For years, we’ve speculated how the Internet of Things (IoT) will impact our lives. We predicted that household appliances would issue maintenance alerts before breaking, or send out e-mails if they needed to be serviced. We imagined a world in which the user experience would mean the dividing line between technology and humans would fade, one in which gadgets like Nest and the Apple Watch were part of our daily routines. These were mere possibilities a few short years ago, but the days of connected devices are finally here.
However, health care, the most critical market for IoT technologies, has yet to reach its full potential.
According to research conducted by Aspect, health care is the industry most likely to adopt changes to technology during the next two years. In fact, 91 percent of health-care professionals believe in the positive impact of cloud technology investment. Clearly, health-care professionals recognize the potential of connected devices in improving the patient experience, but what exactly does the future of health care look like in this connected world?
To answer that question, let’s consider the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which places a new emphasis on the patient experience with a greater focus on decreasing avoidable readmissions after patient discharge. Readmissions not only are detrimental to patient health, but also represent a huge cost to care providers. Health-care experts estimate that in 2013, approximately $17 billion was spent on potentially avoidable readmissions. This is where the IoT can make an impact with remote patient monitoring through connected devices.
Here are a few examples of how the Internet of Things can help improve patient health and lower health-care costs:
Wearable connected devices: Patients recently discharged from a hospital can be issued a device to monitor vital signs (heart rate, respiration, blood pressure and temperature) and any other necessary readings, such as glucose levels. Data would be sent to a patient’s health-care provider via a cloud-based service, and an alert would be triggered if the readings fell outside the acceptable range.
Connected household devices: In a similar way, families may choose to keep a connected device in their home and use it as needed. Think of a more sophisticated Internet-enabled thermometer. Parents of a child feeling ill may connect the youth to the device and have his or her vital information sent to a doctor to determine whether or not an appointment is necessary. And with WebRTC, this child may even have a video consultation with the doctor before deciding whether or not to go in for a visit.
Prescription drug monitoring: Makers of prescription drugs are already using IoT technologies to monitor the integrity of their prescriptions. AdhereTech is one company placing sensors on pill bottles. The bottles are monitored prior to arriving at a pharmacy, in order to ensure that they have not been tampered with. Imagine if the monitoring continued into a patient’s home? Alerts could be issued to patients who failed to take their medications as prescribed.
The key to getting patients on board with connected devices is to make those devices patient-controlled. A patient shouldn’t have to wear a device at all hours of the day unless he or she wants to. That individual should be able to take it on and off at will and control the data being shared. Yet, accessibility to health-care devices raises some serious security issues, most recently exemplified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s findings on the vulnerability of the Hospira infusion pump. Health-care providers should work closely with manufacturers of such IoT-enabled devices to ensure that necessary security features are in place, as well as keep their patients informed and devices current with the latest security updates in order to keep their information safe.
Pursuant to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) and other regulations, strict patient confidentiality rules must be applied to data collected by IoT devices or networks, just as they are already applied to patient data collected and shared over networks today. Stored patient histories must be encrypted, as must test results from any medical facility. With regard to IoT devices, patients should also have the ability to delete data that they no longer want to be made available, as well as control access to their information via confirmed consent, just as with any other medical data. In essence, there is no difference between data collected via the IoT and that collected at a medical facility.
For a consumer-focused health-care system, transformation is inevitable as tech-savvy consumers continue to demand a quick, personalized health-care experience. In fact, 67 percent of the health-care professionals that Aspect surveyed said they believe customer service delivery will change during the next two years more than it did throughout the last decade, while 70 percent reported that technology is the primary customer-service area in which investment will increase over the next year.
Technology is already driving patient interactions. We can now create content aggregators—collections of activity and sensory data pulled from IoT-connected devices, organized for easy retrieval, usability and action—for health-care practitioners to use as a resource for better managing customer experiences.
Creating a customer-centric health-care ecosystem is essential in a competitive marketplace, and the IoT provides a powerful foundation for optimized care practices and interaction between a patient and health provider.
Michael Ely is the VP of technology at Aspect, a software-as-as-service provider of customer interaction management and workforce optimization products. He leads the company’s Enterprise Architecture team, pursuing cross-product research (including unified communications, mobility, cloud computing and virtualization models) and coordinating opportunities with key partners regarding concept discovery and development.