Innovations in healthcare technology: telehealth, patient self-diagnosis and personal health records
Although industry conferences are great in theory, the actual content is typically lacking and fails to result in new insights. So in response to HP’s Health and Life Sciences Symposium, Datamonitor suggests three ‘insane ideas’ in healthcare IT – telehealth, self-diagnosis and personal health records – that it believes, if adopted, would help companies to succeed when the economy turns around.
Datamonitor believes that the three ideas covered in this analysis represent innovations in technology that are likely to help define healthcare practice and delivery going forward. Given the economic crisis and the focus on healthcare in the US stimulus package, now is the time for companies to think big, and the organizations that are most innovative during this period will be best positioned once the economy recovers. Thus, while the following ideas may seem crazy to readers today, they reflect pivotal changes in the healthcare space in years to come.
Telehealth is for everyone, not just the elderly
Telehealth is the use of IT to diagnose, treat and/or monitor a patient in a different physical location than the expert providing care. It is currently only targeted towards a segment of acute care and long-term care patients but Datamonitor expects it to be used throughout the healthcare system in the future, in order to improve efficiencies.
Elderly patients with conditions such as congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes are considered prime telehealth candidates, particularly after an acute episode. However, Datamonitor believes that in the near- to mid-term the adoption of telehealth will expand into other areas of healthcare including primary care and outpatient care, and in the mid-to long-term, telehealth uptake will include the healthy population. Telehealth will be a normal part of healthcare, not a separate type of care for a small segment of the population, as it is predominately viewed now.