Digital health – an overview of Healthcare Transformation for the coming years
The relentless journey of digitalization has touched every sector of the economy, including healthcare. If we look at healthcare as a microcosm then there has been a lot of progress made in the past decades. The development of new medicines and diagnostic tools has revolutionized the sector for the better. This has led to a significant decline in the mortality and morbidity rates globally. Importantly, pestilences like smallpox or plague have become a thing of the past. However, with tremendous progress in various fields, new challenges to seem to have plagued the sector. These include the germination of drug-resistant microbes and the gaining prominence of lifestyle diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and stress, among others. Further, cancer continues to wreak havoc across demographics with a comprehensive cure remaining elusive.
The buzz around healthcare transformation through digitalization has brought in a slew of benefits. This includes managing the burgeoning healthcare sector with AI-enabled medical devices, telemedicine, or blockchain-driven electronic health records. Digitalization in hospitals and nursing homes has brought about a comprehensive improvement in their delivery of services. For example, a computer-based system creates electronic records of patients arriving at the hospital and then manages them seamlessly, right from the admission stage to the eventual discharge. Also, various types of apps tailor-made to monitor the health of individuals have become commonplace.
Medical practitioners have become dependent on the smooth functioning of medical devices to diagnose and treat patients. With so much at stake, glitches in such devices or tools can play havoc with the lives of patients. This is where healthcare app testing should become an integral part of the software development pipeline. Let us understand how healthcare transformation is going to evolve in the coming years.
How digital transformation in healthcare can benefit people
The technology and knowledge intensive the healthcare sector has seen end-users using apps to derive benefits like connecting to a doctor, buying medicines, or doing diagnostics tests, among others.
- Connecting to the doctor: This can often be a matter of life and death as the right doctor can diagnose an ailment quickly and begin the treatment process. However, customers often lack the wherewithal to evaluate the parameters of a healthcare provider. But with healthcare app testing, patients can use a robust app to make informed decisions about their health. Imagine making an appointment with your doctor for a house call or clinic visit from your smartphone, the same way you would book an Uber cab.
- Leveraging big data: Big data can analyze trends or patterns from sets of data received through channels such as online transactions, social media, and eCommerce. These can accrue a number of benefits such as:
- Low rate of medication errors: After analyzing the patients’ records, the software can identify incongruities in terms of prescriptions and patients’ health. These can alert medical professionals to take corrective measures and offer an effective treatment. The quality of such the software can be enhanced through
- Preventive care: A large number of people flock to various departments and add to the already existing pool of patients. Many a time, these people do not require to be there in the first place. Big data analysis can identify such people and prevent them from crowding the wrong department. Thus, healthcare testing services can ensure such software applications with interfaces to big data perform accurately.
- Accurate staffing: Healthcare facilities can be overwhelmed at times with a large influx of patients. By undertaking big data analysis, healthcare service providers can predict such influx and optimize the allocation of the workforce. This way the waiting time for patients at various departments can be reduced drastically.
- Wearable medical devices: Healthcare application testing can preempt the malfunctioning or inaccuracies of wearable devices, which collect health-related data from patients. The wearable device market is likely to be around $27 billion by 2024 (Source: marketwatch.com). The devices come in the form of heart rate sensors, sweat meters, oximeters, and exercise trackers, among others. These devices offer a personalized healthcare experience to the patients and help insurance companies to rate a patient’s risk for illness.
Conclusion
The healthcare industry is undergoing a tectonic shift in favor of technology. This will lead to better diagnosis and treatment of ailments. Moreover, healthcare apps are helping patients to know more about their diseases and the likely treatment protocols to be followed. Patients draw a lot of information from various apps or websites, which were earlier the exclusive preserve of the medical professionals. Healthcare application testing helps in identifying glitches in the applications and ensure they deliver the right outcomes.