The market for senior care is growing rapidly. This comes as more members of the baby boomer generation enter retirement, partly due to the current health crisis. This will encourage retirement and assisted living communities to adopt the right amenities that cater to the increasing senior population.
The market for senior care has provided a number of solutions for delivering quality services and securing livable conditions for today’s retirees. Presently, there are tools that support independent senior living as well as give aid to family caregivers, physicians, and nurses. Here are five of the most important tools and how they can change the landscape of senior care:
Wearable health monitors
Ever since they hit the market, wearable devices have changed the way we approach healthcare. Smartwatches that come with ECG monitors allow doctors to check a patient’s vital signs from afar. For seniors who choose to live independently, these devices can help healthcare providers identify the early signs of disease. This enables the delivery of immediate care, preventing the onset of complications.
Medical alert systems
In addition to smartwatches, seniors and their healthcare providers can also make use of remote alert systems. These take the form of devices that seniors can activate in case of an emergency. Smartwatches and smartphones can also come with apps that will help notify doctors and nurses in real-time. It’s only a matter of picking the best medical alert systems that feature mobile locating technologies such as GPS, two-way voice communication, and fall detection.
By Terrence D. Sims, president of strategic growth and marketing, Raintree Systems.
Among the many lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic was that most patients are more than willing – dare we say eager? – to interact with their healthcare providers digitally. When safety concerns limited their ability to see their physicians, therapists or other care providers in person, patients enthusiastically embraced virtual visits. And from all indications, they liked the convenience so much that they want to continue taking advantage of this option.
Easy access to telehealth services is just one of the many ways patients are eager to connect online with healthcare providers. In fact, an Accenture survey found that 60% of patients reported that based on their experience using new technologies during the pandemic, they want to use technology more to communicate with their care providers and manage their health.
Even before the coronavirus upended life, patients were increasingly expecting to manage their care digitally – from scheduling appointments, to messaging their care team, to refilling medications, to paying bills. After all, that’s how most of us manage most other aspects of our lives these days, whether it’s travel, banking or shopping.
Healthcare still has a ways to go to catch up with the efficient digital experience other sectors offer. Nearly 60% of U.S. consumers expect their healthcare digital customer experience to be similar to retail, but 62% said they were unable to accomplish their healthcare goals online, according to a NTT DATA study.
Healthcare organizations of all sizes need to better meet these digital expectations to attract patients and earn their loyalty. That means it’s increasingly important to develop and implement a comprehensive digital patient engagement strategy, a.k.a., a digital front door. Whether you’re a specialty OT, PT or SLP practice, a specialty clinic or a large health care system, your digital front door serves as an entryway to all online services and experiences available to your patients for interacting with your office and care providers.
By Vikram Savkar, vice president and general manager of the medical segment, Wolters Kluwer’s Health Learning, Research and Practice business
The pandemic has shone a critical light on every aspect of the medical ecosystem, revealing which systems were adequate and which were not – in a way that only a global crisis could have done. There has been widespread discussion since the start of the pandemic, concerning changes to public health systems, medical supply chains, medical education, telehealth infrastructure, and more. Less often discussed, but just as disrupted by the pandemic, is medical research communication.
Encompassing peer-reviewed scholarly journals, books, websites, conferences, point-of-care devices, and more, the medical publishing ecosystem is a critical connection point, ensuring that clinicians and healthcare leaders around the world have access to current information about new and emerging treatment approaches.
Looking Beyond the Journal
The pandemic generated needs that went well beyond the comfort zone of this traditional set of tools. Even in the fastest scenario, a journal article once submitted takes months to reach readers and is preceded by additional months of research. This ultimately means that a hypothesis that a clinical researcher is exploring will take half a year or more to progress from concept to readership. In the early months of the pandemic, front-line clinicians could not wait six months to consider therapies for their COVID-19 patients. They needed to act immediately.
In the absence of peer-reviewed research in the early months of the pandemic, clinicians turned to preprint servers, case reports, and even social networks – through which they were able to receive real-time advice from fellow clinicians in other hospitals and other countries on “what was working and what was not.”
