How IoT Can Significanlty Improve Healthcare in the Context of Smart City
o Lack of capabilities to capture and share
centrally available clinical data in real
time – Most medical devices are
supported
by
proprietary
communications protocols and therefore
cannot send clinical data over Internet
protocols (IP) to a server on a healthcare
network. Ensuring that all the devices
speak the same language, so that data
collected can be read and understood, is
becoming increasingly difficult due to
the growing number of network
proprietary devices. As a result, many
healthcare facilities have "islands" of
data that cannot be shared and stored in
a centralized location in an automated
fashion.
for health monitoring purposes and not
treatment, consuming a major share of
available bandwidth 4 .
o Gap between required and available
medical workforce - With a growing aging
population, the demand for physicians
and nursing personnel has intensified
around the world, which is already
experiencing doctor shortages. A 2017
study conducted by IHS Inc., predicted
that by the year 2030 the United States
alone will face a shortage of at least 40
thousand physicians 5 .
Even the available medical personnel are
wholly engaged in compliance related
tasks, which limits value for the end
consumer, i.e., patients. According to a
research report published by the
American College of Physicians, Doctors
are wasting over two-thirds of their time
doing paperwork and spent only 27% of
their time in their offices seeing patients,
which drastically impacts their effective
utilization rates 6 .
Apart from this, there is little electronic
information sharing among clinicians and
hospital as there are still major
dependencies on traditional means like
phone, fax, mail, etc. For those who use
Electronic Health Record (EHR), around
40% are not satisfied with the EHR
system due to the huge amount of time
consumed in manual data entry needed
to push the data to the servers. This
situation
results
in
dramatic
Similarly, reading and recording patient
data from a medical device manually
(through paper and pen) by nursing staff,
results in a wastage of around 100
nursing hours daily with up to 24 data
errors for a typical hospital. Saving or
eliminating this wasted time and
expertise could improve the quality of
patient care 7 .
4http://www.corp.att.com/healthcare/docs/remote_patient_monitoring.pdf
http://www.techmahindra.com/sites/ResourceCenter/Infographics/IES/Remote_Patient_Monitoring_Solution.pdf
5 https://news.aamc.org/for-the-media/article/gme-funding-doctor-shortage/
6 https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2016/09/07/doctors-wasting-over-two-thirds-of-their-time-doing-paperwork/#57f6d3a05d7b
7
https://www.buildingbetterhealthcare.co.uk/technical/article_page/Comment_Hospitals_and_the_Internet_of_Things/97292
16
June 2016