IoT in healthcare has a long way to go, however, experts believe that it will have a massive impact in improving healthcare. Internet of Things (IoT) is adding new applications, workflows, and tools to healthcare that not only ensures better treatment and improved patient care but also enhancing efficiency, safety, patient engagement and reducing costs.
Let us quickly look at some of the applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) that are benefitting the healthcare industry.
Use of IoT in Healthcare
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Wearables for Remote Health Monitoring
We would have seen many examples of IoT inside a healthcare organization, but the use of Internet of Things outside the premises is what everyone is talking about recently. IOT enables remote patient monitoring where patients can be monitored in home conditions instead of healthcare facilities. Moreover, this is a user-friendly approach where patient’s real-time health information will be delivered to doctor through a wearable using Wi-Fi or cellular connection. The data thus collected helps the doctors to improve diagnosis and improve the quality of treatment.
Just for a fact, Berg predicts that by 2021 there will be 50.2 million people remotely monitored using connected healthcare devices — a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 48%, which is huge. We are likely to see more healthcare based wearables soon.
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Clinical Drug Trials
We IoT, there has been a significant increase inaccurately reported data as well as enhanced patient’s engagement in clinical trials. With IoT, connected devices share vital stats during the trial period allowing patients to stay at home instead of a healthcare organization’s research center. Accurately gathering the data in real time also means the better safety of the patients under trial.
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For Inventory Management And Control
Healthcare has been using RFID for quite a long but not IoT as much as it should. As compared to RFID based inventory management, IoT can improve the efficiency and drastically decrease manual efforts. Recently Cygnet Infotech offered an IoT based implant management solution that calculates the stock, orders it automatically when required and keep a record of the use of each implant, all through an iOS app. This helped surgeons to focus on surgeries with having to worry about the implants.
For hospitals, Pharmacy and warehouses will gain the biggest advantage with the use of Internet of Things based applications.
Hospitals already struggle against the amount of data they gather and most of it remains unutilized. One solution to this problem will be to have a data scientist working on the raw data, which is costly and time-consuming. This also gives a boost to IoT based applications that collect, arranges and transmits meaningful information to the hospitals for them to make informed decisions on patient’s health.
