Healthcare technology | Application & Benefits

Healthcare technology 

Health Technology

Health technology is defined by the World Health Organization as the "application of organized knowledge and skills in the form of devices, medicines, vaccines, procedures, and systems developed to solve a health problem and improve quality of lives". This includes pharmaceuticals, devices, procedures, and organizational systems used in the healthcare industry, as well as computer-supported information systems. In the United States, these technologies involve standardized physical objects, as well as traditional and designed social means and methods to treat or care for patients.

Applications of Artificial Intelligence

AI brings many benefits to the healthcare industry. AI helps to detect diseases, administer chronic conditions, deliver health services, and discover the drug. Also, AI has the potential to address important health challenges. In healthcare organizations, AI is able to plan and relocate resources. AI is able to match patients with healthcare providers that meet their needs. AI also helps improve the healthcare experience by using an app to identify patients' anxieties.

AI uses

In medical research, AI helps to analyze and evaluate the patterns and complex data. For instance, AI is important in drug discovery because it can search relevant studies and analyze different kinds of data. In clinical care, AI helps to detect diseases, analyze clinical data, publications, and guidelines. As such, AI aids to find the best treatments for the patients. Other uses of AI in clinical care include medical imaging, echocardiography, screening, and surgery.

Robots

Modern robotics have made huge progress and contribution to healthcare. Robots can help doctors in performing variety tasks. Robotics adoption is increasing tremendously in hospitals . The following are different ways to improve healthcare by using robots.

Self-Monitoring

Smartphones, tablets, and wearable computers have allowed people to monitor their health. These devices run numerous applications that are designed to provide simple health services and the monitoring of one's health with finding as critical problems to health as possible . An example of this is Fitbit, a fitness tracker that is worn on the user's wrist. This wearable technology allows people to track their steps, heart rate, floors climbed, miles walked, active minutes, and even sleep patterns. The data collected and analyzed allow users not just to keep track of their health but also help manage it, particularly through its capability to identify health risk factors.

The Future of Healthcare Technology

This evolution of digital health technology is crucial in reducing the harm to patients as well as ensuring efficient use of hospital resources and enabling economic sustainability.

A core component of this evolution is interoperability as new models of care are emerging and evolving. Interoperability will enable effective information sharing between care settings, organizations, and geographical locations on a large scale and facilitate information sharing on a smaller scale between professionals and patients to optimize patient outcomes and quality of care. This is hinged on the ability of IT systems across health and care to be interoperable, i.e., compatible with one another.

Benefits of Healthtech

Healthtech has the potential to trim the fat from our traditional healthcare scene. Skyrocketing costs, unbearable wait times, inefficiencies in drug development and limited access to insurance and healthcare providers are all being improved through tech-infused care.

Conclusion

Health technology assessment (HTA) has become a core system to assist healthcare decision-making under resource constraints in many countries around the world. As mentioned above, a lot of systems have been or are currently deployed in middle-income and emerging healthcare systems, often reflecting on the practices in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Regardless of the exact architecture that an HTA system takes in any given healthcare system, it is essential that HTA implementation itself should be regarded as a health policy intervention. As such its benefits for policy-makers, payers, and the wider society should exceed the direct and indirect costs that are incurred through its design and implementation. This means that HTA should be cost-effective itself. From a payer perspective, cost-effectiveness of HTA means that the payer benefit (higher quality of decisions) from the increased quality of information should exceed the cost of producing that information.