Digitisation and Healthcare – Where Technology Can Save Lives

At the beginning of every new year, many people wish for a new healthy way of living. Many New Years resolutions are actually being made around eating healthier, doing more sports (or do sports at all) and bring new and healthy routines into our lives. Now that the first weeks of the year are already over, how many of these resolutions have made it pass the first month?

My guess is, that as good intentions they are, our daily stressful lives often lead us to forgetting how important a healthy lifestyle actually is. What we often also forget is that in many regions of the world, these are very luxurious wishes. Health has a different meaning in different countries around the world. And in many ways, technology can make a huge difference and improve healthcare in general and make it available and accessible to less developed regions. Let’s take a look at healthcare and technology – also in our region.

 Healthcare and Technology – How do Consumers Feel About It?

First things first. There are many new technologies that already can or could potentially improve or support the healthcare industry. But any tool is as good as it gets – if nobody wants to use it, it’s useless. Literally. Deloitte published a study last summer showing that ?consumers of all ages do shop online (92 percent) and use online or mobile banking (83 percent) more often than for health-related activities such as refilling a prescription (59 percent) or monitoring fitness and health improvement goals (42 percent)“. Their assumption was that people might not have as many healthcare needs – compared to shopping or banking, this is probably true. They also assumed that health care needs are often more complex and rather individual: getting a diagnosis or making a treatment decision is usually more challenging than for example booking a flight. However, results of their survey did show that 75 percent of consumers of all ages would be interested in tracking their health or use digital assistants to receive medication alerts. The mindset seems to be there on consumerside. So what are technologies that are making an impact on the industry?

Augmented Reality for Optimizing Surgeries

Despite new developments in medicine, many operations are still very difficult to perform and associated with risks. Doctors need great skills in the operating room, as they can often only estimate the exact location of organs, blood vessels and diseased tissue during an operation.

AR as a technology could potentially revolutionize operations and there have been several developments in this sector. Augmented Reality can support the physician during the operation by creating a 3D model of patient anatomy on the patient's body and serving as a navigation aid: Where do I have to cut? Have I cut out everything I need? AR can improve the error rates as it supports the surgeon with a high degree of precision in terms of surgical navigation and locating targets in the body of the patient.

With AR tools being able to use smaller displays, e.g. notepads or even glasses, they can also be a cost saver and space saver in the operation room itself. Most importantly though it can minimize risks through better accuracy and y help saving lives.

Big Data for Digitizing Health Records

This is perhaps the most interesting and significant aspect of healthcare tech trends: Big Data as a basis to form statistics based upon data and at the same time being able make predictions of potential health problems. In case there is a large enough database available, it is possible to connect stats of medical appointment booking, the weekday of the biggest patient flows, the most frequent health problems etc. With this information, clinics could improve their patient management very much.

Looking at Electronic Health Records and having access to patient data such as cardiac waveforms, chronic diseases, diagnostics and previous prescriptions – this is a gamechanger for doctors when consulting their patients. Not to mention the time savings

In Germany, the use of large amounts of data in the healthcare sector is still largely a futuristic scenario, mostly due to data protection. I just recently read that in Israel for example Big data is a fixed component in the medical sector which has mostly to do with the people’s mindset and the cutlure in dealing with personal data. In Israel evberybody has a personal ID card for virtually everything and patient data such as symptoms, diagnoses and courses of illness are collected from the clinics, compiled in a uniform software and evaluated.

Telehealth and Telemedicine and its Impact for Rural Regions

Another technology that has industry changing potential is Telemedicine. Interestingly, again, Israel is on the forefront this topic and Germany is dealing with data issues. But especially with the growing lack of specialist staff in rural areas it is becoming a more important topic. And when speaking of rural areas, in different African countries Telemedicine is already being used.

Telemedicine offers possibilities to at least somewhat defuse the key healthcare problems. For example, medical assistants can make less urgent home visits and, if necessary, connect the doctor via a mobile video device. Time, and cost-saving. A model example for this is a network of 30 hospitals in India, where every patient can come to the nearest hospital and get virtually in touch with a specialist via telemedicine when necessary. This way, healthcare is made accessible even to remoter areas or people with less money.

These are only three short examples, but I feel they already show the power that technology can have on the healthare industry. In Germany, of course, we need to work on data protection topics – which in my opinion is mostly steered by our mindset – but slowly we can even see developements here towards are more tech-oriented nation. Slowly, but steadily.