Prior to IoT, doctors and patients interact through phone calls, text messages, or face-to-face visits. There is no other option for the doctors to monitor their patients on a timely basis and to suggest necessary health-relevant steps.

Nonetheless, the transformation of IoT in healthcare has drastically changed the scenario. It has empowered healthcare providers to offer supreme care by remotely monitoring the patients through IoT-enabled devices.

Consulting a doctor is now just like walking in the park, and that’s why it has increased patients' engagement rate. The Internet of Things is revolutionizing the healthcare sector and is valuable to hospitals, clinics, doctors, patients, and healthcare workers.

In this article, we will understand exactly why the healthcare industry needs the Internet of Things.

1. Converting data into actionable information

A patient’s health that is measurable will be the future of the healthcare sector as it could be easier to improve. IoT assesses an entire database to obtain actionable insights professionals can leverage for earlier and more informed decision-making.

IoT enables huge computational power to learn different patterns across a few hundred thousand patients. It will allow doctors to react rapidly and tackle a health condition before it becomes crucial. Object measurement and health tracking are necessary for better outcomes, and that is why healthcare needs the Internet of Things.

2. Better Health

Wearable devices such as fitness bands and other wire-free connected devices such as blood pressure, heart rate monitoring, and glucometer enable patients to give more attention to their health condition. These devices are adopted to inform about calorie count, watch out on exercise, appointments, BP changes, and whatnot!

IoT considers each tiny detail about the patient's health status to make the most beneficial decisions, especially for elderly patients. It has impacted majorly on people living alone and with their families. On any variation or disturbance in the day-to-day activities of an individual, the alert mechanism notifies family members by sending signals so that they consult health providers at the right time.

3. Digital Preventive Healthcare

The Medical Internet of Things is at the core of the digital healthcare system, and henceforth it is an essential element of digital prevention. It is concerned with all stages of digital prevention that includes, preventing the origin of disease through determining risk factors and disease studies, diagnose with digital diagnostic tools, medications that leverage digital tools to associate with healthcare providers, consultations, remedies, and track the prediction via real-time communications among patients and health professionals.

IoT plays a major role in patient health data management created either by the care providers or patient-generated health data. Healthcare IoT handles multiple stores with cloud systems. It syncs and provides huge amounts of data gathered from patients that assist in the clinical decision-making procedure.

4. Improve Patient Engagement and Satisfaction

Connecting objects and people, the Internet of Things has started actually affecting patient engagement and satisfaction. RPM (Remote Patient Monitoring) devices obtain information like important signals and sleeping activities and send those data to healthcare providers to manage a patient's care.

RPM devices also enhance patient engagement. When patients are directly concerned about monitoring their medical details, it will help generate awareness about their health.

RPM technology can connect with other systems such as EHR, transfer data easily through the cloud, and mitigate the need for the workforce to manually enter the data.

The smartphone app nowadays offers existing ER waiting times, assists patients find a way out in the hospital, connects patients to their Electronic Health Record (EHR), provides appointment reminders, and sends location details to services and healthcare staff.

5. Better Population Health Management

Healthcare organizations leverage IoT to improve their population health management abilities such as monitoring of wearables’ growth, improved home monitoring of chronic diseases, managing the EHR blanks using patient-generated health details, use of social media platforms for predictive analysis, and enhancing device integration for superior patient safety.

The enormous growth of IoT in the Healthcare sector compelled Healthcare organizations to look for the right, more efficient, and effective processes to keep their patients in good health and good mood.

It shows how IoT can prove to be a vital factor to improve patient management that results in happier and healthier patients.

Challenges in implementing IoT in Healthcare

Each opportunity comes with some obstacles, and healthcare is no exception. One will face many challenges while integrating the Internet of Things with the Healthcare system.

1. InterOperability

As the number of IoT devices increases, interoperability turns into a new challenge. Collected data from the EKG monitoring device or an asthma device often shared directly with the specialist who is operating the patient, but not to the primary care physician. The data exists in storehouses, isolated by vendors.

The other obstacle is to keep tracking devices and maintaining them when they go beyond the hospital network. A physician might send any patient home with any device, and the IT department does not have any information about that.

So choose a tech partner who delivers powerful app integration platforms with the use of microservices and APIs.

2. Data Security

Security is also a nitty-gritty concern as so much data is being produced by a diverse range of IoT devices.

Furthermore, data accuracy, or the virtue of the information generated by the Internet of Things, is essential. Ultimately, this is the data that helps in making medical and business decisions.

So choose a cloud platform to store all the operations and the changes being made on the patient's health data.

3. EHR Integration

Data acquisition from multiple IoT-connected personal health care devices and incorporating it into a patient’s Electronic Health Records (EHR) is crucial and complex as well. If the patient’s healthcare team can use the information, it must perfectly integrate with the EHR. But the data from the devices and wearables are often enclosed in the vendor’s storehouses or the apps. So the physicians are not able to view the data and can’t act accordingly.

The use of APIs and microservices can solve this concern by enabling different software to connect securely.

The Future 

As per Grand View Research, the IoT remote health monitoring market worldwide is anticipated to make more than $300b by the end of 2022.

The technology, therefore, possesses a strengthening future offering independent and mobile health monitoring while mitigating the pressure to visit physicians and health personnel.