Healthcare Technologies and its Adoption

The last decade has witnessed rapid changes in the healthcare sector. These positive changes have affected every entity from the healthcare space, including providers, payers, pharmaceuticals, IT vendors, and many more. The important thing that has evolved over this period is patient-centric solutions. Technology is one of the key factors driving the healthcare sector. Companies are investing huge sums on innovation and research. Almost a decade ago, EHR and EMR were merely a technological concepts everyone was talking about. Most providers today have abandoned paper-based work by superseding the EHRs or EMRs. This was a perfect start for healthcare technology adoption. In the last 3 to 4 years, we have seen that the face of the Healthcare sector is changing rapidly with immense technological innovations. But is the industry really ready to adapt to all these changes so quickly?

The following are the major categories in which companies are investing for research and innovation.

• Telemedicine
• Cloud-based Medical records
• Quantified Health data
• Integration of medical devices

Technology adoption is an upcoming challenge for the healthcare industry. As compared to other industries, the healthcare sector lags behind in terms of early technological adaption. Currently, there are plenty of innovations that could bring revolutionary changes to the Healthcare sector.

The following are some areas in healthcare that have a great potential to grow but lag behind current technological trends:

• Nurse Staffing and Scheduling – 40% scope of adoption (First-time use)
• Dictation with speech recognition – 45% scope of adoption (First-time use)
• Business Intelligence – 40% scope of adoption (First-time use)
• Bed Management – 50% scope of adoption (First-time use)

We can therefore see that healthcare entities are still not open to adopt new technologies from the market, despite their benefits of cost reduction and improvement in quality of care.

Why is the healthcare sector so slow in adopting new technologies?Technology Cost: The new technologies in healthcare are always helpful to reduce operational costs, but a heavy investment is required to implement the technology solutions. Hence, providers, patients and payers prefer to continue with old technology.

Continuous change in Technology: Technology is changing very quickly; today’s technology becomes obsolete tomorrow. Repetitive technology upgradation is contributing factor to the slow adoption of new technologies.

Solving health issues or improving the lifestyle: In healthcare, many innovations are very impressive but are those really for resolving the health issues? For example, a wearable device transmits all sorts of health data. But does a wearable device really improve patient health? Currently, many innovations revolve around improving the lifestyle rather than actually solving the patient’s health issues.

Considering future compliance requirements, the healthcare industry should focus on improving technology adoption. In the coming years, affordable technology is incumbent to achieving the goal of a lower healthcare costs and good quality care.