From Cutting Wastes to Saving Life IoT is Vital for Healthcare

IoT is making a tremendous impact in the healthcare industry by improving patient care, enhancing equipment care and more importantly in reducing hospitalization costs.

IoT in healthcare is a hot topic. According to Markets and Market research IoT healthcare segment is poised to grow to USD 163.2 billion by 2020. Healthcare sector leverages more IOT than many other sectors. Right from taking fetal monitors, blood glucose levels, electrocardiograms, IoT helps clinicians in healthcare monitoring. IoT enables smarter devices are bypassing the patient-physician one to one interaction.

Today’s sophisticated hospitals provide "smart beds" with remote sensors for their patients. Whether the patients are on bed or got up can be sensed by the hospital authorities today with the help of IoT enabled devices. IoT enabled tools helps home medication dispensers to upload data on the cloud when there is no medication. Patients can capture their health data in their mobile apps. Hospitals use IoT to locate medical devices, personnel and patients. Wireless sensors gather patient data, equipment data, and MED staff data to benefit different stakeholders in a healthcare organization. Sensors and actuators embedded in objects allow devices to collect, analyze, and record data. Access to data makes operations efficient.

Benefits of Healthcare IoT

• Equipment management: Healthcare IoT assists in equipment management, inventory management. Medical inventories are vital assets of hospitals. Anticipating demands and stocking become easy for

healthcare organizations with IoT. Assets like wheelchairs, defibrillators, and infusion pumps needed frequently for treatment can be tracked with IoT sensors.

• Real-time location services help in tracking patients and staff.
• Behavioral monitoring is required to prevent the spread of infections due to unsanitary practices. IoT helps in tracking this.
• Access to the right equipment at the right time is a feature of IoT. This helps clinicians in reducing errors.
• Accessing to information is possible with IoT. This will help in improved outcomes.
• IoT integrates fitness band data to hospital systems.
• Integrated patient care in ICU incorporating machines and devices with Hospital Information System (HIS) drives efficiency in patient care.
• Changes in respiration, heart rate, blood pressure can be tracked and recorded in EHR with IoT. If this data is integrated with medication both time and cost can be reduced.
• Preventive maintenance of biomedical equipment's is highly effective with IoT tools.
• IoT saves the productive time of clinicians by automating the recording of environmental conditions for medicine, vaccinations and food against manual recording.

IoT in Healthcare Analytics

Sensors aids in monitoring a patient’s behavior and symptoms. This helps clinicians to diagnose and offer personalized care. This is achieved with sensors fitted into the body of patients. This is highly effective in monitoring the symptoms of blood pressure and congestive heart failure remotely. Congestive heart failure is prevalent among 4.8 million Americans. In this context, if IoT can offer solutions to detect and treat congestive heart at an earlier stage, it can help in reducing hospitalization expenses by billions annually.

Making Hand Hygiene a Standard Practice

Doctors and nurses and patients are required to comply with hand hygiene monitoring systems to prevent infections. Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the U.S. states one out of 20 patients’ get infections due to lack of hand hygiene. IoT helps in feeding the hand hygiene data into a database and makes hand hygiene a standard practice to prevent infections and resultant fatalities.

IoT for Healthcare is Promising

Remote monitoring of chronic disease patients’ value is pegged at $1.1 trillion per year in 2025. The market growth can be attributed to economic benefits accrued out of IoT enabled improved operational efficiencies. As the future of IoT for healthcare looks promising, corporate deployments are all set to increase. This means there is likely hood for healthcare organizations to go ahead with IoT optimization with the help of reliable IT vendors.

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