Ensuring patient privacy and care in connected hospitals
As the healthcare industry continues to progress digitally, smart connected hospitals are becoming the norm. Intelligent technology is now wide-ranging, spanning hospital equipment, cloud accessible patient charts and scans, electronic health records and connected ambulances. All these innovations are helping deliver more personalized patient care and efficiencies across the board, leading to better healthcare outcomes.
Technology’s influence in the healthcare system
Technology is now involved in every facet of a hospital visit, from the moment a patient is admitted to diagnosis, treatment, prescriptions, discharge and follow up. Human intelligence coupled with intelligent machines is helping improve the precision around diagnoses and treatment options. Essentially, the smart hospital allows clinicians to now focus their efforts on delivering face-to-face care rather than on time-consuming administrative work.
As the connected hospital evolves, it will also be able to use smart technology to help reduce the risk of healthcare-acquired infections, which can trigger sepsis. For example, intelligent technology will now set off an alarm if healthcare workers do not sanitize within 15 seconds of entering a patient’s room. Intelligent sensors will also ensure that health and safety procedures and sterile processes are adhered to by human workers with zero deviation. Connected devices will be able to monitor the air quality and sound an alarm or automatically open windows if more ventilation is required.
To realize this vision of intelligent hospitals, healthcare workers and providers will require seamless connectivity across all systems and providers. In healthcare, there can be zero tolerance for performance issues or downtime. If a nurse can’t enter data into a workflow, numerous problems could arise, such as inefficiencies affecting critical point of care decisions with a life or death impact. This puts the spotlight on improving patient care, which requires software and applications that healthcare workers have confidence in and can rely on at all times.
With life or death decisions hinging on the performance and reliability of digital healthcare systems, smart hospitals simply have no choice but to get it right. To deliver better healthcare and enhance outcomes requires intelligent connected machines to work together with humans to improve the performance of technology across the entire healthcare spectrum.
All IoT Agenda network contributors are responsible for the content and accuracy of their posts. Opinions are of the writers and do not necessarily convey the thoughts of IoT Agenda.