Healthcare

Trends and innovations

    Healthcare industry trends that we witness today are new technologies and solutions that address the requirements for clinical diagnosis, treatment, and disease management. The global COVID-19 pandemic led to an upsurge in technologies for disinfecting, limiting transmission, detecting disease spread, as well as for treatment, patient management, and immunization. The advancements in the healthcare industry range from e-consultations, telemedicine, real-time diagnosis to accessing digital therapeutics provided by immersion technology tools. Genetic analysis, clinical data storage, and big data & analytics enable the development of precision medicine.
    Customised treatment planning and execution for individual patients using real-time, remote monitoring devices. The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), and data management practices is making hospitals smarter. These solutions enhance workflows and staff scheduling and provide connected infrastructure, devices, and systems to accelerate accurate and equitable clinical services.

Impact Of Healthcare Industry Trends
    Healthcare employ AI and the internet of medical things (IoMT) for real-time, continuous, and remote monitoring of patients. Telemedicine solutions enhance accessibility to clinical services for patients unable to visit hospitals frequently. Big data & analytics processes structured and unstructured medical data and biomedical literature to generate novel insights. Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) enhance digital therapy experiences.
    3D Printing, particularly bioprinting, enables the development of quality prosthetics and tissue and organ transplants while limiting the need for donors and reducing the risk of graft rejection. With the growth of digitization in healthcare, blockchain and cloud computing technologies play a major role in clinical data collection, storage, and exchange. Lastly, developments in genomics, nanomedicine, and regenerative medicine are advancing personalized healthcare.

Artificial Intelligence
    AI is replacing conventional labor-intensive and time-consuming processes in healthcare with rapid, remotely accessible, and real-time solutions for diagnosis, treatment, and disease prevention. Developed software platforms, application programming interfaces (APIs), and other digital products to extend the benefits of AI. Some of the applications of AI in healthcare include clinical workflow management, advanced surgery assistance, and medical diagnostics.
    Developing tools for cardiac risk diagnosis and measuring tools. The CardioEchoAI, a heart ultrasound image analysis tool. It uses deep learning algorithms to mimic steps performed by a cardiologist during a regular heart ultrasound examination, speeding up the analysis of 2D transthoracic echocardiography (TTE). The automated heart ultrasound imaging workflow reduces the average examination time from 30 to 5 min, as well as increases the overall accuracy and diagnosis.

Internet of Medical Things
    IoMT is instrumental for the development of products that need less or no human interaction to provide healthcare services. Connected medical devices, equipment, and infrastructure enable multiple applications like automatic disinfection, smart diagnosis, and remote patient management to name a few. Cognitive IoMT (CIoMT), a recent development, which integrates sensory information, automatic processing, and communication through networks for real-time diagnosis, monitoring, tracking, and disease control.
    Uventions develops solutions for automated disinfection of surfaces and infrastructure. With multiples for disinfection of air in the room, door handles, objects, surfaces, and handrails. These solutions are easy to install in settings like hospitals, clinics, offices, airports, hotels, and even cruise ships. The system detects the presence of people in a room or door handle usage and automatically disinfects using ultraviolet C (UV-C) light radiation. The solution documents the disinfection process and reports in real-time through a dashboard.

Telemedicine
    The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of telemedicine by many governments, healthcare systems, clinicians, and patients. To tackle the pandemic, governments issued telemedicine guidelines to decongest healthcare facilities. This minimizes the load on facilities and reduces the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) as medical practitioners reach their patients via telecommunication. Moreover, telehealth services facilitate public health mitigation strategies by increasing social distancing. Telemedicine also aids to assist elderly people remotely, reduces bed space, and conserves clinical supplies.
    Providing a tele-ICU platform. The platform offers a fully customizable proprietary dashboard, providing a snapshot of all ICU patients and beds to relay time-critical information demonstrating their need for care. Ceiba AI-based predictive alerts for sepsis, mortality, length of stay, early warning patient deterioration, acuity level scoring, automated doctor progress notes, and nurse notes. Moreover, the solution is easy to integrate with any electronic health record (EHR) platform.

Big Data & Analytics
    Digitisation is transforming medical data collection, storage, diagnostic techniques, treatment planning, surgical workflows, remote patient monitoring, and consultations. The volume of health and medical data is expected to increase exponentially in the coming years. Big data & analytics provides tools and solutions to analyze the unstructured and huge volumes of medical data. It improves the patient-based services, detects diseases earlier, and generates new insights into disease mechanisms. Moreover, big data solutions monitor the quality of the medical and healthcare institutions, as well as enable better treatment methods.
    A decentralised platform for secure, fast, and transparent exchange and usage of medical data. MediChain uses blockchain technology to securely store health records. It provides access to a patient’s record to doctors, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacists, and health insurers while recording transactions on the distributed ledger.

