Digitalization is making a robust advent into an ever-widening circle of industries and applications. We see IT solutions streamline and automate virtually all spheres of human activities – from banking and logistics to retail and education. However, as the events of the previous year have shown, all business considerations are relegated to a secondary place when it goes about our health.
The vicious onslaught of the global pandemic made it clear that for digital transformation health and safety are the top priorities to be implemented on the double. Even before the outburst of COVID-19, people all over the world trusted IT to make a significant difference in healthcare more than in other fields and today this percentage is likely to be yet higher.
When ushered into healthcare, digitalization can bring significant perks in its wake.
How Technology Is Used in Healthcare Industry
Being beneficial to all medicare instances, high-tech advancements have come up huge in the following healthcare applications.
- Health data repositories. In the days of yore, doctors were keeping detailed medical case histories that with years evolved into bulky and unwieldy binders. Patients had to bring these along, traveling from place to place and in case they were mislaid it became a major headache for all parties to the treatment process to recreate the lost files.
Modern doctors have weaned themselves off this unhealthy (pun is intentional) reliance on paper documents, switching to EHRs – electronic health records. Transferring patients’ log records into digital format removes interoperability bottlenecks, eliminates filling out numerous forms, speeds up searching for relevant information, and generally furnishes a complete picture of a person’s health history. - Personalization of healthcare. Wearable devices are an emerging technology in healthcare that provides insights into an individual’s state by tracking their critical health indices. It enables to approach each case personally, develop recommendations that will target this very person, and prevent recurrent attacks of chronic maladies.
- Surgery room upgrading. Operations have stopped being a totally traumatic experience when state-of-the-art technologies entered surgical theaters. Before making the first incision, doctors can review a 3D visual model of the case and plan their actions ahead. Besides, robotic arms that are increasingly utilized for operations provide exclusive precision of manipulations and eliminate the negative impact of the human factor when the life of a patient is at stake.
- Leveraging AI and AR. These two buzzwords in the IT realm have come together to deliver high-quality medical services. For instance, the AccuVein device is used to visualize veins that are otherwise hidden from the doctors’ eyes and drastically enhance accuracy when it comes to blood draws and IV insertions.
Among all headways that contemporary medicine can boast of, one deserves a special mentioning.
Make Way for Telehealth Solutions
This know-how is a godsend for the plague-ridden world of today since it blends the merits of most above-mentioned IT achievements. Telehealth technologies serve as an essential link between patients and clinics, enabling them to exchange health-related data, monitor the implementation of treatment plans, and cut down on therapy costs.
By joining the telemedicine program, people in fact connect to the on-demand healthcare system that can easily fit into our crowded schedules and allow us to get the much-needed advice and cure whenever the patient and the doctor find convenient. Video conferencing can be used by clinicians to gather a pool of experts from various parts of the globe to discuss the case and find the optimal way of treatment.
Remote medicare opportunities are in high demand today when the lethal virus is still ravaging the planet scarcely betraying any signs of abatement. Keeping people on their premises relieves the pressure on hospitals and limits the disease transmission rate, minimizing contagion risks for both patients and doctors.
Future Healthcare Trends: Technologies and Innovations
By all estimations, digital technologies are expected to bring about a better quality of medical service and ultimately benefit patients.
What advancements are likely to disrupt the industry in the nearest future?
- Swifter development of digital products. Technical progress in the IT sector witnesses constant reduction of software development cycle duration. While three years ago, the creation of 29% of healthcare solutions took under 18 months, last year this percentage soared to an impressive 41%. Today, both software engineers and doctors increasingly realize the “need for speed” when human health is in danger.
- Broader involvement of artificial intelligence. The global AI medicare market is expected to top the astounding $45 billion within the next five years – a quite telling figure! What will AI specialists focus on is making medical services personalized by offering health tracking platforms and facilitation of medical data processing.
- Growth of wearables. Modern medicine is moving outside the hospital, emphasizing the priority of illness prevention over their treatment, and wearable devices fit into this shift perfectly. Miniature gadgets that monitor a person’s critical biometrics and even provide nutrition and fitness load tips are the trendiest digital healthcare products that are getting remarkable traction nowadays.
Conclusion
In the pandemic-afflicted world of today, the medical industry is considered to be the primary sphere of digital technologies application. Axisbits can assist you in building top-notch healthcare solutions that will provide high-quality healthcare services to people and become a source of steady income for your company.