Streamlining the healthcare workflow

Automation could remove routine tasks from physicians’ hands, freeing them to focus on more complex cases and allocate more time to engage with their patients and contribute to their specialization. Drones are now performing fast emergency care, removing the need for a physical person to deliver life-saving equipment and supplies to doctors. With the integration of electronic health records (EHRs), patient healthcare information is more accessible and comprehensive, improving health outcomes by giving doctors a more holistic view of their patient’s health.

Improving long-term care management

Healthcare policies aimed at better managing chronic illnesses have helped shift healthcare spending towards diagnostics and preventative care. The preventative care structure utilizes automation tools, data, and analytics to identify risk factors before a chronic disease sets in. Waqaas asserts, “Once a trusted system of EHRs is implemented and data sharing among providers has coalesced, physicians will be able to move from a care structure that spends a large amount of resources on acute care to a structure that focuses on early detection, intervention, and preservation instead.” Remote monitoring technologies, for instance, could have the capability to collect data that identifies patients in need of intervention, and then alert the physician when engagement is necessary.

The digitally engaged patient

Automation technology has the potential to increase patient health engagement by delivering data-driven and actionable insights to both patients and physicians. Waqaas explains: “Interactive platforms, such as specialized devices coupled with software, encourage patients to become knowledgeable collaborators who can take an active role in improving their own health.” Such platforms can give patients instant, continuous access to updates on their condition, medication reminders, health regimen planning, and instructions from their physicians. Patients who take a proactive role in their health improve outcomes for themselves while lessening the burden on the healthcare system.

Waqaas’ article is available on HIT Leaders & News. HIT Leaders & News presents the latest healthcare IT trends and viewpoints.

Interoperability

Modern technology, such as next generation medical devices, should integrate seamlessly into a physician’s workflow. Waqaas affirms that devices “should be customizable, push specified data into the physician’s workflow, and optimize a physician’s time by demanding no effort on their part.” The devices must be easy to use because physicians don’t have the time to teach patients how to use new devices, or perform complex data analysis, or data entry.

Iterative

Personalized medical devices coupled with mobile health software should be iterative by sustaining patient engagement and stimulating use. This is best achieved with technology that offers customizability, such as offering patients the ability to keep a food diary or tracking their glucose levels from week to week based on their adherence to treatment plans. Research has shown that incorporating gamification into healthcare improves patient engagement.

Feedback

Medical technology that could provide actionable feedback for patients and physicians is key to patient-consumer technology adoption. Waqaas explains, “If the patient can hear, see, feel, or measure personal changes while the technology gives feedback, then the patient can corroborate that the technology is collecting the correct data.” A 2010 study on patients using an electronic fetal monitor showed that when patients could both feel their own contractions and see the device transmitting the data, they began trusting the technology more.

Modern technology should also improve bi-directional communications between patients and physicians. When physicians adopt technology, they help enforce a patient’s trust that the technology is providing value. Moreover, improved patient engagement with the technology provides a constant flow of data between patients and physicians, which might in turn inform more personalized care.

Read the entire article here. Waqaas’ article is available on Flarrio. Flarrio is a peer-to-peer learning platform powered by thought leaders from the world’s top universities and technology organizations.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] ]]> https://biotricity-staging.dayonedevelopment.com/2017/02/10/leveraging-technology-socially-disadvantaged-communities/ Fri, 10 Feb 2017 14:00:04 +0000 https://biotricity.com/?p=3884

The Digital Divide

The main factor behind the digital divide is digital literacy. Technologies today are not designed with low-income individuals as target users. To help overcome the digital divide, technology should achieve three things: it should become affordable for the individual, the cost should incentivize hospitals to adopt it for use as a preventative measure, and it should be clinically relevant and interoperable with a care facility’s current workflow. Waqaas affirms, “Technologies must incorporate a meaningful feedback loop that provides accurate data to both patient and practitioner,” and they “must be easily assimilated into the high-functioning care delivery infrastructure so that monitoring can be remote, saving both patient and doctor time and money.” The technology should also be designed with usability in mind.

Case in Point: Global to Local (G2L)

Non-profit Global to Local (G2L) is a Washington State-based organization committed to providing programs that improve individual and community health outcomes in underserved communities in Washington. Its Mobile Health Project equipped 49 diabetic participants with smartphones, which were pre-loaded with a glucose monitoring app. Once a week, the participants could track their progress with a case worker fluent in their native language. The intervention was successful; leading to a reduction of diabetes-related death by 21 percent as well as a 40 percent reduction in eye, kidney, and nerve disease. Waqaas explains “Leveraging technology to improve patient health outcomes depends on whether technology can build a bridge for communications between patient, doctor, and community.” To achieve optimal health outcomes for patients, technology needs to include social incentives and accountability, as well as understand the context into which the technology is being deployed.

Read the entire article here. Waqaas’ article is available on Health News Digest. Health News Digest features current and breaking news on health, science and technology, medicine, and the environment.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] ]]> https://biotricity-staging.dayonedevelopment.com/2017/02/06/artificial-intelligence-smart-role-better-healthcare/ Mon, 06 Feb 2017 14:00:51 +0000 https://biotricity.com/?p=3864

Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare

Real-time RPM technologies coupled with AI could improve health management and outcomes by offering patients personalized and predictive feedback. AI might impact real-time monitoring through predictive capabilities that could, for instance, anticipate cardiac events in time to prevent them. Waqaas states, “This scenario will become the future of healthcare: medicine and care management will become personalized to maximize prevention and outcome improvement.” By pairing AI with RPM, patients may benefit from forewarning and take the necessary action to prevent an adverse health event. With access to real-time data and actionable feedback, patients could also benefit from greater control over their care management. As patients begin to adopt RPM technologies, AI will enable these technologies to learn and adapt based on individual user behavior. This data may be used to generate feedback that is tailored to the individual patient.

