The Latest Technology Trends Benefitting Healthcare Providers

Every industry embraces technological advancements at its own speed. While some industries, like consumer goods manufacturing and electrical engineering, charge ahead and pull a slew of dependent fields with them, others have to operate on more regulated fields. The healthcare industry is one of the latter. Larger healthcare providers and their customers have greatly benefitted from advancements in the areas of diagnostics, surgery, and security, mainly due to prohibitively expensive equipment or high-cost enterprise contracts, neither of which is accessible or feasible for smaller-scale healthcare providers. This leaves hundreds of thousands of people lacking access to the latest and greatest in healthcare technology. 

Fortunately, technological innovations happen not only in the medical equipment and the hyped but questionable AI super machines. Now, cloud technologies, open-source AI, custom automation tools, and managed IT service providers like 3nom can help even the low-tech, cost-sensitive healthcare providers step into the digital age to the benefit of their clients and staff. 

Can Artificial Intelligence Diagnose Patients?

Doctors spend years perfecting their craft. One of the most important things a doctor must do is diagnose a patient. With the right diagnosis, doctors can devise an effective treatment plan. Get the diagnosis wrong, and the underlying illness may not be addressed in time, leading to potentially life-threatening consequences. A study from the Mayo Clinic found that one in five people suffering from a serious condition are first misdiagnosed by their primary caregiver and almost one in two require changes to their initial diagnosis. 

So far, Artificial Intelligence looks to be as effective as doctors when it comes to diagnosing a condition. A recent study found that deep neural networks correctly diagnosed patients in 87 percent of cases, while doctors made the correct diagnosis in 86 percent of cases. At this point, no healthcare practitioner should rely on AI alone for diagnosis but rather, look at it as a source of a data-based second opinion, ensuring the precision and improving the speed of their own diagnosis. 

Provide Care Remotely

More than 5 percent of Americans now work remotely. Much of this work is done through computers, say writing content, programming, and the like. What if doctors could work remotely as well? Imagine a heart surgeon in New York walking a team of surgeons in Brazil through a particularly complicated heart surgery. Sound too good to be true?

Not only are doctors using cameras and other tools to provide insights and oversights during surgeries and other complicated procedures, some are using robots to actually perform “telesurgery”. 

But the benefits of remote care extend way beyond high-tech surgeries. Many people struggle to see their preferred doctor on time, either for the lack of available appointments or because they have to travel too far to get to the doctor’s office. In certain cases, an appointment that may eat up half of the day might have been easily replaced with a video call. 

Telemedicine is quickly gaining steam, running on the advancements in cloud technology. The newest cloud solutions for healthcare providers allow doctors to deliver service from anywhere, with less overhead and higher levels of customer satisfaction, all while ensuring the level of privacy patients expect. 

Make Information Sharing Easier

Sharing information, such as medical records, is vital but very complex for healthcare practitioners. HIPAA regulations and other liabilities make security and confidentiality essential. Unfortunately, this has held medical establishments back from leveraging digital data management. 

The current statistics are staggering: up to 98,000 hospital patients die from avoidable medical errors each year — more than from AIDS, homicides and car crashes combined; 3 out of 10 tests are reordered because the results have been lost; patient charts can’t be located on 30% of visits; a quarter of the patients gets to their next appointment before the records from the previous one; the list goes on and on. The inefficiencies of information management and administrative work cost thousands of lives and Billions of dollars.

Now, technology is ripe to rip the cycle and ensure fast, secure, and reliable information sharing between providers, as well as it’s searchability and storage within the offices. Cybersecurity is a must, and it is possible to devise safe and secure cloud and web-based solutions. At 3Nom, we take cybersecurity seriously and can help you stay on the right side of HIPAA and ensure your patient’s wellbeing. 

Manage Patients More Easily

IT solutions have already made scheduling appointments, sending reminders and follow ups, and otherwise managing patients much easier. Once a tedious process, much of the work can now be automated. 

For example, you can set up texting programs to text people a day before their appointment. You can also automate follow up emails with additional information, requests for feedback, and the like. Many other processes can be automated.

3Nom has helped numerous medical providers automate workflows and eliminate tedious tasks. Our team’s expertise is suited particularly well for creating custom automations that fit your business’s speed, processes, and scale. Want to harness the power of IT to make your medical practice or business stronger, faster, and better? Get in touch with your 3nom advisor. 

Using AI to Empower Doctors

Did you know that Google can predict a flu outbreak before CDC? Remember your own frantic search for “body ache fever,” multiply it by a thousand of your neighbors googling similar things over the span on 24 hours, and this doesn’t seem so unlikely anymore, does it? 

A defining quality of machine learning and deep learning algorithms (what is generally understood by “AI”) is their ability to scope out huge and messy datasets for patterns. Researchers have been working to utilize artificial intelligence and big data to better predict outbreaks and map out how diseases spread through populations. If medical professionals can accurately predict how a disease will spread, they may be able to slow its advance. The same ability to process aggregate datasets can be used to devise the optimal treatment plan, once again giving the doctors another pair of knowledgeable, if not experienced of humane, eyes to improve the outcome for the patients.

Today, more and more open source machine learning resources emerge for the benefit of tech-savvy healthcare providers, allowing them to design custom AI models. Among them, many specialize in machine learning and big data analysis for healthcare. IT service providers like 3nom are here to lend the technical expertise in integrating these models into the workflow of less technical healthcare providers. 

We have only scratched the surface of the latest technology trends benefitting healthcare providers of any size. The technological advancements will help them improve their customer experience, minimize errors, optimize administrative work, and dramatically reduce costs, passing these savings and benefits on to their patients and the community at large. 

If your healthcare office is ready to make the most of the latest technologies, talk to your 3nom expert today to devise the “treatment plan.”