Now that a year has passed, there is a substantial body of peer-reviewed, well-established work on COVID-19 in traditional journals, and we can expect to see the global community’s therapeutic and public health approach returning to traditional research-based foundations for the remaining years of pandemic response. But the need that the onset of the pandemic revealed – for much faster and less formal channels of information sharing to sit alongside the more traditional channels – cannot be “put back in the bottle”. The need must be addressed with new systems, new technologies, and new approaches – so that the global community can be better prepared for future crises.
In patients of demographics, the inability to produce and regulate glucose levels sets off a diverse set of chain reactions, ranging from unpredictable fits of fatigue to increased blood pressure to potential kidney failure and, in some acute cases, premature death. For the optimal quality of life, diabetics need access to specialized treatments—like consistent insulin injections—to perform day-to-day tasks and ensure glucose regularity.
Although diabetes is life-threatening when left unattended, this disease is highly treatable with the right resources and tools. People can buy insulin for sale even online. While lifestyle adjustments and constant vigilance are vital to regulation, individuals diagnosed with diabetes also rely on innovative, state-of-the-art medical treatments and devices to achieve a fulfilling life, free of debilitating health complications.
Recent technological advancements have vastly improved the diabetic experience, as medical professionals discover revolutionizing treatments, enhance medication safety, and streamline procedures. As medical scientists and physicians work to gain a firmer grasp on diabetes and its ever-changing complications, diabetics can integrate new-and-improved techniques and treatments, making life with diabetes less burdensome and more manageable.
The main areas of use of biotechnology today are medicine, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and other industries, where BioTech innovations can reduce the cost of production, speed up the development of vaccines, or model the changes of genomel. But, the development in this area is very expensive, and the necessary research requires a lot of time, and all kind of resources.
The cost of BioTech solutions is also influenced by the availability of technological and human resources. Research centers, special devices, and highly qualified specialists are needed for the development, testing, and implementation of advances in biotechnology and healthcare. The more there are, the lower the cost of producing medtech products due to the ability to scale development. At the same time, it is necessary to demo the statistically representative data, which demands the repetition of experiments and very careful documentation of all the experiments’ work circles, which create additional costs.
It is necessary to increase capacity in research centers through the purchase of modern and productive equipment to reduce the cost of technology. Also, other ways are needed to modernize production facilities, which will help to speed up the Design-Build-Test-Learn cycle. It should be borne in mind that the equipment itself will not help to process and structure huge amounts of data. As one of the way to optimization, artificial intelligence integration can work nowadays. They take the burden off specialists, dismissing the routine work, and in some ways can structurize the documentation flow and research data storage.
Examples of the use of AI and ML in biotechnology
Scientists from Russia and Belarus have developed a special substrate for efficient stem cell growth. This substrate can be used to develop new materials and technologies in the field of regenerative medicine.
According to the representative of the research group, such substrates can be created based on bacterial cellulose, which is produced by the bacteria Acetobacteraceae bacteria, and which is modified with cerium oxide nanoparticles, which give it unique bioactivity and provide accelerated division of stem cells on its surface, which is the main tool of regenerative medicine.
These cells can self-renew, divide through mitosis and differentiate into specialized cells, that is, turn into cells of various organs and tissues. The researchers used special fluorescent stem cells from transgenic mice with a mutation that gives a green glow to all cells in the body. This made it possible to visualize stem cells on a substrate and analyze the process of their accelerated division.
The healthcare sector is currently undergoing many developments that create new challenges for both large and small medical companies. Healthcare is one of the most sensitive sectors directly linked with people of all walks of life. Thus, the challenges it faces in this new economy require urgent solutions to accommodate those who need it.
Although innovations promise to permanently alter and develop businesses of the future, including healthcare services, their progress won’t be drastic and will take time before they reach their full potential. Recent COVID-19 patterns indicate that demand for care will increase even more in the coming days. Towards 2021 and beyond, the healthcare sector will face more critical challenges they should watch out for. Here are some of them:
Challenge In Data Integration
One of the reasons for this challenge is the lack of a standard data format. Healthcare organizations have collected many data formats throughout the years, and some are incompatible with systems and other data.
