By Tim Mitchell, healthcare vertical sales manager, Advantech.
Tim Mitchell
From a technology standpoint, we are amid a transformative era within the healthcare industry. In a hospital setting, where efficiency and accuracy are often life-or-death matters, the increased availability of IoT devices is revolutionizing the healthcare space. In any given hospital, there are countless supplies, tools and devices, each of which are extremely expensive. IoT is enabling a better way to track these assets, helping hospitals to operate in a more timely and efficient manner
Additionally, IoT is a driving force behind how patients now interact with technology. Whether it’s follow-up care instructions via a text message, portal sites or email appointment reminders, the idea is to engage patients electronically and remotely. This helps patients, particularly those with chronic conditions, to better control, monitor and manage their health, resulting in a higher quality of care and reduced healthcare costs for all parties.
IoT is allowing the healthcare industry to streamline processes, boosting efficiency and reducing costs, which is why we will continue to see the rapid adoption of these types of devices in the hospital setting.
Here are four ways IoT is currently revolutionizing the healthcare industry:
“Wayfinding”
Healthcare “wayfinding” is a major problem for large medical facilities and hospitals, as most patients are already anxious about having to see a doctor –and this multiplies with the added stress of having to navigate a large, unknown campus. Updating signage, while proven to be effective, has become outdated with the rise of IoT. Digital wayfinding solutions, like blue-dot navigation apps, touchscreen kiosks and tablets that are distributed to patients upon arrival, are sweeping through hospitals across the nation and help reduce new patient anxiety, no matter their age or socioeconomic status.
Patient experience and engagement
Whether it’s a knee surgery or congestive heart failure, patients are now able to take home ‘suitcase kits’ to help doctors monitor their conditions and recovery remotely. Depending on the patient, these kits may include a tablet or different wearable devices that will monitor the patient’s vitals in real-time, like blood pressure, temperature, etc. The patient can also log and report certain conditions or symptoms that they may develop post-surgery, allowing a doctor to provide a diagnosis or recommendation virtually. Post-care has always been an issue in the healthcare industry. The idea is to improve post-care patient engagement and experience via IoT devices to prevent a readmission, which is extremely costly to both the patient and hospital.
RTLS technology
The simple task of trying to track down a nurse or doctor, or locate a specific piece of medical equipment, can cost hospitals hours of lost productivity. IoT devices that utilize Real-Time Location System (RTLS) technology allow the location of specific items or people to be easily and precisely tracked. This helps medical facilities and hospitals to have one unified system for managing inventory, assets and even personnel, resulting in more productivity and budget savings.
By Abhinav Shashank, co-founder and CEO, Innovaccer.
Abhinav Shashank
While healthcare leaders uniformly agree that transitioning to value is the way healthcare is going to be in the coming days, it is unclear to most how they can make the transition without negatively impacting their cost outcomes. In an industry which had primarily been fee-for-service based, healthcare organizations are facing immense pressure to innovate and adapt or risk their long-term viability.
In developing strategies to succeed with these trends, many healthcare leaders are realizing that Medicare Advantage (MA) is a key component to their long-term success. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has projected that Medicare Advantage enrollment will reach an “all-time high” in 2019 with 22.6 million Medicare beneficiaries, given the unprecedented growth. And industry analysts like L.E.K. Consulting say that Medicare Advantage enrollment will rise to 38 million, or 50 percent market penetration by the end of 2025.
Going along the same lines of ensuring long-term success and enhanced patient satisfaction, CMS rates Medicare Advantage plans by giving them Star Ratings which help beneficiaries and their family members make informed decisions. As MA Star Ratings become the most visible mark of success, the only trail of thoughts would be: How to improve these Star Ratings?
How do Star Ratings work?
The Medicare Star Ratings are key measures of the quality of care a health plan provides. The health plans are rated on 45 measures categorized under five categories which portray how a health plan takes care of its beneficiaries.
Needless to say, there’s a lot at stake here. The more Stars a health plan has, the more likely they are to attract beneficiaries. But earning top ratings is a difficult task. Payers that wish to reap the benefits of high Star Ratings also need to deliver impeccable care to their members and ensure a satisfactory experience of care.
What holds MA Plans back from achieving better Star Ratings?