Revolutionizing Care Management Costs

According to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately are spent on chronic disease treatment and management. The healthcare industry could use AI technologies to eliminate avoidable hospitalization of patients with chronic disease and by helping to manage these patients over the long term, at a distance, it could effectively drive down costs. Deep learning, which facilitates AI interpretation and analysis of the unstructured data that is delivered from medical grade wearable devices, would also spare physicians from data interpretation. Having AI step in at this stage and perform data analysis could help save physicians valuable time and, as Waqaas explains “enabling [physicians] to focus on the most critical patients and streamline the care process.”

Read the entire article here. Waqaas’ article is available on Digital Commerce 360. Digital Commerce 360 provides daily news coverage, trend analysis, industry resources, and competitive data across dozens of markets impacted by the digital revolution.

Training: The advent and quick adoption of 360 video has proliferated the creation of easy-to-access content for practical medical use. Additionally, simulated and live-streamed environments and situations provide a more immediate and immersive learning experience that crosses geographic boundaries in exciting ways.

Therapy: VR allows therapy to happen in the comfort of a patient’s home or local practitioner’s office. Some VR therapy includes patients with intense phobias and sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder, others may be autistic and learning to handle social situations. Repeated experience exposure therapies can be offered through virtual reality in a safe space where patients are encouraged to develop healthy reactions and new patterns of behaviour.

Surgery: Surgeons use 3D scanning and modelling to pre-plan and prepare for their surgeries. VR can enable physicians to literally walk through the patient’s body and plan their task in more detail than ever before. Additionally, real-time VR monitoring would remove the need for a consultant or secondary surgeon to be physically present in the surgery room. This can bring experts from across the globe into any surgery; it also removes the added stress of doctor’s working over each other’s shoulders.

Access and availability of virtual reality

The relative novelty of VR, the limited good quality content, as well as the varying price and accuracy of headsets are limitations to widespread adoption. In the healthcare space, it is also important that new technologies are interoperable and mobile, which VR will need to incorporate before it can be included in complex care infrastructures.

The powerful thing to remember with VR is that the content is available no matter where the learner, patient, or doctor is geographically. The potential benefit for patients and the multitude of applications, some still unknown, are enough reason to continue honing virtual reality so that it continues to be available and useful to healthcare practitioners.

For more on live-streaming surgeries, check out Medical Realities’ first ever live-streamed surgery: http://www.medicalrealities.com/

Sherpaa allows users to connect with doctors via text, phone, or email. Sherpaa’s CEO foresees that everyone will have a master health profile, like a Facebook account, that will aggregate health data and activity. Providers will access, search, and use that data to improve patient care. Melody is a chatbot where users input their symptoms and the bot compares those against a data library. A diagnosis is then presented to a physician who takes over the case.

Data

Change is on its way but there are key steps that need to be taken before it can happen in a meaningful way. Dr Bob Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, explains:

“If I’m seeing you in the emergency room, I really need easy access to your past medical problems and procedures, and you’re going to get better care as an individual if I don’t have to search and cobble it together, which is the way it is today. And doing it truly at scale is just not doable right now because all the records don’t live in one place.”

Applications

Once health records are consolidated and unified, once a library of health data, like the one Melody is creating, has been amassed then Big Data will really begin to change healthcare. Dr Leslie Saxon, the founder and executive director of the University of Southern California’s (USC’s) Center for Body Computing, says that roughly “80% of tomorrow’s healthcare will be in the form of digital delivery diagnostic platforms.” Analysis of health data will allow human doctors to rapidly compare similar cases, conditions, and symptoms at any time which will speed up the diagnosis and treatment process—and easily allow for this process to be done at distance.

Read more here: http://www.digitaltrends.com/features/as-tech-trickles-in-medicine-is-about-to-hit-warp-speed/

The authors created a Ladder of Social Support, akin to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, where they define their escalating stages:

Image Credit: Penn Medicine

The bottom rung indicates a patient monitoring and maintaining their own health routine (i.e. taking medications, exercising regularly) without another person holding them accountable. The top relies on challenges and incentives that incorporate teamwork or other social means that hold a patient accountable for their own health regimen and push that patient to actively improve their health. Dr. Asch says:

“Managing chronic diseases like high blood pressure, heart failure, or diabetes, research shows that behavior is contagious, and programs that take advantage of these naturally occurring relationships can be very effective.”

Results from Dr. Asch’s investigation, which covered a range of research and clinical studies, showed that patients working with peers, friends, and family had a markedly increased decline in glycated hemoglobin levels as opposed to those who worked with clinical staff. “Spouses and friends are more likely to be around patients when they are making decisions that affect their health—like taking a walk versus watching TV, or what to order at a restaurant,” explained Asch. Social incentives for health can be empowering in a way that increasing interactions with physicians and hospitals is not. Seeing marked improvement in health while at home and in a comfortable social group can be powerful. Collaborating and competing with friends and family, in effect “gamifying” a patient’s health, is a natural and potentially significant way to stimulate a patient to engage with their health and the health of those around them.

Read Dr. Asch’s work here:

http://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMp1603978

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