How IoT Can Significanlty Improve Healthcare in the Context of Smart City
including EMR vendors (i.e., Veeva Vault
eSource, etc.) and chip makers such as Intel
have launched or are planning to launch
such innovation to their products in the next
3-4 quarters. This will enable devices to push
data directly to EMR systems hosted on the
cloud 14 .
(NFC) smart medication packages. This
platform can interoperate with medical kits
from different makers. Medical devices can
be registered, verified and generate alerts of
missed dosage intake and push data to the
EMR systems. This automates the
documentation process, removing paper-
based or manual data entry. During the pilot
of this platform, the patient medication
compliance rate reached a very high 92% 16 .
Enhancing medical devices and equipment
interoperability will enable the safe, secure
and effective exchange of information
among one or more medical devices through
standard communication protocols. This will
potentially
improve
efficiencies
by
eliminating manual data entries at various
milestones, patient safety and control
manual data capture errors, with the same
level of inputs. The Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) has been collaborating
with hospitals, health care providers,
manufacturers and standards development
organizations to promote medical device
interoperability through synchronization of
measurement parameter unit and time,
alignment of data transmission protocols,
categorization and labelling of equipment
based on interoperable standards followed,
etc. This can significantly boost the usage of
EMR and information sharing rates among
hospitals, which can improve the Smart City
score 15 .
To summarize, automation of the patient
health data capture process will save
significant physician and nursing personal
time bandwidth, which could be delivered
proactively among larger patient/deprived
groups, thereby enhancing the reach of
patient care.
C ONCLUSION
The Internet of Things has tremendous
potential to automate processes, empower
stakeholders with real time actionable
information exchanges and not only raw
data. The industry is embracing digital in the
form of digitization, but that is just the tip of
the iceberg. A shift to a highly matured state
such as digital transformation by automating
associated business processes will mark the
onset of truly smart healthcare systems.
Further, IoT-led innovations will drive a shift
towards highly mature, value-based care
indicators for Smart City health, improving
operational efficiency, collaboration and
better quality of life.
TCS, for example, is working on a SaaS
platform for improving clinical trial cycles.
The platform ensures verification of
individual medication intake via sensor-
enabled and Near Field Communication
14
http://www.sascommunity.org/planet/blog/category/eclinical-systems/
http://www.intel.in/content/dam/www/program/embedded/internet-of-things/blueprints/nexcom-intel-medical-blueprint.pdf
15 https://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DigitalHealth/ucm512245.htm
16http://www.appliedclinicaltrialsonline.com/digitally-enhanced-janssen-drives-effort-bring-suite-smart-clinical-trials-practice-2017?pageID=1
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