A majority of these measures are defined on the basis of specific service received, claims, or clinical information that verifies access and delivery of care. For example, if there is a large number of members that have a chronic disease, plans can pinpoint them and identify the specific care they have received during the year. After that, they can plan targeted interventions to close the gaps and be on the path to deliver positive outcomes.
However, with limited actionable member data available, MA plans just end up focusing on broad, general interventions as compared to undertaking a member-specific, targeted approach. MA plans require timely and detailed information about their members’ health to create interventions that have a lasting impact.
Additionally, it’s important to realize that beneficiaries don’t just have high-quality care, but also have quick access to healthcare service. MA plans need to ensure that the quality of care is always upheld. In most cases, it stems out of efficient collaboration between the clinical staff and healthcare technology.
More importantly, improvements in Star Ratings depend significantly on how engaged a patient is. For example, measures which are related to medication adherence are almost completely hinged on strong patient engagement that makes it easier for patients to get access to their medications and take them on time. In other words, MA Plans need to deploy efforts that are aimed at implementing holistic strategies to address patient needs.
We live in a world where medical errors are the third leading cause of death behind cancer and cardiac disease, leading to more than 200,000 preventable deaths every year. We have an aging population growing at an unprecedented rate: 8.5 percent of people worldwide (617 million) are aged 65 and older, and this percentage is projected to jump to nearly 17 percent (1.6 billion) by 2050, leading to an anticipated physician shortage of more than 50,000 by 2025. On top of all of this, healthcare costs are projected to increase to over 25 percent of GDP in the United States by 2025. The convergence of these events is pushing the entire industry to begin leveraging technology more than it has in the past.
Many of these challenges can be remedied by leveraging Industrial IoT (IIoT) technology that’s been proven to solve similar challenges in other industries. Could an interoperable, connected healthcare platform that applies the principles of an IIoT connectivity architecture to share data throughout the healthcare system be the cure for our ailing healthcare system?
West Health, now the Center for Medical Interoperability, seems to think so. In 2013 they published a report showing how an interoperable, connected healthcare system could provide nearly $30 billion in industry savings while improving patient outcomes in the process. These connected healthcare platforms provide the foundation for innovation that is needed to make a meaningful data-driven change in healthcare. It’s these platforms that open the door to application developers everywhere to create modality-specific applications using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
So what exactly is a connected health platform and how does it provide a foundation for transformational change in healthcare? First, a connected health platform consists of hardware (gateways and servers) and embedded software components that are designed to take all of the data from any medical device (clinical or remote) and convert the data in a single usable format that gives providers access to a complete data set.
This connected platform will provide a variety of user interfaces, analytics and clinical applications to help users throughout the healthcare ecosystem distill value from this newly-gathered data. The applications range from the early detection of sepsis, to predicting cardiac arrest, to providing business analytics like bed and device utilization. The connected health platform will become the center of an ecosystem for further application development, similar to that of an online app store – but with built-in medical-grade safety and security. The connected health platform must ensure data security and patient privacy by aligning to guidance provided by the FDA on cybersecurity, and meeting the standards defined by HIPAA.
However, these connected health platforms are only as effective as the data they capture, which is determined by the connectivity frameworks they are built upon. Many of the currently deployed platforms are not platforms at all, but a collection of disparate systems that provide silos of individual device data.
These legacy systems have been built using internally-developed, proprietary, message-based communication technology. As the first step towards the development of a connected health platform, modern web services-based communication has been deployed on top of the legacy technology to begin integrating all of the disparate data streams via onsite data centers or the cloud. Although this is a step in the right direction, these platforms are far from complete. Because of the legacy communications infrastructure they are built upon, they are only able to aggregate a portion of the data making these systems a poor fit for true near-patient, real-time clinical decision support – the key to efficiently providing improved patient outcomes.
The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) recognized that the healthcare industry, along with many other “mission-critical” industries, was experiencing a similar set of connectivity and data integration challenges, and thus was not realizing the true benefit of the IIoT. In 2017, they set out to provide recommendations for the fundamental connectivity and security requirements of next generation IIoT systems. Its Industrial Internet Connectivity Framework document (IICF) recommends the Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard as the ideal framework for near patient, real-time connected health platform development. DDS provides a highly reliable, secure, real-time interoperable connectivity platform and is proven in other mission-critical environments, such as autonomous vehicles, naval ships and wind farms. These systems all rely on real-time data that allows medical device companies to design a connected health platform for today and the future without the burden of a less performant message-based architecture.
