Here are four key trends in healthcare technology.
Trend #1
How Health Coaching and Persuasive Technology Can Drive Patient Behavior and Compliance: Its well known that today’s medical grade wearable devices are leveraging leading edge technology to deliver remarkable outcomes for patients. However, the challenges around patient compliance still exist and cost the healthcare system billions of dollars annually. But what if physicians could harness patients’ daily habits such as dietary intake, moods, and exercise data to provide ongoing health coaching? The combination of sophisticated medical grade wearables with targeted health coaching practices can significantly improve chronic disease outcomes. More importantly, they can help chronic disease patients to transform short-term changes into long-term habits.
Trend #2
Deep Data and AI in Healthcare: While we read about AI’s infusion into nearly every industry, perhaps the most impactful application in healthcare could be its effect on patient care. The ability for deep data and AI to uncover and predict a wide range of conditions and treatments is on the precipice of becoming a reality. Harnessing deep data and AI for physician consumption can enable faster diagnostics and improve accuracy by training AI to look for anomalies. Deep data can help physicians better understand patient behavior and enable them to engage with patients to drive better adherence and compliance. Better still, these insights can enable a more holistic view of a patient's condition, which can be leveraged in prescribed treatments.
Trend #3
The Dollars and “Sense” of Remote Patient Monitoring: With annual projected revenues of $52 billion by 2023, and a savings estimate of more than $8,000 per patient per year, the math seems to lead us to an easy conclusion; Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) not only impacts health and wellness it also makes financial sense. However, challenges and barriers to entry, such as engaging and educating patients, managing the devices, monitoring the data, managing interventions, and coding and billing still plague physicians, providers, and payers.
Trend #4
The Need for a New Approach to Holistic Medicine: While “Holistic” medicine used to be considered an abstract form of medical care, it certainly has found its place among mainstream treatments and regimens. However, when we look at the current healthcare system and think about treating the “whole patient, we still see a fragmented approach that doesn’t treat patients “holistically”. For example, patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) often times are only treated for CKD and not, for example, heart disease. With almost 50 percent of CKD patients suffering from cardiovascular disease too, this omission can cost the healthcare system – and patients – dearly. In fact, almost one-fourth of costs for chronic disease care are attributed to comorbid conditions. In order to move to a more “wholistic” approach to healthcare, patient data has to be consolidated, and patient metrics have to be recorded for all vital signs and markers.