Medicine is a continually evolving and developing industry. As our understanding of the human body grows, the ways we fight disease and illness evolve alongside.
With the welcoming of a new decade and new viruses being announced every week, there’s plenty of buzz surrounding medical innovation.
Below is a list of what’s predicted to be the best medical technology advancements set to transform the healthcare industry in 2020.
Let’s dive in!
Artificial Intelligence
In the last 20 years, artificial intelligence (AI) has jumped from science fiction to everyday reality.
AI can analyze and apply data without manual input, making it unlike any diagnostic tool ever seen on the market.
This begs the question; How does this impact the healthcare industry? In short, AI provides hospitals with extra time to give treatments and conduct research.
AI frees up some of the time of hospital staff because AI tech can focus on identifying illnesses based on a list of symptoms. Other applications of AI within the healthcare industry include:
- Crowdsourcing
- Logging info
- Developing personalized treatment plans
This same tech can also be used to track the progress of care regimes, clinical trials, and other medical research.
AI achieves this by:
- Setting guidelines for professionals to work within
- Storing results
- Analyzing data
- Forming catalogs of conclusions that are well evidenced and easy to follow.
On a more global scale, you can utilize AI technology to help keep a watch on health-related epidemics. In fact, Stat News reports that AI has been a fabulous tool for following the recent coronavirus outbreak. Namely, because AI tech can monitor:
- The volume of posts on social media
- Google searches
- General web chatter
This makes it easy for the software to track the spread of the infection around the globe.
Robotics
The use of robotics to carry out surgery is also on the rise. It’s increasing to such a degree that experts at Forbes expect the robotics market to reach $20 billion by 2023.
This is a vast industry, and the daily breakthroughs only threaten to boost this further, which, needless to say, is a good thing.
A current application of robotics in the surgical field is the Da Vinci robot. These creations are supporting surgeons in the operating theatres with unparalleled precision.
The system specializes in minimizing the errors that could occur during invasive procedures. This can be used in any area of surgery – from cardiology to pediatrics; robotics can play an instrumental role.
It’s not just surgery, where robotics are proving useful. The healthcare system is also using animatronics for the disinfection of hospital and clinical rooms, dispensing medication, and even as comfort aids. Or, as Luvozo, calls it “Sam, the robotic concierge.”
These day-to-day robots maximize efficiency and cut unnecessary expenditures on tasks that would have otherwise had to be completed by a hospital worker.
Another more radical use of robotics in the healthcare industry is micro-bot therapy. This is a cutting-edge method of dealing with conditions that afflict specific areas of the body. Most notably, cancers.
This tech can target specific areas of the body and treat them according to their programming. A fantastic example of this is micro-bots.
These can release chemotherapy chemicals to combat cancers but only in the targeted area. Thus, reducing the adverse effects of chemotherapy.
3D Printing
This tech has been bounced around within other industries for quite some time now. But it’s now being used to print identical replicas of individual patients’ organs.
This life-saving technological technique has allowed surgeons to forgo waiting for a donor organ and simply print the patient a perfect organ based on their original.
Another use is to create cost-effective and highly comfortable prosthetic limbs for amputation patients. This allows patients to adjust more quickly to a new limb that is closer to their own than a generic limb.
Some healthcare professionals also use 3D printing for dentistry and orthodontic casts.
The incredible part of the 3D printing is the fact that the bioprinters replicate tissue and will print body parts using the necessary genetic sequencing and cellular structure of the patient.
This means that each print is unique to the patient. The purpose of this is to minimize the likelihood of the patient rejecting the organ, which is relatively common in traditional organ donation procedures.
Virtual Reality
This technological advancement is particularly surprising. Virtual reality is usually associated with gaming. VR headsets, however, are being used more recently in the healthcare industry for several reasons.
The first is that professionals at Forbes claim that it has really helped to support patients suffering from impaired vision, depression, autism, and even cancer.
It’s famous for patient education because the virtual nature of the system can allow a patient to see what will happen during their surgery.
The replication of the patient’s exact measurements and proportions means that it can also be beneficial for the surgeon.
The doctors can use V. R. with the patient’s details within the coding, which allows for a broader range of vision for procedures like craniotomies, where the view is limited.
It also permits the surgeon to be able to perform more precise procedures like keyhole surgery and other minimally invasive surgeries with more care and detail.
Virtual reality is also currently being used to treat mental health disorders and to manage pain after amputation. The concept of being transported somewhere else can support patients with depression, chronic anxiety, and other ailments.
A fantastic use of VR is in support of amputees. A common side effect of a significant amputation can be phantom pain. This is when the person feels like the limb is still there.
They experience sensation and pain in the area where their limb was. This is all psychological, and a great and indirect way of treating this is through virtual reality.
The fictitious world allows the patient to come to terms with the loss of their limb slowly rather than the sudden trauma of it suddenly not being there anymore.
Cloud Computing
‘The cloud’ is a term we have been hearing more and more often over the past few years, what with advancements in phones and the way we store our data. The healthcare industry has joined this trend.
They use the cloud to store records for patients’ details, medical history, and even for hospital staff. This heightens the level of efficiency when dealing with a busy ward. The details you need are there at the touch of a button.
Data protection legislation has been hugely relevant to this progression in technology in hospitals.
It’s vital that, while the hospital staff is well versed in the protection of those in their care, if someone were to complain and push legal proceedings on the health service, then he staff are covered as they followed a system put in place for the smooth running of the hospital.
Telemedicine
This technology is one of the most significant contributors to the changes in the medical industry.
Data-driven Investor says that telemedicine is transforming the care for those without as much as others. It’s also been proven to improve the diagnostic stage and to revolutionize treatments.
According to VSee, telemarketing is an excellent tool for saving money, developing patient engagement, and is more freely accessible to a broader audience. It is a remote way of sharing data and information concerning patients.
Therefore, it is irrelevant both, where a patient came from and what they do for a living, everyone gets the treatment regardless of their social life.
Telemedicine software can transmit the patient files across long distances, meaning that going abroad or moving away will mean that the professionals are always prepared, no matter where you go.
This increases the speed at which patients are treated and how their information is stored.
If this is something you’re interested in, MedicareWire offers customized care plans to support each client’s individual health needs.
Ready to Take Advantage of These Medical Technology Advancements?
The medical industry is fast-changing and continuously evolving. Medical technology advancements such as virtual reality, cloud computing, 3D printing, robotics, and artificial intelligence are propelling the healthcare market into a new age.
The age of machines. This, however, does come with drawbacks as modern healthcare is mostly paid for by the patient.
It’s very wise nowadays to have health insurance to cover any need for medical care in the future.
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Throughout the year, our writers feature fresh, in-depth, and relevant information for our audience of 40,000+ healthcare leaders and professionals. As a healthcare business publication, we cover and cherish our relationship with the entire health care industry including administrators, nurses, physicians, physical therapists, pharmacists, and more. We cover a broad spectrum from hospitals to medical offices to outpatient services to eye surgery centers to university settings. We focus on rehabilitation, nursing homes, home care, hospice as well as men’s health, women’s heath, and pediatrics.