DDS provides a level of reliability, security and interoperable performance that cannot be matched with any other currently available, standards-based technology. By working with standards-based technology like DDS, healthcare developers can develop systems faster, with lower development and maintenance costs. Using an advanced connectivity software framework allows the connected healthcare platform developers to better focus their core competencies, and their customers’ requirements, clinical workflow, analytics and diagnosis.
The next 10 years will be transformational for the healthcare industry. Innovation will be moving at an unprecedented pace. Big tech, medical device vendors, payers and providers will be racing to develop or leverage new technology to better utilize data to improve patient outcomes, lower the cost of care and run more efficient operations. The connected healthcare platform is the future of the healthcare market. Those who embrace this trend and get to market first will transform the industry and establish a model for high-value, lower cost care for generations to come.
Pillo Health, a Boston-based technology company for patients managing their health at home, announced that is has secured $11 million in funding from leading venture investors to complete its Series-A round. The capital will be used to drive growth and innovation as Pillo Health builds out its voice-enabled medication and care management platform for the home.
Six in 10 Americans live with at least one chronic condition, a leading driver of healthcare costs across the country. Medication non-adherence amounts up to $289 billion in wasted costs annually and leads to a higher mortality rate in the United States.
Pillo Health offers partner organizations an engaging in-home interface and HIPAA-compliant technology platform to create customized voice-first health and wellness experiences; empowering them to deliver better care into the home, enhancing patient connections to their care teams, and aligning with the growing trend of voice-enabled technologies in the healthcare industry.
This round of funding was led by Stanley Black & Decker’s corporate venture capital arm with significant participation from Samsung Ventures. Existing investors, including BioAdvance, Hikma Ventures – the corporate venture capital arm of Hikma Pharmaceuticals PLC (LSE:HIK) – Hackensack Meridien Health System’s Innovation Center Fund and Civilization Ventures, also participated. Pillo Health will use the funds to continue development of its HIPAA-compliant technology platform and to develop additional voice-first experiences for partners to deliver digital health solutions into the home. The company is also currently hiring in its Boston, MA and Genoa, Italy, offices.
“We look forward to the continued evolution of the Pillo Health platform as we work with organizations addressing the management of chronic conditions for patients at home,” said Emanuele Musini, Co-founder and CEO of Pillo Health. “Stanley Black & Decker and Samsung have made a strong commitment to the health and wellness of millions of Americans looking to remain independent longer, with a focus on tailoring voice-first technologies for their customers and revolutionizing the way healthcare is delivered into the home.”
Pillo Health and Stanley Black & Decker are also jointly launching Pria by BLACK+DECKER in the U.S. later this year. Pria is powered by the Pillo Health platform and will be available for consumers to purchase in late summer online, with additional distribution channels to follow.
Larry Harper, vice president of Stanley Ventures, stated that “Pillo and Pria represent an important and growing strategic focus for our organization as we continue to find ways to help seniors age in place at home and enjoy their later years in familiar surroundings. The partnership between Pillo Health and Stanley Black & Decker is strong, and together we expect to have a large impact on the senior healthcare market with more innovations on the horizon.”
Forescout Technologies, Inc. announces insights from 75 real healthcare deployments with more than 10,000 virtual local area networks (VLANs) and 1.5 million devices contained within the Forescout Device Cloud, with a specific focus on 1,500 medical VLANs with more than 430,000 devices. Launched in July 2017, the Forescout Device Cloud is one of the world’s largest crowdsourced device repositories and now contains more than eight million devices from more than 1,000 customers who share anonymized device insights.
“The Forescout Device Cloud provides us with game changing data from millions of devices around the world, and what we are releasing today is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Elisa Costante, head of OT and Industrial Technology Innovation at Forescout. “Our findings reveal that healthcare organizations have some of the most diverse and complex IT environments, which are compounded because of compliance risks. Every time a patch is applied, there is concern around voiding a warranty or impacting patient safety. These organizations are dealing with lifesaving devices and extremely sensitive environments.”