Immersive Technology
    The use of immersive technologies, such as AR/VR and MR, is on the rise in the healthcare sector. Applications for VR in healthcare vary from rehabilitation therapy and exposure therapy anxiety disorders to aiding in cognitive and physical rehabilitation. AR/VR also plays an important role in medical education. Immersive technologies also find applications in surgery, for instance for the perioperative projection of patient information, holographic images, and scans.
    Immersive technologies to support patient care in both adults and children. They specialies in virtual reality (VR) distraction therapy to support pain and anxiety/stress management. Rescape Innovation solution offers cystic fibrosis (CF) patients to view therapeutic documentaries, wherein they can travel among the planets in the solar system or experience surfing, skydiving, and other adrenaline-fueled activities. Their interventions reduce anxiety in patients.

mHealth
    Mobile health technologies provide access to personalised information using digital solutions and connected devices. Mobile devices enable visualisation of health issues that prevent patient commitment. Unconstrained by geographical boundaries and using real-time data streams, smartphone-linked wearable sensors, point-of-need diagnostic devices, and medical-grade imaging make healthcare delivery more equitable and accessible. mHealth solutions played a critical role in controlling the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic by enabling contact tracing, surveillance, quarantine control and management, testing, and dissemination of relevant information, as well as immunisation cycle tracking and notification.
    Developing a mobile health platform. M4Life’s provides a simplified and smooth patient/caregiver relationship, allowing information traceability inside the mHealth care chain. Using a blockchain-based architecture to share prescriptions, diagnostic images, medical certificates, patient consent. Moreover, it offers a telemedicine interface for communication between patients and physicians.

3D Printing
    3D printing is gaining traction in the healthcare industry for multiple applications like printing lightweight prosthetics, bionics, and casts for fracture repair. The use of inexpensive, lightweight biomaterials and smart materials ensures improvement in care delivery and time of production while reducing costs. 3D printing technologies are advancing the development of patient-specific models of organs and surgical tools, using the patient’s own medical imaging. Another area of application includes personalized surgical instruments that increase a surgeon’s dexterity and support better surgery outcomes while facilitating faster and less traumatic procedures.
    A user-friendly technology for planning & executing complex surgeries. Graft3D utilises the radiological assisted 3D Model (RAM) technology to visualize a patient’s anatomy prior to surgery. Their Virtual Surgical Platform (VSP) assists doctors in predetermining surgical cuts. They designs patient-specific implants (PSI) with informed evidence from nearly 100 successive case studies on complex surgeries. It uses a haptic device that allows doctors or surgeons to sense the bone consistency.

Blockchain
    The security and traceability of blockchain make the technology suitable for multiple applications in the healthcare industry. Some of these include electronic medical records, remote patient monitoring, pharmaceutical supply chain, and health insurance claims. The blockchain technology supports the management of EHRs and FHIRChain (Fast Health Interoperability Records) for sharing clinical data. It also plays an important role in smart contracts, tackling drug counterfeiting, as well as storing, sharing, and retrieving remotely collected biomedical data.
    Developing blockchain-based drug traceability and anti-counterfeiting solution. The Blockpharma app allows the consumer to instantly check the authenticity of the drug box. BlockPharma integrates with multiple information systems and stores authenticated data on medicines stored on Crystalchain, its private blockchain. Upon detection of a falsified medicinal product, the laboratories immediately alert BlockPharma which then adds the medicine to its flagged list.

Cloud Computing
    Cloud computing allows clinicians to establish quality patient journeys supported by tech-enabled care delivery via telehealth and remote monitoring. It allows for greater storage capabilities and processing power for data analytics and eliminates the need for on-premises storage. The cloud platform integrates network, security, billing, monitoring, and alerts, together with access and identity management. It also provides streamlined data access, data storage and management, data backup and recovery, smart data potential, and data interoperability, among others.
    Latest advancements in cloud computing, data analytics, blockchain, and AI-based technology. It provides a platform for connecting patients and healthcare providers to local and global expert radiologists on-demand. Radmol AI technology enables accessing reports from anywhere, at any time. It creates solutions that democratise access to healthcare, enabling patients, physicians, and providers.

Genomics
    There have been notable efforts in developing genomics tools for various applications in recent times. Integration of both genomic knowledge and genomic processes into existing clinical workflows would ensure physicians perform established communication and actionable recommendations that a genomic test can provide to patients. The new arena of personalized medicine is possible due to the advent of innovations in genomics. Gene therapy and gene-based therapy solutions have revolutionised clinical medicine and specialty care for several unmet clinical needs.
    Predicting human traits and diseases based on genomics data. The proprietary platform performs genomic risk prediction based on polygenic risk scores (PRSs). Allelica’s technology uses machine learning algorithms to accelerate clinical genomics for applications in precision medicine. The solution identifies individuals with a high genetic liability of cancers and heart diseases who are unidentified by traditional risk models.