What Technology Will Be Available in the Healthcare Facility of the Future?

Yesterday we looked at what the healthcare facility of the future will look like.  As we continue our look at healthcare facilities and what changes we’ll see, today we’re going to look at what technology the Healthcare IT Today community thinks will be needed and included in a healthcare facility.  Here’s a look at a few of the ideas they shared.

Michael Rivers, Director of Ophthalmology at ModMed
Key technologies that make up the “exam room of the future” won’t be in the exam room at all. They will evolve our understanding of healthcare from an episodic experience to on demand. Wearable technologies will allow physicians to monitor patients with chronic diseases, such as diabetes, and empower more proactive treatment. We will also see more app-based digital patient engagement tools that help patients focus on health goals and have their questions answered between clinic visits.

Mandira Singh, Senior Vice President and General Manager Acute & Payer Markets at PointClickCare
The provider experience in the future will look drastically different. Today, there is a lot of clicking, typing and digging through records. The exam room of the future will be equipped with tools that deliver relevant insight directly to providers to act on to close care gaps. Most importantly, these tools will weed out information that is not relevant to a patients visit – meaning less time being spent searching and more time building the patient relationship and delivering the best care.

Kimberly Powell, Vice President of Healthcare at NVIDIA
Every hospital will be smart, using real time sensors and AI edge computing to help healthcare professionals deliver more precise and efficient care from surgical robots, to automated x-ray rooms, to interactive virtual assistants. Using the power of digital twins, hospitals, operating rooms, humans and health can be simulated to make personalized predictions for the best possible healthcare delivery.

Punit Soni, CEO at Suki
Voice is going to be the next transformative interface in healthcare and can do very powerful things due to the advancements of AI, NLP and ML. Today, voice technology can understand your intent regardless of how you say something; learn a physician’s specific preferences or terminology; identify clinical entities like diagnoses; and suggest correct ICD-10 codes. In the future, we envision surgical suites and medical devices being powered by voice.

Curtis Gattis, CEO & Co-Founder at LeadingReach
As we move to a fully digital healthcare world in the next 10 years, the extinction of the fax machine will finally happen. Healthcare leaders and facilities will fully lean into tech solutions, gaining insights on critical metrics such as referral-to-appointment ratio and referral response rate. With strong referral tech in place, patients will receive the timely care they need instead of being left behind, which happens 50 percent of the time with outdated processes that involve faxing.

Max Cohen, CEO and Co-Founder at Sprinter Health
What technologies will be in the exam room of the future? The biggest gain is from better interoperability, not from some magic futuristic tech. Augmented Reality, robotic remote surgery, AI diagnostic algorithms – all these things are great, and will continue to improve. But just making sure the care team knows the details of what the patient is going through, having access to that diagnostic information even if the patient isn’t physically present, and being able to communicate care and treatment plans back to other supporting clinicians would be a massive transformation from where we are today.

What do you see as the future of technology that will transform the healthcare facility?  Let us know in the comments and on social media.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • Smart Fax solutions to bridge the gap from fax to direct electronic records transfer are available today through companies like ReferralMD. Requiring tight EHR API integration and a link back to the classic fax systems still ubiquitous in the industry, vendors like ReferralMD are providing solutions to ‘fix’ your fax machine yet still maintain a link back to legacy technologies in widespread use. Visit getreferralmd.com to learn more.

Click here to post a comment
   

Categories