The convergence of IT, IoT and OT makes it more difficult for the healthcare industry to manage a wide array of hard-to-control network security risks. IoT and OT devices are rapidly increasing in numbers, but traditional IT still represents the most vulnerable attack surface. Forescout uses the Device Cloud data to analyze more than 150 attributes per device to bring increased device intelligence and improved auto-classification to its customers. Forescout will leverage the increasing amount of data and intelligence gathered from the Device Cloud to generate future insights on the characterization and risk posture of connected devices across industries.
Forescout researchers found that the most common devices on medical networks are still traditional computing devices (53 percent) followed by IoT devices (39 percent), including VoIP phones, network printers, tablets and smart TVs. OT systems, including medical devices, critical care systems, building automation systems, facilities, utilities and physical security, comprise eight percent of the devices on medical networks.
Within the OT device category, the three most common connected medical devices found were patient tracking and identification systems (38 percent), infusion pumps (32 percent) and patient monitors (12 percent). Considering the growing number of vulnerabilities in OT environments, we can see an increase in the attack surface in healthcare environments.
Healthcare organizations riddled with devices running legacy Windows operating systems
The Forescout Device Cloud Report highlights that 71 percent of Windows devices within these healthcare deployments are running Windows 7, Windows 2008 or Windows Mobile, with Microsoft support planned to expire on January 14, 2020. Running unsupported operating systems poses a risk that may expose vulnerabilities and has the potential to impact regulatory compliance.
Diversity of operating systems and vendor sprawl creates headaches
The diversity of device vendors and operating systems present on medical networks adds to the complexity and increases security challenges. Forescout’s research found that 40 percent of healthcare deployments had more than 20 different operating systems. When looking at the different types of operating systems found on medical VLANs, 59 percent were Windows operating systems and 41 percent were a mix of other variants, including mobile, embedded firmware and network infrastructure and many more.
Measles continues to spread in the United States as health officials seek to stem the worst outbreak of the disease in decades. More than 700 cases have now been reported, about half if them involving children under the age of five.1
James D’Arezzo
James D’Arezzo, CEO of Condusiv Technologies, says, “It is the job of our healthcare database networks to map a situation like this in order to help caregivers control it.” D’Arezzo, whose company is the world leader in I/O reduction and SQL database performance, adds, “Unfortunately, some pieces of this network are missing, and a number of others don’t work very well.”
Experts in the field agree. According to a recent report by team of scientists led by the National Institute of Health, while analysis of data derived from electronic health records, social media and other sources has the potential to provide more timely and detailed information on infectious disease outbreaks than traditional methods, there are significant challenges to be overcome. Big data offers a “tantalizing opportunity” to predict and track infectious outbreaks, but healthcare’s ability to use it for such purposes is decades behind that of fields like climatology and marketing.2
Nonetheless, progress in data sharing has been made. State, local, and territorial health departments now have access to healthcare-associated infections data reported in their jurisdictions to the Center for Disease Control’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN). Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia now use NHSN for that purpose.3
However, D’Arezzo notes, this data has its origins in a multiplicity of far-flung healthcare organization IT systems. To be usable, it must be pulled together through millions of individual input-output (I/O) operations. The system’s analytic capability is dependent on the efficiency of those operations, which in turn is dependent on the efficiency of the computer’s operating environment. The most widely used operating system, Microsoft Windows, is in many ways the least efficient; the average Windows-based system pays a 30 percent to 40 percent penalty in overall throughput capability due to I/O degradation.4
When you hear the words “cancer treatment,” you probably think of things like chemotherapy, radiation or even hair loss. While many cancer patients go through painful procedures that create uncomfortable and life-changing side effects, there might be new ways to help them deal with the disease and their care.
Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are technology trends in healthcare that have recently taken the industry by storm. While many researchers have been interested in this technology for some time, it’s only been in the past few years that studies have started to prove its usefulness in helping cancer patients undergoing care. Here are the essentials you should know to understand the use of VR and AR for cancer patients.
What are VR and AR?
