Ciente > Blog > AI

Healthcare Technology Trends to Watch in 2024

Tag: AI

Healthcare Technology Trends to Watch in 2024
Blogs

Healthcare Technology Trends to Watch in 2024

Healthcare Technology Trends to Watch in 2024

New technologies have sped up development in healthcare. How is AI in healthcare changing the domain for patients and doctors alike?

With the growing needs of the healthcare industry, it is no wonder that doctors burn out. Health institutions struggle to solve challenges and deliver high-quality services – from analyzing health issues to safeguarding patient privacy. With the introduction of new healthcare technologies, overcoming some of these difficulties is possible.

The U.S. healthcare market is growing, with national health expenditures expected to exceed $6.2 trillion by 2028. Although there are still significant obstacles to overcome, there is hope that technology will be able to help. Healthcare technology can change how the industry operates for patients and healthcare professionals. 

Let us find out how:

The Telemedicine Revolution

Telemedicine has been around for quite some time. Doctors used telemedicine for far-away consultations. They have done this since the time of bulky computers.

People started becoming familiar with technology, and phones completely overtook our lives. People became more comfortable with tech, and the rise of video and audio consultation was near. It was the time when Googling the symptoms was becoming a thing.

Then the pandemic happened. It changed the way we lived – there were a lot of changes in healthcare – people accepted online consultations, not wanting to come in contact with others fearing they might catch something new. 

The new normal pushed the government agencies to lax the rules. After the pandemic, the medical field relaxed several rules, leading to the acceptance and preference of telemedicine.

AI and Machine Learning in Healthcare

Imagine how hard it would be for a hospital to sort and analyze the data of every patient – they have so many new patients on a daily basis and, many have a history of tests and diagnoses. The hospital cannot make a mistake with these crucial data and at the same, it also has to sift through it for every patient to draw a pattern or make any predictions. It would take forever. That is where AI and machine learning come in – they can  analyze this vast data and use it to improve healthcare in some mind-blowing ways: 

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI is an umbrella term for intelligent machines that can learn and act like humans – almost like humans. In healthcare, professionals are using AI for healthcare things like analyzing medical images (X-rays, MRIs). It helps to detect diseases or help doctors develop treatment plans.
  • Machine Learning (ML): ML is a specific type of AI where computers learn from data without explicit programming. In healthcare, machine learning algorithms can analyze patient data. They use it to find people at risk for diseases, predict how they might respond to drugs, or even help with drug discovery.

Here are some other examples showing how AI and machine learning are making healthcare better:

  • Spotting diseases early: AI can analyze mammograms, skin images, and other scans to find abnormalities doctors might miss, leading to earlier diagnoses and better outcomes.
  • Personalized medicine: Every person can have different reactions to the same drugs. Machine learning can help personalize treatments for individual patients based on their unique medical history, genes, and lifestyle.
  • Drug development: AI can analyze data to find new drugs and treatments faster.
  • Virtual assistants: AI-powered chatbots can answer patients’ questions, schedule appointments, and provide primary medical advice. It is better than Googling symptoms.

Blockchain for Health Data Management

Instead of relying on a single doctor’s office to hold all your information, and different offices to have different variations, blockchain lets you have a copy that can be accessed by anyone you trust with your permission. Your address book is backed up and kept safe by a complex code, making it tamper-proof. And that is how blockchain technology works for managing health data.

Here is a breakdown to understand things better:

  • Blockchain: It is a digital ledger recording transactions, in this case, your health ledger, across a network of computers.
  • Health Data: All your medical history, allergies, medications, etc. that you have records of.
  • Security: The code that protects the data from violations and unauthorized changes.

This way –

  • You get to control who sees your information.
  • Your data is secure, and no one can alter it without your permission.
  • Everyone sees the same up-to-date information, leading to no extra fuss about whose version to trust.

So,  instead of each doctor’s office having its copy of your records, making it hard to share and update, all authorized users see the same secure, shared record.

Wearable Health Devices

It might surprise you that even wearable tech devices have been used since the late 1970s – people used calculator watches back then. It was the stepping stone for wearable tech.

In the late 1800s, there were hearing aids, a proper introduction to wearable healthcare. But, it was not until 2010 when Fitbit launched the popular wearable bands, and then came the influx of smartwatches, which now are turning into small phones!

The latest wearable health devices can track you:

  • Fitness – includes steps taken, calories burned, and distance covered – like a souped-up pedometer.
  • Sleep – includes how long you sleep and how well you rest.
  • Heart Rate – helps you watch your heart health and activity levels.
  • Other biometrics – include some advanced wearables that can even track blood pressure, oxygen levels, or even glucose levels for diabetics.

