Digital transformation in healthcare: Five top trends

At the more obvious level, technology is shaping healthcare by advancing some areas of medicine to help us to live longer. 3D printing, for example, is allowing bespoke medical devices to be created and which are finely tuned for the individual patient. There are also more subtle ways through which digital transformation is altering healthcare, most notably in altering the patient-doctor interaction and experience.

Arguably healthcare is now firmly entrenched as part of the ‘information economy’. In fact one consultant predicted a few years back that “Internet technology may rank with antibiotics, genetics and computers as among the most important changes for medical care delivery.” Perhaps we’re not there yet, but things are progressing.

Here are Digital Journal’s pick of the top five digital transformations in healthcare:

The Internet of Things concerns the interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data. The principle can apply to almost any industry, and this includes healthcare. As an example TechRadar cites cases of patients wearing interactive health monitors. In this case, adverse variations in key readings can rapidly alert a physician.

One example of this is the Dario smart glucose meter . This device integrates directly with a smartphone, allowing the user to track and monitor your blood glucose, and much more, on your phone. Following on and connected to the Internet of Things are the vast array of health-related werarables.

Smartwatches, fitness trackers and the latest wearable technology and smart devices are examples of ‘wearables’. While many wearables are popular with consumers and used for tracking fitness and so on, there are some more serious medical applications.

One such example is a novel wearable vest for tracking pulmonary congestion in acutely decompensated heart failure. This works on the basis of bioelectrical bioimpedance analysis . This is a commonly used method for estimating body composition, and in particular body fat, looking at the flow of an electric current through body tissues.

Big data refers to how extremely large data sets can be be analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, particularly those relating to human behavior and interactions.

The era of big data has brought with it new opportunities for health organizations to extract insight and value from a mass of data.