[Techie Tuesday] Internet of Medical Things: Transforming Indian Healthcare Industry

The healthcare industry in India is transforming itself digitally, and the integration of IoT devices and ICT technologies is enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of care delivery system. These technologies improve the safety and timeliness of care delivery, reducing wait-time, enriching medical reports with error-free medical data, accessing electronic health records and many more.

Integration of such smart technologies in surgery, traumatic treatment, psychological care & more, and the use of tools ensure patient-centric quality care for any ailment and care- requirement.

Systems like sensor-based wearables, clinical wearable devices, remote patient monitoring (RPM) systems, pharmacogenomics, tele-medicine, continuous glucose monitor (CGM), human-on-a-chip, organ-on-a-chip, cancer treatment, clinical evaluations, diagnostic tools, and others have already disrupted the medical devices industry, and is expected to grow exponentially in coming years.

The global m-health market size was valued at $45.7 billion in 2020, and is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 17.6 percent by 2028. Favourable strategic developments by key market players are the primary drivers of this growth.

Care providers broadly classify care into three sets- managed care, preventive care and curative care. While there are many health-care providers and care-enablers which catalyse this growth, services like remote patient monitoring, tele-consultation, virtual clinics and smart clinics and Covid monitoring are significant services provided by health-care service providers.

Managed Healthcare System

Managed healthcare represents the importance of good health. Ensuring regular monitoring of health to ensure mitigation of any major diseases/ ailments is very important.

Considering this, health-care service providers have tailored solutions for integrating AI-ML based IoT devices for monitoring and generating patient centric health information reports.

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Preventive Healthcare System

Being in good health is derived not just from loading quality medical care when you need it, but it also comes from finding and preventing health problems before they start.

Preventive healthcare system categorises monitoring health parameters timely, and taking necessary precautions and aid to overcome issues at the beginning.

Curative Healthcare System

Curative healthcare is dynamic to each individual and plays a role only when there is a necessity to treat patients and give care.

In the pre-Covid days, visiting a hospital/ clinic and consulting doctors for ailment has been the practice. However, with the digital transformation of healthcare systems, consulting doctors has become easy.

Tele-consultation provides access to doctors of any specialty any time anywhere. This system is further enhanced by integrating machine learning algorithms that churn copious health data into defined data insights, that further enhance care delivery and improve effectiveness of care.

Additionally, teleconsultations are an effective way to assess suspected cases and monitor a patient’s diagnosis and treatment, reducing the hazard of disease transmission. These teleconsultations enable many of the key clinical services to operate uninterrupted, both in preparation for and in the course of a public health emergency.

The growing ecosystem and way forward

To sum it up, IoMT devices in healthcare industry enhance efficiency, reduces cost, saves time, improves storing of health record, fosters informed decision making for delivering right treatment to care-seekers, and in turn, improves operational efficiency of systems and processes. These sophisticated smart healthcare systems have re-created smart patient-centric care for all at all time.