With technology making inroads into all aspects of healthcare, now is an excellent time for the industry to address the challenges of providing more with less. The infusion of technology into healthcare practices brings enormous volumes of complex data from various sources like medical records, health applications, medical devices, and more. Harnessing this treasure trove of data to drive smarter decisions for healthcare optimization could well, be the only way for healthcare organizations to stay competitive. This blog discusses the various emerging trends in healthcare and the growing importance of healthcare analytics that is centered around patient care.
Changing Trends in Healthcare with AI
The rise of technology in the pandemic era and the increasing use of AI/ML to leverage healthcare data for shaping the delivery of services is definitely a positive trend. Hospitals and healthcare providers are witnessing changing patterns in patient care and management solutions in the post-pandemic era. Despite being in the early stages of AI adoption, there is considerable growth in the use of technology in healthcare. There are AI-based systems for precise disease diagnostics, anomaly reduction, reinforcement planning, and IoMT devices that provide continuous patient data. These emerging uses of AI play a major role in creating a complete ecosystem of value-based care for patients. They are also creating new trends in healthcare like:
- Use of population health to improve health outcomes of a defined group of individuals through improved care coordination and patient engagement
- Addressing data privacy through de-identification and anonymizing of healthcare data
- Access to virtual care or telemedicine
- Patient health passport and traceability to support global healthcare outreach
Technology as an Enabler for Integrated Healthcare
The world is moving towards decentralized sharing of patient data with an emphasis on interoperability. Recent growth in technologies such as Blockchain have been significant enablers for providing traceability in healthcare. In the absence of technologies like Blockchain in the traditional world, healthcare providers relied on centralized databases, which affected data interoperability in countries with large populations such as India. Another trend that is making significant headway from a data perspective is Graph Technologies. The patient ecosystem needs to be understood better for healthcare providers to treat the patient better. Data typically captured as part of an EHR platform needs better analysis and interpretation. Healthcare providers must focus on collecting data from various sources that needs to include personal medical devices and the social environment of that patient. Evidently, these new uses of technology will play a significant role in shaping the patient-provider relationship today and in the future.
Data Analytics for Better Service
From an analytics perspective, AI/ML is predominantly used in predicting the patient’s conditions – for example, predicting readmission rates. Using data analytics on patient records can help predict readmissions and to take suitable preventive measures. Another area where data analytics can help is in fraud prevention. Many hospitals spend a considerable amount of time processing insurance data ensuring that the data is accurate. As a result, there will be a reduction in operational expenses made possible through operational efficiencies.
Role of AI/ML and Blockchain in Healthcare
There are multiple touchpoints for data — PHR data, remote monitoring devices, wearable devices, etc. The surplus of patient data has given birth to two needs — the ability to mine relevant data and secondly, to be able to extract inferences without heavy human dependency. As data integration continues to be one of the critical aspects of focus among healthcare providers, AI/ML-based technologies such as NLP and Business Intelligence have stepped up and proven to be the preferred solutions. On the other hand, interoperability and consent management can be effectively driven by Blockchain. As scalability is one of the primary areas of concern, Blockchain is proving to be a viable solution as there is no need to centrally store all the data. With the decentralization of data, healthcare providers can access data irrespective of geography.
There are several other areas where technology is evolving to play a major role in patient care. Some of them are:
- Telemedicine cuts geographical barriers as doctors can use chat-based or voice-based apps to treat patients
- Emotional Intelligence capabilities can help overcome language barriers between doctors and patients
- Better Communication between doctors and patients as AI can help with OCR recognition, handwriting, and online translation
- Real-time AI and ML-based algorithms can help Drug Research with graphing, data modeling, and anomaly study
- Accelerated Product Development by investing in blockchain skills
- Clinical Trials need the ability to have tamper-proof records, and Blockchain has proven to be a great candidate.
New trends to look out for:
- There is a paradigm shift towards wellness care. Healthcare providers are focusing on bringing mindfulness and including mind and spirit into the realm of health. Companies are offering incentives to employees to embrace that line of thinking. As a result, value-based care such as telemedicine will play an important role in creating digital transformation in this segment
- The move from applications to analytics-based problem solving will help innovation that directly impacts time-to-market
- Robust digital access management solution to be able to provide the right access to the right data and to ensure that all vulnerabilities are well tapped and under control
- AI/ML solutions to predict healthcare outcomes through deep learning
The possibilities with Artificial Intelligence in managing healthcare data for the betterment of healthcare are limitless. Long 80 extensively leverages AI/ML, Automation, Big Data, and Cloud technologies to accelerate healthcare digital transformation. To learn more about our offerings, please visit https://www.long-80.com.
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