The patient of the future will have embedded smart sensors so doctors can capture their data from anywhere there’s a digital signal.

“The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent. When compared with previous industrial revolutions, the Fourth is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace. Moreover, it is disrupting almost every industry in every country. And the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance.”
Klaus Schwab – World Economic Forum

We are well into the fourth industrial revolution. It has hit every industry with some of the biggest, and most transformational technological changes that we have ever seen.

Like other industries, healthcare has experienced a digital disruption that has included how we monitor health, how patients access treatment, how we conduct surgery, and how we report on patient outcomes.

Wondering how your hospital is adapting to the fourth industrial revolution? Why not request a quote and get a free assessment?

With the onset of a whole array of IoT devices, healthcare is about to shift again, broadening the clinical treatment space to include patient self-monitoring, home visits via telemedicine, and IoT devices that track post-surgical patients wherever there is a digital signal.

Welcome to the new era in healthcare. Let’s see what technology will bring us in the coming months.

Healthcare Technology Embraces the Cloud

Healthcare has not traditionally been an early adopter of anything. That’s because the scientific method forces the entire paradigm to shift slowly, like a turtle walking. But technology has forced change upon even the most stodgy of medical managers, who now acknowledge the benefits of these innovations for health systems, hospitals, and medical providers.

Standard practices in the rest of the business world, such as data analysis and brand marketing came to healthcare relatively late. Today, hospitals can take advantage of some of the same analytical tools found in every other business that capitalizes on enterprise resource planning software.

Some of the other technology trends healthcare is capitalizing on include:

• Cloud computing models that offer robust security, scalability, and ease of access, along with data storage and machine-driven analytics that help turn patient data into actionable insight.
• Telemedicine models that offer millennials the quick access they’re seeking from the “privacy” of their personal digital device.
• Remote patient monitoring in the form of smart IoT devices, wearable’s, and other ways to track a patient’s behavior and physical well-being, without an invasive procedure or another clinical visit. These devices have a particularly valuable role in population health models, which seek to proactively change the behavior of a group of people to help them get healthier.
• Behavioral health intervention can take the form of a phone app now that our digital transformation has occurred. The app, call Moodivator, was developed in a big pharma/healthcare collaboration.
• Managed cloud services offered by managed service providers has formed solid partnerships with healthcare IT teams, who are seeking to shore up their knowledge base of security in the cloud. Managed servicer providers help hospitals monitor the efficacy of their network security and free up hospital IT staff to work on special projects.

These are just a few of the innovations, but now, what are the challenges?

Healthcare Technology and Cloud Computing

The fourth industrial revolution is still technically in its adolescence; it certainly hasn’t evolved yet. As new IoT devices are invented and artificial intelligence makes its way into the network security realm, IT leadership is wondering what is next? For many hospitals, what is next is a managed service provider. MSPs help hospitals assess and then manage their security in the face of increasing cybersecurity threats.

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