The COVID-19 pandemic overhauled the development of the medical industry and raised new challenges, but it also led to innovation and acceleration in healthcare. Significant strains were put on health systems. Overcrowded hospitals became normality. Healthcare organizations face healthcare worker burnout because of labor shortages.
For the future scope of patient monitoring systems is essential to understand how healthcare will evolve and the role of technology in this process.
Connected technology allows healthcare workers to increase productivity and the level of care delivered to patients at each stage: from the first visit and diagnosis to returning home.
According to statistics, 59 % of U.S. healthcare executives think digitalization improves clinical outcomes. There are many possibilities here, such as making predictions and flagging potential health risks by analyzing large amounts of patient data to spot patterns.
Analytical insights revolutionize healthcare as well as use patient data. Right now, the data collection phase is primarily separated from data analysis. For example, technology can analyze vital sign data to alert an irregularity, but the healthcare provider needs to take the next step to diagnose. So, the technology will help to interpret patient data in real-time and remotely, thereby improving healthcare provider response times.
Future remote patient monitoring will enable healthcare providers to connect with patients 24/7 and change their operations. It reduces hospital stays and improves patient outcomes. Future patient monitoring will lower healthcare costs and lead to 77% fewer deaths and 87% fewer hospitalizations.
Wearable devices like wristbands or skin patches enable the future scope of patient monitoring systems to collect data, dashboard visualization, and analytics processing. Healthcare providers can monitor patient data remotely and intervene immediately after receiving real-time alerts if clinical thresholds are breached.
The primary beneficiaries are patients with chronic conditions. They need extensive and continuous vital sign monitoring without staying in a hospital. Remote patient monitoring can expand the hospital’s reach and bring care directly to these patients in their environments, freeing up beds for patients who need in-person attention.
Electronic health records collect socio-behavioral, medical, and environmental patient data. EHRs handle current healthcare-related data and have introduced many advantages. For example, EHR allows healthcare professionals better access to the whole medical history of each patient. Medical diagnoses, data related to known allergies, prescriptions, clinical narratives, demographics, and laboratory test results. It makes treating medical conditions more time efficient by significantly decreasing the additional and redundant examinations, ambiguities caused by illegible handwriting, medication dose and frequency errors, lost orders, and improved care coordination.
EHRs facilitate healthcare reporting quality indicators to organizations enabling faster data retrieval and immediate reporting of disease outbreaks. EHRs can help to reduce or eliminate delays and mistakes in the billing and claims management area and help control the increasing costs of health insurance benefits.
Prompts regarding vaccinations, automatic reminders, abnormal laboratory results, cancer screening, and other periodic checkups can improve medical practices significantly. Facilitating better communication among multiple healthcare providers and patients leads to more excellent continuity of care and timely interventions. Immediate insurance approvals and electronic authorization decrease the amount of paperwork.
Clinical workflow solutions can enhance medical care quality by reducing errors and providing a central hub for storing and retrieving patient data. These solutions use a mix of desktop terminals, mobile devices, and on-site medical equipment to help healthcare providers input patient data.
When designing a plan to incorporate digital tools, involving the key stakeholders that use these systems is critical. Doctors and nurses have unique insights into the operational pain points that create inefficiencies in their work environments. They receive firsthand patient feedback, which can serve as a roadmap for where advanced technology can help. By engaging caregivers in the discussion from the beginning, hospital decision-makers can better understand their workforce’s needs and introduce a tailored solution, which can help guarantee digital systems adoption.
Once it is clear which types of solutions will best serve hospitals’ specific needs, the next step for successful implementation is to take a hard look at their current IT infrastructure. With digital integration, large volumes of data will be created that must be appropriately managed and fully compliant with cybersecurity, patient data privacy, and data integrity rules and regulations. To digitize the patient care ecosystem effectively, hospitals should ensure they have sufficient capacity to withstand this influx of patient information and that the new solutions can easily integrate into existing digital environments.
Real-time data streaming, aggregation, capture, visualization, and analytics solutions can help integrate a better utilization of EMRs with healthcare providers. However, the hundreds of certified EHR products with different functionality, clinical terminology, and technical specifications make sharing data and interoperability more difficult. Let’s discuss some of these challenges.
A massive volume of patient data is not easily manageable with traditional EHR format. There is a need to codify all the clinically relevant information that surfaced for billing purposes, the purpose of claims, and clinical analytics.
Medical coding systems like International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code and Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) were developed to represent the core clinical concepts.
It is one of the primary challenges of digitalization. Many healthcare organizations store patient data on their premises to control access, security, and uptime. However, an on-site server network can be challenging to maintain and expensive to scale. The cloud-based storage with healthcare-specific compliance and security issues is a better option that most healthcare organizations have opted for. Cloud storage offers easier expansion, lower up-front costs, and handy disaster recovery.
Medical images often suffer technical barriers, for example, multiple types of artifacts and noise. Improper handling of medical images can often cause the delineation of anatomical structures like veins, which could be more optimal. Measures needed to benefit the purpose are:
The EHRs improve the communication and quality of data in clinical workflows through reports by indicating discrepancies. The self-report questionnaires from patients for their symptoms enhance the quality of documentation. The data needs a manual or automatized cleaning process to ensure correctness, accuracy, relevancy, and consistency.
Charts, histograms, and heat maps allow us to absorb and use information more effortlessly. Visualized data can correct information labeling and illustrate contrasting figures to reduce confusion.
A list of technical safeguards, termed HIPAA Security Rules, was developed to protect health information against hacking, security breaches, ransomware episodes, and phishing attacks because data security is a priority for healthcare organizations. It helps with transmission, storing, integrity, authentification protocols, and access control. It is also mandatory to have accurate, complete, and up-to-date metadata composed of information like purpose and person responsible for the data, time of creation, and previous usage (by who, why, how, and when) for researchers and data analysts.
The service provider for healthcare analytics and clinical transformation is continuously contributing towards better and more effective patients outcome that can be achieved using medical data. The collective extensive data analysis of patient’s medical data is crucial for building a better prognostic framework.
Common goals of these companies include:
For example, analyzing healthcare procedures can provide further insights regarding technical, procedural, and medical improvements to archive the full potential of personalized medicine and patient-specific medical specialty.
The modern healthcare fraternity has implemented big data analytics in healthcare and clinical practices to realize the potential of big data and extract meaningful information in reduced time.
Big data will facilitate healthcare. For example, by providing early warnings of disease conditions, introducing prediction of epidemics (concerning population health), and helping discover intelligent therapeutic intervention strategies and novel biomarkers for an improved quality of life.
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