Virtual Reality in Healthcare

Virtual reality works for healthcare in diverse ways. Most hospitals and medical universities implemented VR applications to train professionals, perform surgery, or provide medical education.

It involves problem-oriented learning, internal body organ explanation by virtual visualization, and teaches the necessary communication skills to students.

Another use case of virtual reality in healthcare is distracting patients’ attention. Virtual reality is known to relieve chronic pain in people who are recovering from any disease or when the use of pain medicine or anesthesia does not have the desired effect.

VR in the medical field also assists in physical therapy and rehabilitation for patients who find it difficult to exercise because of pain. VR motivates them to complete their physical activity by distracting their attention away from pain with the help of visual aids, sensations, and sounds.

Personalized Medicine and Genomics

Personalized medicine, called precision medicine, is how your healthcare becomes perfect for your unique needs. It considers your genes, environment, and lifestyle to predict your risk for certain diseases and recommends the best prevention or treatment options. It is like a personalized medicine that gives you a custom fit, instead of a one-size-fits-all approach. And, it is helpful – we all have had experiences where over-the-counter medicine has caused new allergies or side effects, and precision medicine helps you avoid that.

Genomics plays a promising role in this because it studies your genes and how they affect your health. When analyzing your genes, doctors can:

  • Predict disease risk: Your doctor can identify whether you will develop certain diseases based on your genes.
  • Improve diagnoses: They can understand what is causing your health issues.
  • Choose better treatments: Genomics gives your doctor the power to tailor medications and therapies to your genes, making them more effective and reducing side effects.
  • Develop preventive strategies: Your healthcare professional can create custom plans to prevent diseases you might be sensitive to.

Your genes act like a blueprint for your body. They act like instructions for the doctor when anything goes wrong. Personalized medicine uses these instructions to create your personal healthcare plan.

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)

Although the IoMT is nothing new, this sector will grow in the coming years. The industry is concerned with digital health trends. It offers excellent uses to healthcare specialists, with money saved in return. 

Many companies are providing IoMT solutions that can help you design and adjust your IoMT system with the help of urbane custom software. 

Wearables and Mobile Apps in Medical Practice

As discussed earlier in the blog, remote health monitoring and wellness apps are growing and will keep booming. If you visit your Playstore or the Appstore catalogs, you’ll find many professional healthcare and wellness mobile apps. Again this also highlights how much the telemedicine industry is in demand.

Some of those mobile apps can synchronize with wearables as well, such as pulsometers or fitness trackers, to use data collected through the sensors placed on your body to report or analyze your health conditions, such as pulse, body temperature, blood pressure, and other metrics. While many people appreciate knowing every detail that they can capture about their day-to-day activities, some also prefer to know only the basics such as the step count at max to keep their minds off of worrying about their health. Let’s face it with the kind of lifestyle we are living today – the celebration of the hustle culture – it will take a lot of self-control and discipline for most people to be where they want to be in their health goals. And while knowing the tiniest of the details does help you be aware, it also can increase your stress levels. So, it is always advised to choose.

Smart autonomous devices in healthcare

Autonomous nursing robots or self-moving smart devices are helping medical staff by reducing their sanitation-related or supply management chores. 

Different kinds of robots can work in various hospital-based locations and positions, which protects human employees from being exposed to infection risks or burnout due to the immense strain.   

For example, robot nurses have been used by an Italian hospital during the COVID-19 outbreak. Those robots were used for remote monitoring of blood pressure and oxygen saturation levels for patients because these are crucial parameters of their current health condition. If the levels drop, the patient requires immediate help within minutes. In this way, the need for nurses to visit patients was reduced. 

So, it is safe for us to say that IoMT is one of the most significant medical technology trends in 2024.

Smart Implants in 2024

Innovations in the implants sector can be promising for these reasons:

  • Regenerative medicine uses techniques to regrow damaged tissues and organs. They might become more efficient.
  • It speeds recovery from surgeries and injuries. It helps patients recover better and faster.
  • There were many diseases for which there was no solution. But now there is hope. We can restore lost functions to conditions like paralysis or blindness.

Let us understand the trends driving this transformation:

3D Bioprinting

3D bioprinting technology allows you to get custom implant prints for yourself. It uses specialized printers to create implants from biocompatible materials, meaning your body will not have any aversion to it.

