Vikas Gupta is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at MyDiagnostics. He handles the operations and the product development activities at the firm. With his vast and rich experience in Business Consulting, technology, and start-ups, he is working in a direction to enhance the performance and the growth of the home-based, functional preventive care diagnostics center. During his 12+ entrepreneurial and corporate journey, he learned that one needs to be honest and purpose-driven to move ahead and succeed. Additionally, the ability to absorb information, filter various noise barriers, and swift problem-solving abilities are pre-requisite traits for any entrepreneur to thrive in the market. Coming from a rich academic background, he pursued engineering in computer science followed by an MBA from one of the leading institutions, XLRI. He then went to work in the corporate space to expand his horizons.
Technology has always been a key enabler in the healthcare ecosystem. Today, digital technology is impacting healthcare in three critical areas – Access, Outcomes, and Economics. The future of healthcare is transforming in front of our eyes with advanced digital healthcare technologies, such as AI, 3D printing, VR/AR, nanotechnology, or robotics causing major disruption. It is crucial to familiarize yourself with the latest developments of the healthcare sector to control technology.
The healthcare sector’s future lies in working closely together with technology, and the healthcare workers have to accept evolving healthcare technologies to remain relevant in the upcoming years. In the medicine and healthcare sector, digital technology could help to shape up unsustainable healthcare systems into sustainable ones as well as offer rapid, cheaper, and more effective solutions for diseases. Moreover, these technologies can make our life simpler and more hopeful in winning the battle against AIDS, Ebola, and Cancer.
In this article, one can explore some of the best ways medical technology is transforming the healthcare sector.
- Artificial Intelligence
While Artificial Intelligence is still advancing, it has already brought about a shift in the working of the healthcare sector and offers high-end healthcare technology for the patients today who wish to book a doctor’s appointment depending on the severity of the symptoms. Also, AI helps to overcome the staffing challenges, observe the health status, and to alert the human nurse straight away if the parameters are out of control and also helps home care assistants to be aware of the patient’s progress.
- Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)
The Internet of Medical Things, also known as Healthcare IoT, refers to a linked infrastructure of the healthcare devices and software applications that can contact various healthcare IT systems.
This advanced technology offers various benefits and helps in upscaling the healthcare segment. Some of the major advantages of adopting IoMt are-
- Remote Monitoring
- Adaptability
- Automation
- Objective Reporting
- Local Activity Recording
- Precision Medicine
However, it does come with its share of challenges. The biggest risk related to IoMT is the distortion of the medical industry with its adoption and inculcation. There is a threshold for the speed at which anyone can execute on furnishing these innovative solutions to a population and the industry desperately needs to change the way the disease is treated and hence is imbibing IoMT at a significant pace.
- Virtual Reality
Virtual reality has successfully transformed the lives of doctors and patients. It is being used to give training to future surgeons and for the present professionals to practice operations efficiently.
As per a recent study conducted by Harvard Business, the VR-trained surgeons witnessed an increase of 230% in their entire performance than their conventional-trained counterparts.
Patients are receiving various advantages from this technology as it is proven to be effective in pain management. Various experts suggest that the patients undergoing any surgery experienced reduced anxiety and pain and enhanced their entire hospital experience as well.
- Augmented reality: Augmented reality is another budding trend in the technology space that is redefining the working of the medical industry. It varies from virtual reality in majorly two ways:
- The users don’t lose touch with reality
- It puts information into eyesight quickly
These different features allow the augmented reality to become a driving force in the healthcare segment, both on the medical professionals and the receiver’s side.
Impact of technology on the healthcare sector
The key areas that have been transformed with the technology are overall care delivery (including at-home access to diagnostics, remote-consults), remote health monitoring, health risk analytics, and the emerging rapid point-of-care area testing kits and portable IoT enabled medical devices, etc. People can easily get their tests done at home and monitor their health status in real-time. Moreover, online test booking has become all the more convenient for patients and healthcare providers as it allows them to do increased bookings easily and empowering them to live a healthy life.
It has become very simple to share the patient’s information across several platforms. Even in the coming times, delivering preventive healthcare and hospital-grade care at home will become an important capability for providers. Digitization can make the patients self-manageable as they can regularly track and monitor the symptoms on their own. Considering the digital wave hitting the medical industry, home diagnostics will emerge as the primary vector for delivering continuous care with timely interventions through AI-powered systems.
With the technology’s takeover, the communication of patients and doctors have improved. For the first time in history, the patients can get themselves tested without leaving their homes. This smooth and instant communication between the patient and doctor has certainly resulted in extending enhanced services of patient care. The most crucial advantage is that there would be less room for human error in the medical field.
Digital Dispensation Programs Results in Faster Prescriptions
Many companies are working on making prescription applications for smart wearables and smartphones. However, these applications are created to make the patient’s life simpler to receive notifications regarding renewing their medical prescription and refilling their medicines in just a few easy steps.
Advances in Robotics Resulting More Successful Surgeries at Fewer Costs
The robots doing the surgeries may have perhaps once seemed like science fiction. However, in today’s time, this phenomenon is incredibly common. Robots today are going where the human hands and tools can’t and have been translating into comparatively more successful surgeries. It has been seen that some of the surgeries have also become less invasive because of the use of robotics. Today robots are performing more than doing surgeries. Moreover, they are helping the healthcare industry to save money by cutting down labor costs.
Interestingly, robot assistants are also now performing routine tasks such as cleaning and food delivery to patients’ rooms. This has made their adoption and acceptance all the more easy and quick as they come with state-of-the-art technology and offer the required assistance to both the medical workers and the patients.
Summing Up
Digitization of healthcare systems on standard-based protocols would ensure standardization of data, and this data can further be used for various insights. The data portability would ensure that the patient records and their clinical history is available for making informed care decisions instantly. Indeed, technology has brought about a major shift in the working of the healthcare segment and will eventually continue to digitize it all the more in the coming times.