Recent research indicates that health care demand and expenditures are increasing. This is partly driven by aging, growing populations, increasing chronic diseases, and advances in costly medical solutions. Because of this, healthcare providers and consumers are struggling to manage the financial challenges encountered with high-quality healthcare.
New, connected health solutions may help solve these problems by building a foundation of affordable, accessible healthcare. This can shift the focus from a system of sick care where we treat patients after they fall ill, to one of health care which supports well-being, prevention, and early intervention.
Connected health solutions have enormous potential as devices are connected to the cloud and each other. Live data from sensors and devices can enable the visibility needed for healthcare providers to respond to current conditions.
Connected health solutions benefit the patient and the healthcare providers by:
Simplifying patient monitoring while reducing costs
Optimizing equipment utilization
Proactive maintenance and supply replenishment
One potential concern with connected health is how to deal with the potential explosion of medical data. Instead of simply generating all this data, and sending it to the cloud, a Connected Health Gateway, such as the Systech SL-600, can process and analyze data at the network edge. Edge processing can simplify the handling of confidential patient data, reduce data communication costs, and can assist with integrating patient data with other sources, such as fitness and health monitoring devices.
If providers want to successfully address healthcare quality and healthcare costs, they will require access to on-site data, and take advantage of the ability to analyze data at the edge and in the cloud.