IoT is transforming the healthcare industry by redefining the interaction between the patient and the healthcare sector.

IoT helps reshape the new normal of the healthcare industry as the increasing pressure on healthcare operation by the aging trends around the world. Still, today’s IoT applications have tremendous potential to enhance healthcare operations and generate overall improvements to care outcomes, cost and efficiency.

However, something is becoming a new normal as the IoT-driven healthcare revolution has marched into a stage under the impact of the COVID-19. Contactless interaction by IoT technologies can guarantee the safety of the medical staff and the patient while delivering medical treatment in the pandemic. Such transformation has brought some new normal to the healthcare industry as it can reduce or even eliminate virus infection. IoT also has a major impact on reducing healthcare costs and improving treatment outcomes by using wireless devices and IoT-related technologies.

What can IoT do for healthcare?

For the patient

IoT improves patient comfort. Devices like wearables and other wirelessly connected devices such as blood pressure and heart rate monitoring cuffs, glucometer, etc., give patients access to personalized attention. Patients can have a more enjoyable experience, reduce stress, and go through faster recovery.

One of the obvious signs that IoT has changed people’s lives is the caring of elderly patients, by enabling constant tracking of their conditions. This has a major impact on people living alone and their families. For any emergency or unexpected changes in the routine activities of a person, the alert mechanism sends signals to family members and concerned health providers. Suppose you or your customers are looking for versatile and cost-effective IoT devices for elderly caring. In that case, Minew offers a smart wearable, the B10 Multi-use Wristband with pinpoint positioning, to make your solutions a reality. More detail on B10.

For the medical staff

By using wearables and other home monitoring equipment embedded with IoT, the medical staff including physicians and carers can track patients’ health more effectively and remotely. They can track patients’ adherence to treatment plans or any need for immediate medical attention. IoT enables healthcare professionals to be more watchful and connect with the patients proactively. Data collected from IoT devices can help the responsible medical staff identify the best treatment process for patients and reach the expected outcomes.

The hospital information system can be improved for higher efficiency and easier to access with the help of IoT. The electronic wireless devices allow information search and view in the paperless records, reducing the workload of manually recording data and the time on searching for target information from plies of paper materials.

For the healthcare sector

Apart from monitoring patients’ health, there are many other areas where IoT devices are very useful in healthcare sector. IoT devices tagged with sensors are used for tracking the real-time location of medical equipment like wheelchairs, defibrillators, nebulizers, oxygen pumps and other monitoring equipment. In such applications, Minew’s location beacons for asset tracking can provide precise and real-time location while consuming low energy by the BLE technology. Taking the i10 Durable Beacon and the E2 Max Beacon for examples, Minew’s location beacons deliver the timely positioning of the tagged assets and accelerate further possibilities. They have a long service lifetime, long broadcasting range, are lightweight, and affordable in your smart healthcare solutions.

Also, the deployment of the medical staff at different locations can be analyzed in real-time by the use of wearable beacons, like the C10/C7 card beacons from Minew. These BLE beacons provide the real-time location of the wearers to optimize space occupancy for a better working process and remain of the appropriate social distance to keep them safe and healthy in the pandemic. What’s more, the built-in NFC (optional) integrated with the access control and personnel management in the healthcare facilities guards the safety of the staff and assets within. Discover more about C10 Multi-use Card and C7 Card Beacon.

IoT devices also help in asset management like pharmacy inventory control, and environmental monitoring, for instance, checking refrigerator temperature, and humidity and temperature control. You can learn more about temperature and humidity monitoring in our another blog: Bluetooth LE Beacons Drive Digital Transformation of Temperature Monitoring.

The major advantages of IoT in healthcare include

Reduced Cost: For the patients’ side, IoT enables them to be monitored in real-time and cutting down unnecessary visits to doctors, hospital stays and re-admissions; for the healthcare sectors’ side, wireless IoT devices bring high ROI with the future-proof attribute.
Improved Treatment: It enables physicians to make evidence-based informed decisions and brings absolute transparency to both the healthcare sector and the patients, improving the patient experience.

Faster Disease Diagnosis: Constant patient monitoring and real-time data help diagnose diseases at an early stage or even before the disease develops based on symptoms, to truly care for the patients’ health and help them recover faster if falling ill.
Proactive Treatment: According to continuous health monitoring, proactive medical treatment can be provided for more efficient therapy as the patients or their families can notice the abnormal changes.

Drugs and Equipment Management: Management of drugs and medical equipment is a major challenge in the healthcare industry. Through connected devices, these are managed and utilized efficiently while preventing loss and damage.

Mitigated Error: Data generated through IoT devices helps in effective decision making and ensures smooth healthcare operations with reduced errors, waste and system costs.

The biggest challenge Healthcare IoT is facing

It’s data security. IoT-enabled connected devices capture huge amounts of data, including sensitive information, giving rise to concerns about data security.
Implementing apt security measures is crucial. IoT explores new dimensions of patient care through real-time health monitoring and access to patients’ health data. This data is a goldmine for healthcare stakeholders to improve patient’s health and experiences while making revenue opportunities and improving healthcare operations. Being prepared to harness this digital power would prove to be the differentiator in the increasingly connected world.

Minew iot healthcare solutions

A successful healthcare solution requires rational analysis, appropriate solutions, and low-cost and high-performance IoT devices.

With over a decade of experience in wireless product design and manufacturing and IoT solution support, Minew has helped healthcare organizations develop and implement actionable and impactful IoT-based smart healthcare systems. Minew is willing to share more insights on Smart Healthcare for bringing more and more healthcare facilities into the IoT era.

Editor: Sheila
Reviewer: Rosa