Virtual reality is an immersive technology that closes the user off from the real world. Using a headset and video screen, the user can feel the experience of being transported to new locations. If you’re unfamiliar with this technology, do a quick online search to find videos of people who feel they are falling or that things are moving toward them in such a way that they instinctively shift their body to avoid contact. These videos are amusing, but this technology is so much more than just fun.
Augmented reality, often called AR, uses a camera or smartphone to add digital elements to the real world. Typical uses are lenses on the popular app Snapchat or the ever-intriguing game of Pokemon Go. AR has many applications in healthcare as well.
Use of VR and AR in healthcare
Medicine and other treatments are both palliative and curative. However, all medicines and procedures have limitations and at times create negative effects that patients must adapt to or learn to overcome. Researchers continually look for new ways to impact patient care with immersive technologies and other cutting-edge advancements. Both AR and VR have received acclaim for their role in the healthcare industry.
Not only can this tech help patients, but it can improve healthcare as a whole. A few of the ways VR is impacting healthcare can be seen in the treatment of chronic pain, the restoration of low vision in older patients or those with damaged vision, and the expedited recovery of patients after traumatic brain injury.
By Michelle Davey, CEO and co-founder, Enzyme Health.
Michelle Davey
Today, our healthcare system is changing, and it’s changing quickly.
What’s leading the way for the remarkable shifts we’re seeing in our industry? Record-breaking investments into digital health (more than $14 billion in 2018 alone). Every day, we see digital health leaders working toward more affordable and accessible care for patients everywhere.
However, as we evolve and advance, we can’t ignore the glaring problem that still plagues the industry: clinician burnout. It’s a terrible symptom of a system that’s no longer working. Clinicians are 15 times more likely to experience burnout compared to any other working professional, and they’re killing themselves at alarming rates — the highest of any profession.
I believe the very technology we’re creating to better serve patients can also save clinicians — as long as we’re mindful of how we bring forth change. Here’s how we can do it.
Tech is helping clinicians prioritize flexibility, autonomy and career mobility
Our most recent generation of clinicians are approaching work very differently than their predecessors. Studies show that more Millennials are choosing to stay at home than Gen X before them. Many attribute this to our current economic climate and a changing attitude towards work-life balance.
In healthcare, technology is keeping pace with this cultural shift by empowering clinicians to live on their own terms. How? Currently, one in five physicians use telehealth. That number is expected to triple to more than 60 percent by 2022, with many stating that they plan to adopt new technology because they’re experiencing burnout and want more flexibility.
What does this new work-life balance look like for clinicians? A level of career mobility that hasn’t been available to them until now. For example, with asynchronous medical assessments, the days of darting from exam room to exam are behind us. These software-enabled questionnaires mirror a clinician-patient interaction, so clinicians can review responses on their own time to diagnose and develop a treatment plan in a matter of minutes.
Technology is alleviating the pressure felt from a growing physician shortage
Burnout is intensifying another crucial problem in the healthcare industry: our physician shortage. Recent findings suggest that by 2030, the United States will have a shortage of 120,000.
What does burnout have to do with this? Many clinicians are reducing hours at work to alleviate their feelings of burnout. This is especially true for young clinicians who are starting families. Female clinicians in particular take on a disproportionate share of child care and family responsibilities. To manage this new chapter in life, they’re often faced with taking a “career detour.”
New digital health solutions are shifting this reality, offering options that allow clinicians to work when and where they want. This is a significant win for the healthcare system. We get to retain highly qualified clinicians who might otherwise have no other option but to leave the profession–temporarily or permanently. It’s also a huge win for our clinicians. They no longer have to ask, “is it possible to work,” and instead get to decide “when and how am I going to work.”
Clinicians’ jobs are becoming more and more efficient
One reason we’re seeing the fast adoption of telehealth technology among clinicians is because it’s making their jobs more efficient–not more difficult. We might think it’s a no-brainer that technology should make our lives easier, but in healthcare, that hasn’t always been the case. For example, with past advancements like electronic health records, a common complaint was the cumbersome administrative tasks that came with them.
Pillo Health
When you hear the words “cancer treatment,” you probably think of things like chemotherapy, radiation or even hair loss. While many cancer patients go through painful procedures that create uncomfortable and life-changing side effects, there might be new ways to help them deal with the disease and their care.