies connecting various devices and systems via healthcare organizations. It allows for faster medical equipment and inventory management, temperature and humidity monitoring automation in healthcare facilities to ensure proper storage conditions and remote patient monitoring.
The main challenge for wearables remains the same: accuracy. Wearable technology comes with limitations and may not be 100% precise. Each device manufacturer uses different algorithms and methodologies for sensors. Thus, other devices can display different results even when the real metric is constant.
Personalization is becoming the key factor in clients' attraction and retention worldwide, and this is also true for healthcare organizations. Modern means of collecting, transmitting, and analyzing patient personal health data enable healthcare organizations to provide more tailored prescriptions and recommendations for each patient, improving patient care quality.
Personal patient data allows the creation of personalized care plans based on lifestyle, environmental, and genetic factors. The diversity of data accessible for analysis has rapidly increased over the years. It now includes medical imaging, test results, EHR diagnostics data, data from home testing kits and wearables, and even DNA testing.
The further development of personalized medical care will be aimed at:
While chatbots emerged among healthcare technology trends years ago, they remain in the lead positions in the domain. With the potential to further improve patient care, reduce costs, and streamline administrative tasks, they continue to develop close ties with AI, machine learning, voice recognition, and data analytics technologies and tools.
Virtual healthcare assistants and chatbots can make doctors' work and patients' lives easier. They provide seamless, patient-centered care, decrease the number of administrative tasks, and encourage patients to seek qualified help, acting in the field of preventive medicine.
The main concerns about using chatbots and virtual assistants are misinformation and errors that can lead to incorrect self-diagnosis. Additional common issues include ethical and privacy considerations. Nevertheless, chatbots provide timely medical advice for patients and reduce clinic waiting times. Future chatbot improvements will give them more human-like responses and increase speech recognition capability.
Digital twins as a technology trend was applied as far as in the 1960s by NASA, but recently expanded to the healthcare industry. The idea of digital twins is to create a virtual interactive model of the real thing — organ, bone, or system, for example, and analyze their work, characteristics, and behavior in certain simulated situations.
Making it simple, the digital twin technology consists of 3 parts:
The technology sparked interest in giants such as Microsoft and Nvidia, who now try to improve and make it more accessible. But there are real examples already accessible on the market! Twin Health uses digital twins technology to help people mitigate chronic metabolic conditions.
First, it analyzes an individual's health data to identify the condition. Second, it gathers real-time patient data using smart devices and wearables. Third, Twin Health develops a personal whole-body digital twin that indicates a person's metabolism and other characteristics. Finally, the company issues lifestyle recommendations, ongoing feedback, and support to improve current health conditions.
Digital twins are a promising healthcare technology that could revolutionize personalized care, drug development, and medical operations.
3D printing is one of the most advanced and dynamically developing medical technologies. It allows the manufacture of 3-dimensional objects through an additive process. It shows great potential in healthcare, opening the perspectives for organ replacement, prosthetics, medical equipment design, and more.
3D printing ideas that have already come to life to some extent include printing blood vessels, heart valves, and living tissues of various organs and replicating human ears and noses. However, the domain faces many challenges, like the lack of regulation, the high cost of printers and materials, and the need for more trained personnel.
In the 1980s, the first robots in healthcare provided surgical assistance in the form of robotic arm technology. Since then, the world has changed. Today, robots not only assist in complex surgeries but also support medical personnel and enhance patient care. Robotics and automation help to cope with previously manual, repetitive, and high-flux tasks, allowing professionals to focus on high-priority and strategic tasks.
Robots can reduce personnel workloads, streamline clinical workflows, and improve patient care in understaffed clinics and hospitals. Regarding infectious diseases or pathogen disposition, robots can maintain a safe work environment by transporting supplies to and from unsafe areas.
Surgical robots become more precise each year. They help surgeons perform complex operations and contribute to surgical robotics training. In the future, surgical robots are expected to better implement AI and, hopefully, take over small subprocedures.
Outdated systems updates or their complete replacement are also considered information technology advancements in healthcare. Healthcare providers should innovate to keep pace with time and secure protected patient information. Each year, the healthcare software market offers more advanced and secure solutions for better data management and improved patient care outcomes. Without timely updates, the healthcare organization risks losing efficiency and being outrun by competitors. That is why legacy healthcare system upgrades are trendy.
To succeed, healthcare providers must have a clear strategic direction and instigate a cultural mindset shift. The modern healthcare system facilitates seamless data exchange, data collection, and analysis and allows one to gain a competitive advantage.
In the future, we will examine further advancements in actual trends in healthcare technology and perhaps new ways of implementing it. Today, such technologies as AI, telemedicine, and AR/VR facilitate the work of millions of healthcare workers worldwide, bringing quality patient care.
If you need a reliable partner for healthcare software development, NEKLO professionals are ready to provide top expertise and find the best solution for your business. Contact us to get a free consultation on your project.
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