Moreover, data privacy and data sharing concerns can limit effective data integration in healthcare systems and facilities. Some healthcare companies even have inadequate knowledge of privacy and privacy legislation. This leads to the lack of a comprehensive strategy for data processing.
In most cases, the people who handle data collection are not the same people who require and utilize the data. In the data transfer, important information may be overlooked; and data ownership may become uncertain and unrecognizable.
Therefore, data must be safeguarded and shared under certain situations, against unlawful access and manipulation. It may be challenging to balance these two interests but healthcare businesses should aim to strike a balance and overcome the challenges in data integration. Data privacy and cybersecurity issues should also be dealt with to prevent more severe issues from happening in the future.
Rising Healthcare Costs
Increasing healthcare costs has an immediate effect on healthcare businesses’ revenues. Higher healthcare costs deter people from lab testing to regular post-visits that eventually lead to poor results among sick patients.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, telehealth has emerged as an invaluable part of care delivery. And by all indications, virtual care is here to stay even after the threat of COVID-19 passes — in large part because of consumer demand. In a report by Qualtrics commissioned by Zoom, 61% of respondents in the U.S. who have used video for healthcare said they plan to attend healthcare appointments both virtually and in person in the future.
The key elements are choice and competition. Consumers want to be able to choose how and where they receive care — and that may include retail and direct-to-consumer solutions or their primary care provider. Sometimes an in-person appointment may be preferred or required, and other times, patients want to save time and money by using high-quality telehealth options.
As more healthcare organizations look beyond the pandemic to building long-term telehealth and virtual care solutions, reliability, consistency, and quality are key to driving adoption, building trust, and improving the patient experience. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Find a solution that integrates into your workflows
When the right technology meets the right application, it becomes nearly invisible to end users. That’s what providers and patients want: a telehealth solution that “just works” and feels as comfortable and intuitive as something they’ve been using for years. The ability to integrate and customize plays a key role in creating that experience.
During the pandemic, I met with many healthcare organizations who stressed that they need their telehealth solution to live in the workflows they use every day.
If your telehealth solution doesn’t sit comfortably in your workflows, it could lead to a variety of issues. If providers need to switch between multiple platforms in their day-to-day work, it could potentially increase time spent on administrative tasks, limit time with patients, and lead to missed appointments and lost revenue. Administrators may find that a parallel workflow duplicates efforts and costs, while an integrated solution could streamline processes and cut down on inefficient spending.
Look for a telehealth solution that has the ability to integrate with your EHR or HIT system, or allows for integration with open platforms through APIs, the latter of which provides flexibility and customization opportunities. A seamless integration enables providers to focus on practicing medicine without fiddling with controls or toggling between platforms.
Wolters Kluwer, Health announces the release of EmmiEducate to improve alignment between patients and their care teams. With educational content tailored to a variety of learning and reading styles, and interoperability across disparate systems and access points, EmmiEducate gives providers the ability to easily support their patients’ information needs within their workflow, delivering easy-to-understand educational materials that mirror the guidance provided to patients during the clinical encounter.
Meeting patients where they are
EmmiEducate aids the expansion of virtual care delivery and helps providers reduce health inequities by more effectively reaching diverse populations through multiple touch points and modalities. EmmiEducate features hundreds of compelling videos, more than 8,000 leaflets in up to 20 languages, and presentation of educational materials at a fifth- to seventh-grade reading level, helping care teams provide content to patients in ways they can better understand and act on.
“How patient education is developed and shared directly impacts whether or not it will be used. Done right, educational touchpoints can improve patient understanding and adherence to their treatment plan, enhance the overall care experience, and build organizational affinity,” said Jason Burum, general manager, healthcare provider segment, clinical effectiveness, at Wolters Kluwer, Health. “By extending clinical decision support to patients, EmmiEducate aligns healthcare stakeholders in a manner that is convenient and highly effective for improving outcomes.”
