Leverage IoT to bring humanity back to healthcare

Over the past few years, the healthcare service providers such as hospitals and healthcare centers have launched several digital initiatives to improve the customer experience primarily in the patient management areas such as onboarding, easy interaction with doctors, continuous check-up, etc. This shift to value-based care (VBC) is trying to bring humanity back to healthcare by making services more patient-centric and affordable.

With the advent of IoT, some of its applications have the potential to bring a sea change across all the stakeholders in the healthcare industry. In this PoV, we discuss the emerging IoT use cases that healthcare industry players have started to adopt and the things enterprises should keep in mind while managing connected healthcare solutions.

Internet of Things (IoT) applications are paving the way to make healthcare more patient-centric. It is not a surprise that healthcare is the third-largest consumer of IoT engagements across all major industries (see Exhibit 1). IoT-enabled healthcare solutions have shown promises to overcome the underlying environment complexity, system fragmentation, data swamps, manual processes, and siloed approaches.

Exhibit 1: Healthcare and life science is the third-largest consumer of IoT engagements across all major industries

Sample size: 10,000 engagements (approximately) across 26 service providers

Source: HFS Research, 2018

What are the emerging healthcare IoT use cases? What are the benefits? What are some examples of recent initiatives? Let’s discuss!

Welcome IoT enabled “smart” pills, medical devices, health monitoring, hospital management, and clinical trial

Several emerging IoT-enabled use cases, which we outline below, are influencing the healthcare sector. The entire healthcare ecosystem including healthcare facilities, medical devices manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies are getting influenced by these use-cases. Since IoT technology implementation demands a lot of software and embedded electronics capability that widely varies from traditional medical technologies, healthcare players are collaborating with technology companies for IoT initiatives as described in Exhibit 2.

Exhibit 2: Enhanced patient monitoring and diagnosis are the main benefits of connected healthcare applications

Source: HFS Research, 2019

Factor in the following aspects while implementing IoT-based integrated healthcare system

The benefits of a connected healthcare system look promising, but enterprises need to keep in mind the following pointers to pave the way for IoT-enabled healthcare applications.

• Patient privacy: Healthcare providers monitor IoT devices such as wearables and pacemakers in real-time for any emergency issue and store most of the data generated from these devices for future diagnosis. The primary issue is privacy to keep the patients’ personal records confidential not only from cyber-attacks but also from any third party access.
• Interoperability: IoT is often fragmented and lacks interoperability among devices and control systems. Thus, the monitoring system should be flexible enough to deal with different types of devices, protocols, and communications.
• Regulatory concerns: Regulators are focusing on guidelines about the patient data such as who can access IoT data, how that data is used, and who owns it. Because this data is the reference for insurance claims, anti-trust issues, and other litigations, enterprises must comply with the regulatory standards and guidelines to ensure that the patient data is not misused and tampered.
• Data security: IoT usage in healthcare needs strong authentication methods and encrypted data to protect data from security breaches. Since, hardware (IoT devices), cloud and other applications are involved in the entire data management process, so the exposure to breach is high.

The Bottom Line: The promise of IoT-enabled healthcare is powerful, but it requires more than mastering the technology to make it real

IoT is an enabler for healthcare Industry players because it generates real-time patient data that acts as a reference point for analysis. But data security and privacy are of major concerns from both patients and the regulation point of view. With the GDPR type regulations, patients will now have more control of their data, so, any mismanagement of this data can damage the organization’s reputation and restrict the future access of the patient data. So enterprises should manage the data properly by adhering to the regulatory standard and guidelines.