Implants, stents, genome sequencing, non-invasive surgeries, transplants, and prosthetics — the evolution in medical sciences over time has been stupendous, to say the least. The proliferation of technology has provided an impetus to several elements of the end-to-end healthcare value chain — consultation, maintenance of health records, surgical and diagnostic procedures, large-scale production of drugs, personal health monitoring, and many others.
These benefits are not limited to the healthcare infrastructure or providers alone. Today, we laypeople are experiencing first-hand advantages, such as early diagnoses, personalization, real-time and remote patient monitoring, and a greater focus on geriatric healthcare — all of which have led to a better quality of patient care and flexibility for patients and medical staff. Several aspects of technology in different stages of research and commercial deployment have enabled this evolution. Some of the key ones are:
- AI, which has become omnipresent and transcends the complexities of several domains, has already made its mark in healthcare applications; for instance, in terms of analyzing large sets of data from health records, sensors, and images. Better correlation of test results, accurate predictions of health risks, and high-quality scan reports and visualizations are resultant benefits that have come about in our everyday life.
- The emergence of smart healthcare devices in the market is another evidence of the application of AI, combined with advancements in hardware. Wearables, including several of their avatars such as wearables, smartwatches, eyewear, and skin patches, are touted to have great potential in addressing rising healthcare costs. These are at different stages of acceptance by the masses; while fitness trackers are prevalent, an innocuous earbud that can analyze our Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, which in turn can help predict the occurrence of an epileptic attack, is not as common.
- Cloud technologies and Big Data systems enable storing and processing of large-scale healthcare data from several sources with speeds that we did not anticipate about 10 years back. This has helped scale up solutions in the aforementioned realms in a cost-effective manner.
- Robotic surgeries, remote monitoring, and deployment of humanoids for first responder systems, powered by IoT and 5G, are in developmental and testing stages, and will likely become ubiquitous soon.
- The applications of Virtual Reality (VR) in medicine, while still at their nascent stages, are also promising. Areas of relevance, particularly of high impact, include medical training, treatment of phobias, and other psychiatric conditions and physiotherapy.
- Another such technology that will likely bolster healthcare, through its use cases in creating surgical tools, implants, and prosthetics, is 3D printing.
The possibility of integration of some of these developments, leading to value-added services and augmented feature-rich products, has huge promise and potential. Technology will likely revolutionize traditional formats of almost all aspects of healthcare; for instance, in the near future, we could even hope to see an automated insurance processing system that kicks into action, when we check in for a medical procedure, saving us two dozen frantic phone calls to have the procedure “covered and approved” under insurance.