This technology is not new, but 2024 can be a breakout year for several reasons:

  • Increased Affordability and Accessibility: 3D printing implants will become cheaper and more available for diverse patients.
  • New Materials and Printing Techniques: Advancements in materials and printing methods will lead to more sophisticated prosthetics with improved functionality.

Neural Implants

Brain-computer interfaces, or neural implants, are chips placed in the brain to interact with electrical signals. Here is what the future looks like:

  • Neural implants hold immense potential for restoring sight, movement, and other functions lost due to disabilities like paralysis or blindness.
  • Though challenges remain, the potential for neural implants to change how we treat disabilities is something to look forward to.

Conclusion

Technological advancements have improved healthcare, from allowing for quicker diagnoses with tools like MRI scanners to facilitating better communication between patients and doctors through teleconferencing. AI in healthcare has led to more precise treatments, improved access to information for both patients and professionals, and the ability to personalize care for better patient outcomes.

Customer-Data-Platform-Explained
Blogs

Customer Data Platform Explained

Customer Data Platform Explained

A CDP unifies your customer data into a centralized hub, enabling transparent marketing initiatives. Explore the power of CDPs in modern marketing!

Data is essential to modern marketing. It is therefore not surprising that the customer data platform (CDP) is outpacing all other marketing technologies in terms of growth. The CDP claims to offer the secret to complete data-driven marketing, a captivating marketing idea in which all your consumer data is merged for marketing and other purposes. The “marketing brain” that enables better campaigns cannot operate without the data and the administration of the data. IDC predicts that by 2026, the amount of data in the world will have doubled. Therefore, compiling the data is crucial. Here’s when the consumer data platform comes into play!

What is a customer data platform (CDP)?

Packaged software that unifies and persists client data into a single, system-accessible database is called a Customer Data Platform (CDP). Data is extracted from several sources, cleansed, and merged to generate a single consumer profile. Afterward, additional marketing platforms can access this organized data.

By merging information from several sources, consumer data systems build customer profiles. Relationship management (CRM) and data management platforms (DMP), transactional systems, online forms, social media and email activity, website and eCommerce behavior data, and more can be some of these sources. Since CDPs assist businesses in placing the consumer at the center of their marketing initiatives, they are crucial for people-based marketing.

A customer data platform (CDP) makes it easier to handle customer data for marketing purposes by merging data from multiple sources across multiple platforms.

How does a customer data platform work?

To build a single customer database, customer data platforms (CDPs) directly gather data from various digital channels, including websites, social media platforms, email lists, and mobile applications. Other systems can access this database, created during the identity resolution process, for analysis and consumer interaction management.

Additionally, some CDPs can gather third-party data—the user information a business has purchased or shared with third parties. Through a process known as customer data integration (CDI), CDPs gather client data in real-time from both online and offline channels independently.

Why do you need a customer data platform?

·         Gather and combine all first-party data

Numerous technologies that marketers utilize, including email, analytics, CRM, e-commerce, and social media, function in silos and don’t exchange data. Getting the whole picture is difficult, and understanding what you’re looking at is even more difficult. By integrating all the technologies marketers use and serving as a single source of truth for first-party consumer data, a customer data platform aims to solve those problems.

·         Customer data management

By managing consent and regulating data transfers between various marketing systems, CDPs oversee the management of first-party data as well as customer privacy and data rights. In the age of GDPR and data protection, your company must actively manage consent and data flows and keep records of that management.

·         Client data synchronisation

You can operate upon first-party user data after obtaining authorization to gather it, unifying and organizing it into profiles. Utilizing audience segments created by CDPs can benefit all your marketing channels and platforms.

What are the key benefits of having a CDP?

·         Make your marketing initiatives more transparent

Knowing the actual expenses and results of marketing initiatives can be challenging at times. You can see exactly how much you are spending and how well each channel and campaign is working with a CDP. Your digital marketing initiatives will be transparent as a result.

·         Acquire knowledge to aid in decision-making

You may make more informed judgments based on facts by collecting, evaluating, and acting upon consumer data. Changes in the market and with clients can be handled by your business more quickly.

·         Putting the business benefits first

These days, gathering and analyzing data takes up a lot of time for analysts and marketers. You may increase profitability and improve the customer experience with the time you save by automating this and having it provided in real time.

·         Improve the experience for customers

A unified customer experience can be established with the use of a 360° customer perspective. We anticipate the same experience even though we utilize more channels and gadgets now than we did in the past. A CDP makes this feasible.

Wrapping Up

Businesses need to use tools and approaches that keep them ahead of the competition as they expand and enhance their marketing efforts. Customer data platforms act as a concentrated source of strong data that helps protect sensitive customer information and boost the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives.

