Medical IoT will fuel greater change in healthcare over the next 10 years than in all of the last 100 years. The application of IoT to healthcare will allow a reboot of healthcare delivery – capturing patient data more regularly and allowing it to be rapidly assimilated into proactive, outpatient-based diagnosis and treatment. The resulting waves of change will boost clinical effectiveness and lower costs, alleviating the increasing strain on the healthcare system.
Report Introduction:
Connected health, a new delivery mechanism for healthcare services, has already begun to impact the healthcare industry: Clinicians can conduct remote visits with patients and remotely collect their vital signs and other data with the goal of improving their health. Technology advances have incrementally improved healthcare delivery, but the pace of change will rapidly accelerate due to medical applications of IoT and its ability to alleviate increasing patient health needs and rapid cost increases for healthcare delivery. Medical IoT (MIoT ) will spur connected health adoption across a series of successive waves, starting with IoT-enabled remote patient monitoring and telemedicine. The adoption of connected health, with its emphasis on leveraging data to proactively and remotelycare for each individual patient, will also enable a new focus on global health. This global view creates a direct connection between individuals’ current (and future) health to their lifestyles and also that of the greater population. Ultimately, improving one person’s health influences that of the population and vice versa.
All of this information gathering, analysis and preemptive decision-making creates an explosion of data. That creates opportunity for IoT, datacenter infrastructure and cloud-based hardware, software and services as well as connectivity vendors. The first opportunity is in supporting initial connected health use cases and applications where critical patient data is captured, sorted and stored in specific ways. That data must be managed and manageable; it must be secured; and it must be reasonably accessible when needed. The second opportunity is in support of a wholesale upgrade of healthcare operations, over time, influenced by connected health. Ultimately, new electronic health record (EHR) platforms for patient-record and device management will be required for IoT. The platforms must interface with population health and precision medicine data as well. Many telemedicine and remote patient monitoring operations will choose to build command-center operations, allowing for a centralized approach to overseeing, monitoring and delivering care, leading to a buildout of these facilities over the next five years.
This Technology & Business Insight report on the benefits of medical IoT is based on a combination of insights and data gathered through direct interviews with each of the vendors mentioned in the report (with a few exceptions) spanning a wide variety of vertical applications and our analysts' deep experience in the IoT industry. The full report includes:
- The benefits and drawbacks of IoT-driven connected health
- The core connected health use cases
- An examination
into connceted healthcare service delivery