What is Smart Healthcare & Benefits, Intro to Telehealth & Telemedicine

What is Smart Healthcare 

‘Healthcare’ is a self-explanatory word and it describes the health ecosystem that we experience in today’s life. Smart healthcare is nothing but making existing healthcare ecosystem Smart and intelligent using today’s technology that can benefit patients, doctors & the entire ecosystem and also improves the quality and patient care.

Almost everyone has faced health challenges in their past life. A scenario of the past few years, when you visit a hospital, there you might have seen the different test equipment for measuring health parameters which process of mostly manual.

Health parameters include

• blood group identification,
• Blood pressure measurement,
• sugar level (identifying diabetic),
• fat measurement, vitamins, minerals, and water in the body.

This process was less accurate as it was manual. Sometimes doctors used to advice patient to get admitted for the monitoring and observation purpose, even for minor cases. The patient has to obey the doctor with fear of getting health condition worse and pays for the long bill of the hospital.

Manual measurement may give many human errors which then affects the calculation of the parameters and some may misguide doctor in identifying the disease, and the prescriptions given as per the wrong judgments will affect a lot on the patient body when he/she gets different medicine due to inaccurate health parameter measurement.

See also: Internet of things in Healthcare for Improved Disease Management

Presently, the patient does not need to get hospitalized as his/her doctor can monitor the health parameter from anywhere and also gets the notification for getting unwanted parameters from patients attached to the device.

There are many wearable devices available in the market which monitors your pulse rate, heart rate, blood pressure, hydration level, and other parameters and this data can be shared with the family doctor so that he can inform if any disease symptoms have found.

These machines measure our blood pressure, the sugar level in blood and other health parameters automatically with accuracy. These machines have an algorithm to calculate the parameters as per the input, hence the doctor needs no more calculation but just to see the results on the screen.

IoT healthcare reduces the patient’s hospitalization cost and improves the health ecosystem as well.

An exception to any critical condition patient does not need to get hospitalized as the doctor can monitor every parameter remotely and can get notified for abnormal conditions from the attached device to the patient.

These devices have good battery backup and it continuously records health parameters from the patient body and sends this information to the doctor’s device where a doctor can observe the patient continues on the screen.

The patient can get insights for the activities done throughout the day on his/her smartphone.

See also: IoMT – Internet of Medical Things | New Age of Healthcare

Understanding Telehealth and Telemedicine with Meaning

The technology of monitoring patient and giving prescriptions from a remote location is called “TeleHealth”.

A patient can get insights for the activities done throughout the day on his/her smartphone.

According to TeleHealth Startup and Resource Guide Report (ver.1.1)

• “Telehealth is the use of digital technologies to deliver public health services, medical care, and health education by connecting multiple users in separate locations.”
• Telehealth encloses a broad definition of technology-enabled health care services.
• “Telemedicine” is nothing but a traditional clinical diagnosis and patient monitoring and it is delivered by using technology to users in a remote location.
• TeleHealth includes telemedicine (diagnosis and treatment of illness or injury) and services such as assessment, monitoring, communications, prevention, and education.

Examples of Smart Healthcare

Apollo TeleHealth services

Image source: Apollo TeleHealth services (ATHS)

Key Health Care Services from ATHS:

1. To provide primary and preventive health care services through CSCs to rural and semi-urban communities.
2. To promote health advocacy/literacy and social health education among the rural communities particularly with a
3. focus on:
   1. Women and Child Health.
   2. Non Communicable Diseases screening, management, and advocacy.
4. Provide a second opinion and expert consultations.

Benefits of smart healthcare system

1. Better healthcare access

Growing expertise can deliver better outcomes, but you need to be able to share limited expertise in a specific field further afield. TeleHealth services can help to use specialist expertise, making it possible for an expert to provide his/her knowledge and support in geographically distant areas.

2. Greater independence for the elderly

M-Health (mobile health) is the current hot trend in the healthcare industry. M-Health examples include monitoring tools that identify when a person has fallen over or is facing one of a number of pre-defined problems. This continuous 24/7 monitoring allows people to live with no worry about health for longer in their own homes, giving them greater independence as well as reducing costs.

3. Faster diagnosis of certain conditions

Skin conditions are a classic example of this. Instead of going to a doctor or specialist it is possible to simply upload a picture of your skin condition and send it to an online doctor who can diagnose and send out treatment.

See also: Internet of Things Applications in different verticles 

Let us know what you think about Smart Healthcare, telehealth and telemedicine in the comment section below.

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