The Impact Of IoMT In The Mobile Healthcare Space

Let’s examine the IoT universe and how IoMT, its healthcare counterpart, has impacted the mobile healthcare space.

Lastly, IoMT devices can also facilitate the automation of patient care workflow, chronic disease management, data culling, and analysis. They can even optimize drug manufacturing processes, resulting in lower drug prices and better quality control for the pharma industry. Let’s look at some of these benefits in more detail.

One of the most significant benefits that IoMT has brought to the healthcare sector is enabling remote medical assistance. IoMT gadgets are often attached to a patient’s body to gather or store data, take readings, and observe behavioral patterns. These data are shared and subsequently, read and interpreted to produce treatment avenues and diagnoses. IoMT devices can help physicians track and monitor patients’ health conditions without summoning them for an in-person appointment when connected to an app or software.

Using IoMT solutions and connected medical devices and apps across the entire healthcare system, from hospitals and private practices to pharma and insurance companies, allows institutions and users to access and provide services faster and remotely. This means fewer unnecessary routine checks, fewer or shorter hospital stays and readmissions, faster lab test protocols and insurance claims, and more efficient medical research. Also, thanks to efficient medical data collection, treatment plans transitioned from reactive to proactive, digitally-driven, personalized, and more valuable.

As a result, patients and doctors can collect individual data from these devices, access that information using their smartphones, and tailor specific treatment protocols. They can help reduce healthcare costs by reducing hospital readmissions, lowering medication non-adherence, and improving quality of life. Without the need for in-person consultations, all of this translates into reduced hospital traffic, less workload, and no need to hire additional staff or make structural modifications to deal with high patient turnover.

Ultimately, IoMT helps the healthcare industry capitalize on the countless possibilities presented by modern technologies. The ability to connect patients, doctors, and other providers enables patient-centricity and makes the entire system more productive and cost-effective.

Arguably one of the biggest challenges, when implemented correctly, is interoperability, which can also be one of the biggest perks of IoMT. With the help of mobile solutions, IoMT devices can automate patient care workflows while driving the healthcare system towards becoming an interconnected, next-gen industry. Moreover, introducing IoMT devices into the system has enabled instant information exchange, machine-to-machine communication, and seamless data movement between institutions. This has transformed the healthcare sector into an interconnected web of medical information. Consequently, IoMT creates a pathway towards building a unified technology-driven healthcare setup for sharing clinical data, findings, breakthroughs in research, disease behaviors and patterns, and drug discoveries with the proper standards and frameworks.

Additionally, IoMT and mobility solutions can create a centralized governance framework that can significantly improve data integrity within the healthcare system when compatibility and connectivity issues are overcome. It can also reduce costs by helping optimize resources and enhance collaboration and planning among stakeholders. This way, cross-industry partnerships powered by IoMT devices can bridge gaps between institutions and users, thus opening up communication paths that add clinical, operational, and monetary value to the system.

Additionally, mobile applications offer other data-capturing capabilities such as user feedback from healthcare apps, biometric data, survey results, gamification, and personal insights gathered, analyzed, and used to support medical decisions and improve health outcomes.

Data derived from IoMT devices is vital for medical and pharma research purposes. The massive amounts of data these devices collect and analyze regarding patients’ illnesses and overall health conditions, which would have taken years to collect manually, are now gathered in minutes. Such data-collecting features not only put a wide assortment of medical data at researchers’ disposal but enables real-time clinical trial monitoring. This way, scientists no longer have to wait months to observe trial results. They can now observe side effects and other health changes as they happen and react accordingly, saving time and resources that are extremely valuable for pharma companies.

Additionally, they can gather analytic feedback from IoMT devices, such as adverse reactions, and aggregate it to their clinical trials in real time. This feedback can help deliver shorter, more effective trials that are less prone to error and produce more valuable results. IoMT devices also facilitate mobile data-sharing between research groups, doctors, pharma companies, and other healthcare organizations. As a result, discoveries and data about diseases and drugs are available to a wide range of medical groups who can use it to drive more informed decisions. Thus, IoMT has a significant impact on medical research, and as technologies keep evolving, the industry will see the introduction of better medical breakthroughs.

Still, data sharing is inherent to IoMT, and it’s an unavoidable aspect of the interconnectivity it provides. Sharing patient data, especially when done through wireless networks, significantly increases vulnerabilities within the system. And, since patients use IoMT devices in their homes in most cases, they are often connected to home Wi-Fi or cellular networks. As that information is transmitted back and forth between the hospital and the patient, it becomes more prone to breaches and compromises of the privacy of patients and institutions. Moreover, patients–and often physicians–use their smartphones to connect to IoMT devices, so the devices can get stolen or lost, which exposes the data stored within.

The challenge this growth means for doctors is concerning because not all of them have data science knowledge, and most don’t even have the tools to process it. Many hospitals still don’t have the IT infrastructure to store and manage the incoming data, and pharma companies still have to implement the proper protocols and tools. Healthcare apps can receive and interpret most of the information they gather. Still, more sophisticated sources of incoming data, such as MRI machines or surgery monitors, require extra training.

Healthcare organizations must anticipate these challenges to get the most out of the IoMT universe. Data analytics solutions powered by AI are widely available and can handle vast amounts of data. These tools can either be run automatically or by data professionals, which can significantly reduce data confusion and leverage the application of said data to produce clinical results.

As stated earlier, interoperability can be both a benefit and a challenge. It enables the exchange and interpretation of shared data and allows for patient-centric medical care. Nonetheless, in healthcare, interoperability is exceptionally complex and requires seamless connectivity and communication between IoMT devices and established IT systems. Similarly, efficient workflows and data exchange between parties depend on an existing consensus of standards, compatibilities, and protocols.

However, current barriers hamper these connections that lie mainly in the lack of a central integrated governance framework that establishes a benchmark in communications and data sharing among stakeholders. Each hospital or practice has its standards and protocols for medical data sharing and storing that may differ from the rest, making interoperability difficult. Added to this is the lack of incentives for institutions to implement the infrastructure and practices needed to standardize the sector and enable connectivity and interoperability among stakeholders. Hence, many healthcare systems lack the necessary interfaces and structural robustness to share data efficiently and standardize it to promote its widespread use.

IoMT devices have made mobile healthcare and remote patient monitoring a possibility for healthcare systems across the world. They have helped developers and MedTech companies unleash the potential for institutions to bring medical care into an AI-powered future. As a result, physicians are now empowered to deliver excellent medical care with fewer errors and less workload for themselves and the institutions they work for. Patients, on their part, can take a more active role in their treatments. This increases engagement and reduces medication non-adherence, thus improving the chances for successful outcomes. Furthermore, IoMT has opened up limitless opportunities for the healthcare sector to redefine its scope and reach even more people with better and more efficient medical care and research capabilities. Undoubtedly, the IoMT universe, coupled with mobile solutions, has proven to be a driving force in becoming an interconnected healthcare sector.

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