The accelerated adoption of healthcare technology as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic has introduced new modes of delivering patient care, interacting with and accessing patient data, and led to questions around the future of healthcare and the longevity of technology solutions such as telehealth, AI-driven solutions, and remote patient monitoring devices.
The largest concerns with the future of healthcare technology question whether the tech will:
- Alleviate clinicians’ stress or contribute to it
- Improve access to patient care or complicate it
- Drive insights and aid in diagnosis and care planning or burden clinicians
-- depending on its usability and how effectively it is incorporated into workflows.
The major three emerging trends in healthcare: telehealth, AI-driven solutions, and remote patient monitoring devices must address these concerns in order to survive the post-pandemic return to “normalcy” and legacy ways of providing patient care.
Challenges in Telehealth:
Telehealth faces a plateau after a year of unprecedented growth due to the rapid adoption of telemedicine technologies and platforms in response to the need to safe alternatives to in-person care. Three major concerns for the continued use and growth of the telehealth market are:
- Identifying where it fits in clinician workflow
- Changing perceptions of users and clinicians to increase adoption in late-comers
- Determining who (payer or patient) pays for the virtual care
As more care providers transition back to in-person visits and traditional modes of patient care, clinicians are juggling how to create a hybrid care strategy with a return to “normalcy”. Hospitals and systems are struggling to eliminate confusion for patients and care providers in the process of integrating telehealth into their permanent practices. These challenges have led to a slow down in the adoption of telehealth solutions by “late-comers” to the market, and those who are not interested in maintaining a telehealth practice in a post-pandemic care setting.
To further complicate the issue, the reimbursement plan initiated by most major insurers to cover telemedicine care in-full is not yet permanent, which raises red flags on the long term viability of telehealth as a strategic care advantage. The decision to change reimbursement plans could set back the telehealth market indefinitely, back to being a niche service.
Challenges with AI-Driven Solutions and Remote Patient Monitoring:
The biggest challenge for AI-enabled healthcare solutions is to deliver real-time insights into the clinical workflow at the point of care, in ways that are easily accessible and usable for the clinician. The technologies that will persevere with the ever-expanding access to mass amounts of healthcare data from remote monitoring, consult transcripts, in-clinic metrics, etc. are the ones that will be able to filter the data for relevancy at point of care.
David Lareau of Medicomp Systems stated in a recent Forbes Article: “The systems of the future need tools that let clinicians quickly get the clinically relevant patient- and diagnosis-specific information they need when they need it. With the right tools, clinicians can spend less time on activities that fuel burnout, and more time improving productivity and remaining focused on care delivery and optimal patient outcomes.”
This is the puzzling challenge that AI-driven solutions are called to accept, and succeed at piecing together. It is simply not enough to provide access to patient data from remote devices (in remote patient monitoring), or access to the conversation files from a patient-provider consultation, the platform needs to put the data into an actionable context the clinician can use to determine the right steps in the patient’s care plan, or to take immediate intervention when necessary.
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