The ‘Moment Of Truth’: Healthcare System
In a perfectly healthy environment, the future of our healthcare system would have included virtual reality, 3D printing and prosthetics, augmented reality, and even robotic healthcare workers. In matter of months, the mighty world is waking up to the moment of truth – its overburdened analogue healthcare system that is largely managing the crisis through risky brick-and-mortar visits. Clearly, we need an immediate digital revolution to face this crisis.
Global Medical experts and senior scientists are already looking at major changes that are guaranteed to become healthcare and technology’s future — from the sudden interest in telemedicine, to use of geo-location to follow traces and automation to expedite legacy processes. All while experiencing the highest levels of demand in modern times.
Taking Down The Barriers: Digital Health Goes Mainstream
Breaking down the current situation from the overall care delivery perspective, here are the identified problem areas and the technology that can act as a game changer:
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Remote Care: This is an area which will by far see the most dramatic uptake on adoption across the ecosystem of providers, payers, government, and the end users/patients. The only solution to protect the patient and healthcare worker’s safety and resource optimization is remote care. This entails – remote patient health data capture and monitoring, anomaly detection, population health data analysis, geofencing, creating both a symptomatic risk score and location-based risk score, virtual consultation etc. Telemedicine will gain a lot of traction. Many governments are simplifying their policies and many payers including CMS are making virtual consultations valid for the payment. The time is right for the inflection point for remote care and telemedicine services.
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Long duration & high cost of diagnostic tests: The testing kits are too expensive and take too long to process the results. The past few weeks have seen great innovations across many countries (and many types of testing) to make the testing kits inexpensive and the results faster. Molecular diagnosis is going to experience innovation.
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Effective way of social distancing: There is really no effective way to ensure and enforce social distancing. Technologies such as geofencing could be used to effectively nudge people and encourage social distancing. And, voice technology can effectively make most of the existing operations touchless. It is not a distant future where voice-based operations will be the default way of user experience replacing the touch-based user experience.
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Contact tracing to track patients: Tracking movement of the people using the GPS technology and mapping the movement, the intersection of the population will be extremely helpful to stem the spread of the virus. Many governments have been using some version of the contact tracing technology. Health officials will be able to use the information to isolate people, warn the people with potential infections, and identify and address specific hotspots. Balance between tracking people to keep the population safe while protecting patient and business privacy is an important challenge and needs to be addressed.
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Home monitoring and effective homecare of isolated patients: As the healthcare systems are getting overwhelmed, more patients (with less severe symptoms, recovering patients) are going to be at home and the digital health technology tools will be needed along with telemedicine. Below are few key tools that will help us address modern healthcare crisis:
- ·Virtual home visits of doctors & caregivers – Telemedicine
- Tracking health parameters (vital parameters, biomarker) – IoT based connected devices
- Real time monitoring with edge level analytics – Remote patient monitoring platform
- Medication adherence – Gamification, IoT based devices
- Training for self-care, using medical devices, etc. – Content repositories, Mixed reality
- Self-rehab (virtual guidance) – Mixed reality
- Curated information about the illness, recovery, wellness, etc. – AI based personalization
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Effective physical isolation without social isolation: The ongoing change in public policies by government agencies, has significantly changed our daily lives. Despite all comforts of home, we are feeling anxious for being disconnected from the outside world. For patients staying at home (especially with chronic illness), this takes a major toll on their state of mind. The mental wellbeing certainly affects the treatment efficacy. There is a renewed focus on mental health. Many tools and apps are available for the patients to work on their mental health and other tools for connecting to your social networks. Mixed reality could be leveraged effectively for visualization purposes.
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Overwhelmed health care systems: The healthcare workers are the frontline soldiers. The world is going to augment and replenish the workforce to tackle this crisis. This will mean bringing fresh staff onboard quickly & training them for the necessary skillset. This overwhelming training need is on top of the already urgent need constant training due to high turnover of the staff. Simple, effective training management platform along with innovative learning content (using gamification, mixed reality, hyper interactivity, etc.) will be the urgent need of the hour.
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Accelerated drug discovery: Modern health crisis will act as a catalyst for exponential growth in accelerated drug discovery technology. Pharma companies are using big data driven transformation that use integrated and advanced analytics to accelerate the drug discovery. On-demand lab resource platforms on the cloud are transforming life science research and the drug discovery process. Potent combination of genomic data along with biology, medicinal chemistry, and massive compute resources the game changing medicines will reach patients, faster.
Accelerating The Health System Transformation: HARMAN Care Technologies
HARMAN helps its clients transform care through the development and deployment of innovative, scalable, patient-centric products and platforms that address gaps and inefficiencies in current delivery system using next gen. technologies. Some of our key IP’s are Platforms:
HARMAN Remote Care Platform (RCP)
- Supports remote monitoring, analytics, and risk assessment of patients
- Continua Certified & secure platform with the ability to capture/ingest medical data from various sources and make it available to the healthcare ecosystem/platforms over HL7 FHIR interface.
- Collaboration with Samsung S-Health for remote monitoring of vulnerable population like patients with pre-existing ailments and elderly citizens. S-Health has 500 million downloads worldwide and can connect to not just wearables but more than 70 medical devices for measurements like HR, SPO2, BP etc. This gives us access to a sizable deployed base and medical device ecosystem.
- Supports video content and remote consultations
- Voice Assistant based questionnaire to record patients’ inputs on their health condition
HARMAN Castanet Unified Endpoint Management Platform
Current crisis has challenged providers to think about disaster recovery models. The ability to create satellite care locations with agility makes real-time control on the assets and IT endpoints, particularly important. HARMAN’s comprehensive enterprise device management and IoT platform is helping hospitals manage devices and provide faster deployment over-the-air at a reduced cost from one single console.
HARMAN eNOVA Voice Assistant AI Platform With the increasing demand for touchless interactions, voice technology can be a powerful and safer possibility specially in healthcare. HARMAN with its audio pedigree has its own custom-built voice AI platform specifically built for the enterprise. This can be customized very deeply for specific tasks within healthcare and to follow a medical dictionary of terms. It can be integrated into various devices- speakers, kiosks, digital screens as well as on a mobile application.
HARMAN Media Suite Video Content Management Platform With social distancing at play across industries including healthcare, video is the most engaging and powerful form of communication. HARMAN’s secure enterprise video content management platform helps users (Care providers, Nurses, Physicians, Payers, etc.) create, manage, distribute, and stream video content at-scale. Many healthcare companies today rely on Media Suite for their staff training and live grand cast webinars. In addition, Media Suite can help support high quality telehealth consultations.
Here are a few examples highlighting the rich experience of HARMAN in digital health solutions:
- Use of a television set top box for telemedicine and patient engagement for the elderly population.
- First in the world population health platform - Platform for advanced data science and social determinants of health for the most vulnerable population of the community (homeless base)
- A mobile app for senior citizens who need to be able to monitor pleural effusions post discharge from hospital
- Non-invasive diagnostic medical device for neonatal population for hemolysis testing reducing the testing time from 24 hours to 5 minutes
- Digital sensor-embedded ingestible pill for monitoring physiological reactions
With the right mix of our IP portfolio, experience and skill in building innovative programs and products, we partner with Healthcare providers, payers, digital health platform players in building end to end digital care platforms and products which is both the need of the hour and our insurance for the future.
If you are looking for more information around any products from HARMAN, feel free to reach out to us
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