Pratiti Technologies

Tag: healthcare

  • How IoT is Transforming Healthcare?

    How IoT is Transforming Healthcare?

    When we talk about healthcare, the first thing you visualize is hospitals and medical practitioners. A lot has been made possible in the field due to the availability of IoT devices.

    Traditionally as well, doctors always used to rely on a variety of investigations to diagnose a patient symptom before prescribing medicines. Today, with the advent of IoT, a lot of these parameters can be monitored in real time and can significantly aid patient rehab and recovery. In the healthcare space of hospitals and medical practitioners, service providers, who can analyze data captured from smart IoT devices and report inferences are making rapid strides.

    There are a number of areas that IoT health care sensors are disrupting:

    • Elder care: From tracking wandering patients to monitoring the engagement and activities of elderly individuals in nursing homes and hospitals, elder care is a big market for IoT medical devices.
    • Patient data-gathering: This is the most mature field in health care but continues to grow with new innovations in the IoT world.
    • Real-time location: Today, hospitals are using IoT technology to track both people and assets at a lower cost than ever before.

    IoT is slowly allowing for the health care industry to reduce its dependency on humans (and their associated human errors). Even though IoT medical devices may not always impress the everyday consumer, they are steadily improving health care and providing early diagnosis and treatment of serious issues. Having said that though, there are quite a few IoT health care challenges that application developers have to overcome, which include:

    HEALTH CARE PRIVACY & HIPAA

    Security is important for the IoT industry as a whole, but it’s even more important when you add in patient privacy. The regulations that medical apps need to uphold make innovation in the IoT medical device field a challenge. HIPAA—the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act—sets the standard for protecting patient data that is created, received, maintained, or transmitted electronically. Privacy is always an issue with health records, but since we now have sensors automatically collecting and storing our medical data, security is even more critical. This means anyone creating an IoT medical device has to keep patient privacy as a top priority.

    IT INTEGRATION & CYBER-SECURITY

    Cyber-security is a major concern in every sector, and the health care industry is no different. In March 2016, for example, health care group MedStar was a victim in a ransomware attack that rendered their computer systems—and vital patient records—unusable. The company had to resort to using paper records until they could restore their systems.

    All this to say, hospitals today are even more hesitant to put anything on their network that is not well-vetted—and since IoT medical devices are the frontier of connectivity and many new applications are hitting the marketplace regularly, they often aren’t well-vetted. But keep in mind that not all technology needs to be deployed within the IT network of a hospital.

    It’s hard to predict where IoT medical devices are headed next—but we are certain that with the rise in interest in IoT and the money being spent in health care innovations, good things are bound to happen in this space.

    If you’re looking for opportunities, health care is a great place to be. We’re excited to see what kind of innovations—from connectivity to data privacy, to application architecture—come into this space.

    Pratiti technologies is focused on the IoT space and has worked extensively in the healthcare sector, helping both medical practitioners as well as health care providers leveraging IoT for improving patient care.

    The core team at Pratiti has over 25 years of industry experience and we have built some great competencies in the Cloud Computing Technologies and Data Analytics. We offer flexible partnership models, through which we partner with you to build scalable technology solutions to bring your innovation faster to market.

    Nitin

    Nitin Tappe

    After successful stint in a corporate role, Nitin is back to what he enjoys most – conceptualizing new software solutions to solve business problems. Nitin is a postgraduate from IIT, Mumbai, India and in his 24 years of career, has played key roles in building a desktop as well as enterprise solutions right from idealization to launch which are adopted by many Fortune 500 companies. As a Founder member of Pratiti Technologies, he is committed to applying his management learning as well as the passion for building new solutions to realize your innovation with certainty.

  • IoT: Creating a More Efficient Healthcare System

    IoT: Creating a More Efficient Healthcare System

    Imagine if you are a relative of a chronically ill patient who has forgotten to take his medicine and his condition is worsening. You receive the alert about the changing health condition, are able to know the location of the patient, quickly check some of their vital parameters remotely to see if hospitalization is becoming necessary. Not only this, by while you are gathering all this information, your car’s navigation system can inform you, which of the nearest hospitals have a free bed and create the clearest traffic route to get there in a jiffy. This is not storied from a sci-fi movie but something which is now being made possible by the Internet of Things (IoT).

    “Internet of Things (IoT) refers to any physical object embedded with technology capable of exchanging data connected together over the Internet.”

    IoT is creating a more efficient healthcare system in terms of time, energy and cost. One area where this technology could prove transformative is in healthcare.

    Care at Home

    There are people all over the world whose health may suffer because they don’t have ready access to effective health monitoring. But small, powerful wireless solutions connected through the IoT are now making it possible for monitoring to come to these patients instead of vice-versa.

    Let’s check this example for a patient suffering from dementia if we can equip them with sensors/ wearable and their health could be monitored remotely by their caretakers hopefully the patient can be allowed to stay within their own homes for longer. This can prevent or delay the need for costly long-term care in nursing homes plus reduce the need for unplanned hospital admissions and Doctor visits.

    Similarly, for elderly, we can detect the onset of a wide range of health issues, from high blood pressure to early signs of delirium. Emergency admissions could be reduced – with proactive health systems in place to address the problems before they become more serious or irreversible.
    The data that could be taken from a network of IoT devices will also be able to significantly lower margins of error thus making remote health diagnosis and treatment possible thus dramatically cutting down on the necessity for routine reviews and checkups. Patients could be allowed to leave hospitals and clinics earlier, as professionals are enabled to monitor them from home and health specialists from around the world can provide consultation or even diagnosis from hundreds of miles away rather than keeping them in hospitals for observation.

    Care in Hospitals

    Hospitalized patients whose physiological status requires close attention can be constantly monitored using IoT-driven, non-invasive monitoring. This type of solution employs sensors to collect comprehensive physiological information and uses gateways and the cloud to analyze and store the information and then send the analyzed data remotely to caregivers for further analysis and review. It replaces the process of having a health professional come by at regular intervals to check the patient’s vital signs, instead of providing a continuous automated flow of information. In this way, it simultaneously improves the quality of care through constant attention and lowers the cost of care by eliminating the need for a caregiver to actively engage in data collection and analysis.

    Using IoT devices patients with chronic diseases may be less likely to develop complications with an early diagnosis, for example, patients suffering from cardiovascular diseases who are being treated with digitalis could be monitored around the clock to prevent drug intoxication. Arrhythmia that is randomly seen on an EKG could be easily detected, and EKG data indicating heart hypoxemia could lead to faster detection of cardiac issues. The data collected may also enable a more preventive approach to healthcare by providing information for people to make healthier choices.

    Nitin
    Nitin Tappe After successful stint in a corporate role, Nitin is back to what he enjoys most – conceptualizing new software solutions to solve business problems. Nitin is a postgraduate from IIT, Mumbai, India and in his 24 years of career, has played key roles in building a desktop as well as enterprise solutions right from idealization to launch which are adopted by many Fortune 500 companies. As a Founder member of Pratiti Technologies, he is committed to applying his management learning as well as the passion for building new solutions to realize your innovation with certainty.

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