Med-tech and the Cloud: Transforming medical technology

In recent years, the healthcare system has witnessed a sharp rise in demand which created a drive towards digital transformation and a profound urgency to focus on innovation. At the center of this change is the exigency to capture, store, analyze, and deploy the information that is increasingly flowing in to improve medical product design, and therefore the health of patients. Enter; the Cloud.

Data is key to every aspect of medicine— both in terms of the practice and research— and the cloud has provided transforming possibilities to deal with loads of information in healthcare. Having access to unlimited data and computing power, boundless connectivity, edge computing and auto-scaling of capacity, or artificial intelligence, machine learning and cognitive services embedded within critical functions. These are all possibilities in the cloud.

The Cloud: An innovative and comprehensive solution in healthcare

Opportunities for the Cloud in Healthcare

With the rapid growth of data in healthcare, the future of Med-tech will be about connected care. In the future of connected care, however, technology is the gateway to healthcare.

Healthcare institutions are focused on building smarter, more personalized, less invasive healthcare where patient outcome variability is decreased and operational efficiency is improved. In the quest for an improved standard of care and the transformation of healthcare from reactive care to predictive, personalized and proactive care, big data and AI can be of help.

Amazingly, over 4 billion people do not have access to healthcare despite a global estimated worth of the healthcare business being $7.5 trillion. The cloud, big data, and AI have the potential to expand access to better care, ensure equity, and improve outcomes for everyone. In the future, innovations like conversational chatbots, precision medicine, intelligent scribes, and APIs for data and interoperability will make healthcare better, more efficient, and more equitable.

In an emergency, there’s a need for urgent and easy access to information. However, in healthcare, there are many data sources and data lakes; the lack of centralized data storage makes it quite laborious to access data in dire circumstances.

For instance, when there’s an accident, the ambulance, being the first medical service intervention arriving at the scene, should be the first data collection. Using cloud and IoT, the information collected is made available to the oncoming care team before the patient gets to the hospital. This quickens the management of the patient.

In the acute care setting, the treatment of patients with multiple comorbidities, and sometimes the elderly, multiple-specialty care teams are required to collaborate to make accurate decisions. With the cloud, the teams can virtually come together around a patient, with a complete picture of the patient from various systems, without being physically present at the bedside.

The Cloud’s Current Impacts

For about 50 years, the protein structure problem has been a major challenge to research organizations. To solve this problem and help organizations better understand complex diseases and accelerate the development of new treatments, DeepMind’s AlphaFold created a machine learning system.

At Emory University, researchers used Google Cloud to create an algorithm that predicts the onset of sepsis in patients within four to six hours. It has 85% accuracy.

Due to peripheral neuropathy which is a complication of diabetes mellitus, there’s an increased risk of pressure ulcers in diabetics. In the bid to address this, Sensoria made a boot that can track pressure and movement, allowing data to be pulled into the cloud. And then, with the application of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, pressure ulcers can be predicted.

GE Healthcare life care solutions have deployed solutions on the cloud that help ensure care protocol compliance in the ICU and Labor ward for timely interventions that lead to improved patient outcomes.

Conclusion

Data in healthcare is sensitive, and a secure cloud networking solution reinforces the protection of patient data and improves access policy to key IT software and infrastructure.

A good cloud networking solution will continuously synchronize security across all elements including the cloud into a common view and domain, assisting healthcare professionals to improve their data management.

With a comprehensive cloud networking solution, healthcare enterprises can use the digital opportunity of today to protect their customers’ data and information while meeting the needs of patients both now and in the future.

About Med-Tech World:

It is now estimated that the global digital health market will increase to around $640 billion by 2026. Through our expertise coupled with optimized networking, we will ensure that both investors and startups are on the ground floor of this health revolution. The event which is organized and curated alongside a team of doctors, attracts legislators and policymakers, medical professionals, and investors from across the world, addresses the opportunities and challenges driving this million-dollar forum.