Technology is an integral part of the Healthcare industry and is the reason for increasing avenues in medicine. IoT is making waves in healthcare, the healthcare IoT market would be $117 billion by year 2020 and 155.7 million wearable technology units will be sold in 2019, up from 72.1 million in 2014. Mobile technologies of today have the potential to play a key role in health care of future. Along with the plethora of connected IoT devices comes the fast moving big data that is not only overwhelming in volume, but also in variety of formats, speed at which this data needs to be managed, and sources it is generated from. Sources of healthcare data for each Patient are, personal wearable devices, sensors, past prescriptions, family history and lab records amongst others. The IoT is relevant only if we have systems to pull together and process this information to make it easily accessible in real time. Analytics must be in place to make sense of unified healthcare data from myriad sources, use it to monitor patient health, make comparisons over time to increase the accuracy of diagnosis and render support to healthcare providers’ decision making.
In many cases, timely availability of patient data can mean the difference between life and death. The combination of the IoT and the AoT (Analytics of Things) is potentially a powerful tool for clinical decision support systems that will enable us make that difference by generating super fast, data backed actionable insights with an end goal of improving patient outcome.
Use cases for AoT in critical care decisions for individual patients:
- Preventive healthcare via anomaly detection: Constant data stream from wearable monitoring devices can deliver insights that are key to enhancing patient care. It can be used to deliver more targeted care to high-risk patients. Through continuous remote monitoring, the devices can be used for adverse event prediction by identifying vital signs that are outside of set boundary conditions. Once an event (need to intervene) is identified, the combination of IoT and AoT systems can further act on defined protocol of immediately alerting the stakeholders, prescribing immediate steps of action, collating the patient records and data including any allergies or past reactions to certain prescription medicines/practices for easy access of ER staff. To further prevent the patients from readmission, monitoring them should be made a priority, remotely tracking alarming vitals on a regular, so as to catch hold of anything of concern.
- Precision medicine: AoT can enable rationalization of healthcare with medicinal decisions drawing insights from correlation between symptoms, analysis and comparison of data sets from wearable or in-hospital medical devices, taking into account situational awareness and personal health history, This will empower the healthcare providers perform more accurate diagnosis and make decisions based on information and not just intuition at critical times.
This post comes to you courtesy:
Priyakshi Gupta – Solution Architect Click Labs
Shyam – Global V.P Sales Click Labs
