Technology in Healthcare

Hello folks! In this post we will take a look at technological advancements that are happening around us related to healthcare.

Technology is vital driving force behind improvements in healthcare, we can say that this is true when we see the rate of change in recent innovations. Technology has impact on many aspects of our life as improvement in data collection, research and advanced treatments help healthcare providers with new tools and techniques and innovative medicine practices.

Artificial intelligence (AI):

(Source - https://blog.relecura.com)

As we have seen in last post about Augmented Reality (read more) , the artificial intelligence is playing vital role in data analytics for healthcare. As the adoption of electronic health record (HER) is increasing and technologies like big data and cloud computing is helping to perform some analysis on this data. By this practitioners and medical researchers can develop new ways to find cure for difficult diseases. Robotics industry can use this large amount of analysed data for robotic equipments such as RIBA (Robot for Interactive Body Assistant) developed by RIKEN and Tokai Rubber Industries. Augmented Reality can help in medical education, like medical 3D imaging technology, in which 3D images of organs appear to pop out of screen and anatomy can be applied. Watson by IBM is an example that leverages this technology to provide suggestions in healthcare domain.

Blockchain:

Blockchain technology has been in talk since Bitcoin got sudden changes in recent days. This distributed ledger and peer to peer communication solution for secure and untampered transactional data is useful in healthcare also. 

With use of blockchain, many interoperability solutions for exchanging patient information across all healthcare related entities are baing developed. This will help in value-based care and health information exchange for accurate treatment and medication. The healthcare companies face difficulties while analysing data that is present in different technologies and platforms. For example, the single patient data is present in different type of databases makes difficult to design any software solution that makes use of this data. So using idea of blockchin we can implement some solution that will help to keep accurate information and also it will help in auditing the data we have. Also such applications can help in validation of data while claims are in process, and will speed up the claim payments.

We will see the details about blockchain in upcoming post.

3D Printing:

3D printing has been around from many years and mainly used in manufacturing industries. In healthcare it’s been helping with custom prosthetics and dental implants. But there is possibility with this 3D printing for personalized healthcare.

(Source - https://getreferralmd.com)

3D printing can add a new way for how the drug is prepared. It can help pharmaceutical researchers for printing oral tablets. This will be more helpful in curing the patients who respond differently for same drugs. The data analysis done with EHR and case documents can help to decide drug release profiles and contents to provide optimal medication dose. So we can imagine that the doctor we visit will give some profile and contents file to us, and we prepare our personal drug instead of relying on standard set of dosage made from different tablets/liquids.

Internet of Things:

(Source - http://ccindustrialcare.com/internet-of-things-iot-and-your-healthcare/)

We have seen brief introduction about IoT and its applications in previous article (read more). IoT is internetworking of physical devices, vehicles, buildings and other items embedded with sensors, actuators, software, electronics and network connectivity that enable these objects to exchange data or collect data.

We can make use of this in remote monitoring of patient’s health statistics, hospital asset management, remote device configuration and design data analytics applications. We can use connected devices that monitor our health and will help us in emergencies. We can design some system that monitors health related data, if any accident or health related emergency occurs, the system will automatically call for ambulance, by tracking location, and will automatically fill required forms for hospitals while patient reaches there.

BioElectronics:

Imagine that equivalent of security guard, a movie director, bouncer and multilingual translator is sitting inside your brain and they are monitoring the signals sent by brain to all organs. Now imagine that they can correct the signals that are erratic and wrong. This simple explanation for BioElectornics technology.

(Source - https://www.gsk.com)

GSK’s Bioelectronics and R&D unit is working on this relatively new scientific field that could result in new class of medicines that would not be pills or injections but miniaturized devices which can be implanted in body. Such devices can be programmed to read and correct the electric signals that are parring through our nervous system. GSK say that, disorders like asthma, arthritis, hypertension and diabetes  could be treated using these devices. There will be revolution in healthcare industry if such thing could actually work, and it seems feasible with such pace of technology is moving ahead.

This is brief information about the technological advancements in healthcare industry and ideas related to their implementation.

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