Internet of Medicine

A number of technologies can reduce overall costs for the prevention or management of chronic illnesses. These include devices that constantly monitor health indicators, devices that auto-administer therapies, or devices that track real-time health data when a patient self-administers a therapy. Because they have increased access to high-speed Internet and smartphones, many patients have started to use mobile applications to manage various health needs. 

These devices and mobile apps are now increasingly used and integrated with telemedicine and telehealth via the medical Internet of Things (mIoT). The technology is amazing and has the potential to completely change the healthcare industry, give better treatment and diagnosis to patients, ensure productivity and communication within medical facilities and can provide personalised, targeted medicine.

IoM adoption in healthcare is inevitable

Internet of Medical Things, or Healthcare IoT, refers to a connected infrastructure of medical devices and software applications that can communicate with various healthcare IT systems.  The move toward IoM is gaining momentum and becoming extremely important nowadays. In fact, its adoption is inevitable. For starters, it serves the financial interest of key players in healthcare — the insurance industry, big pharma, hospitals and doctors. Secondly, it’s ideally suited to help meet the demands of today’s increasingly health-conscious and empowered patients.

And where does recurring revenue fit into all of this? Healthcare is so overpriced that the entire healthcare system prefers to do business through incremental payments. For instance, many hospitals have begun storing medical images in the cloud on a pay-per-image basis, rather than maintaining costly on-premise storage systems. As medical costs continue to climb, these sorts of recurring payment mechanisms will become even more widespread.

What are the dangers of IoMT?

The greatest danger related IoMT is the high barrier of entry to truly disrupt the healthcare industry and to change the way disease is treated. There is a threshold for the speed at which anyone can execute on delivering these innovative solutions to a population and industry that so desperately need change.

There is the importance of balancing the introduction of innovation with appropriate regulatory compliance such that we can ensure the delivery of the safest products.More specifically, in a field that has a direct effect on people’s health and wellness, we must be deliberate; we must be excellent; and we must be right. However, with bioelectronics, we are introducing the technology that will roll out systems that will very much revolutionize the way we think and approach medicine and healthcare. 

What are the benefits of IoMT?

The benefits to introducing IoMT are great, and certainly there are even more benefits to be discovered as we continue to grow our expertise in this space as an industry. But to name a few:

●Objective reporting: Because the devices can record and report on actual activity at the level of the nervous system, we no longer have to rely solely on subjective patient reports of “how they are feeling”; instead, we have an objective evaluation of the disease progression andpatient therapy efficacy as reported by the devices,

●Remote monitoring: Increased patient accountability as the healthcare provider will have a “report card” so to speak of actual patient therapy compliance instead of relying on accuracy of patient summary,

●Local activity recording: Device recording capabilities allow for the collection data that we’ve never previously been able to access. This data will vastly improve our understanding of the mechanism of action of these chronic diseases. And if we understand the disease better, we will undoubtedly enhance our approach on disease prevention and therapy,

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IoT will be invaluable. It can provide unprecedented, real-time access to troves of patient health data that doctors, hospitals and drug companies can use — responsibly and with permission, of course — to improve results and forge lasting relationships with patients. More broadly, IoT is poised to dramatically transform virtually every aspect of medicine while paving the way for incremental profitability across the entire healthcare landscape.