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have become the keystone of a successful customer-centric strategy as a crucial element in this paradigm shift. CDPs enable organizations to provide more personalized consumer experiences than ever before with the help of CDPs, which centralize data from many sources, enable real-time processing, and ease compliance with data privacy requirements.

Future-generation CDPs appear to hold considerable potential, with advanced AI and machine learning features, a stronger focus on privacy-by-design, and architectures that support integration and scalability. With so much potential ahead of them, CDPs will help to advance consumer awareness, improve engagement tactics, and eventually boost business growth.

The Intersection of Creativity and Technology
Blogs

The Intersection of Creativity and Technology

The Intersection of Creativity and Technology

“We need technology to work for creativity, not against it.“

Intersection of Creativity and Technology

The debate of Creativity vs Technology has been going on for a while. But what we need to get straight is it’s not a competition. It’s not another either/or situation where we have to choose one. In today’s world, creativity and technology work together, as it should.

Critics argue technology has made everything kind of the same. It’s as if the world and our work lives are all a how-to template. You go through your social accounts, and it all looks jarringly similar. What can bring a breath of fresh air?

image 5

Technology and creativity are now more intertwined than ever, and it’s at the intersection of the two- magic happens. Creativity helps you unlock these new ideas that can be potentially disruptive; technology takes care of the execution. Human minds create abstract ideas; technology deconstructs those so we can finally decipher them.

Supporters argue technology will replace humans. But no technology (no matter how sophisticated) can mimic human creativity and its genius.

image 6

Undoubtedly, a lot depends on standardization and routine work. AI can take care of that, while humans can have their creative juices flowing and do what they do best, leaving the rest to the machines.

Utilizing the full breadth of our tech stacks paves the way for more creative opportunities. Technology has empowered us with the capabilities to create more and share more. A great idea can reach millions so quickly that it was inconceivable a few decades back.

Without technology, businesses can’t make sense of the colossal quantities of data they keep amassing. Without creativity, they can’t create change. It’s worthwhile pondering here how technology facilitates an idea; it’s not the idea itself. It allows all new concepts to come together in one place, building on it and leading to a more focused execution of the whole process.

image 7

The Editor’s Note

With technology come monotony and sameness. Data shouldn’t be the only thing leading your efforts; it should be informing your decisions.

Create an atmosphere where you don’t consider tech and creativity as two competing forces but as complementing assets that intersect and achieve impressive results much faster.

How AI Continues to Transform Healthcare
Blogs

How AI Continues to transform healthcare

How AI Continues to transform healthcare

Things AI is doing for healthcare aren’t fiction anymore. Artificial intelligence is changing the healthcare industry and doing it well.

Ai in healthcare

AI and deep learning are doing some of the things humans do- only quicker, better, and more economically. Frost & Sullivan predicts artificial intelligence (AI) will help the American healthcare industry save over $150 billion by 2025.

AI-powered healthcare solutions are helping with medical diagnosis, drug discovery, medicine, and more.This article will drill down and give you insights into the substantial ways Artificial intelligence is playing a huge role in healthcare. 

AI and the path ahead

Artificial intelligence will transform the lab of the future. Healthcare data platforms would help doctors and scientists better understand diseases and their treatments. Biopharmaceutical researchers have achieved a lot in this space in the last couple of years, but we’re still far from having a systematic process for medical intervention for different patients. There are limits associated with reductionism in medicine, and AI can bring in a step change.

image 3
Source

The Precision

  • Robot-assisted surgeries allow medical professionals to perform complicated procedures with precision. These surgeries are minimally invasive and boost doctors’ precision. 
  • AI also helps diagnose diseases early, making the treatment overall more effective than the traditional diagnosis. 
  • A Nature research article found that an AI system surpassed human doctors in detecting breast cancer, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of cancer screening.
  • Different lifestyles, genetics, and environments call for precision medicine. Massive parallel sequencing, or NGS, is capable of sequencing a person’s genome with insane speed (Compared to traditional sequencing that almost took a decade to achieve the same!).

The Prediction

  • A Stanford study found that AI was better able to predict how long the patients have to live (The AI algorithm showed an accuracy of 90% compared to 64% for human doctors).
  • The complexity of human bodies makes drug discovery a long process. Some scientists believe AI will expedite the process and have a drug available for treatment in 1/10th of that time. Artificial intelligence can deliver results here at an unprecedented pace and scale. 
  • AI can predict the diseases an individual is prone to, treatment options, and the readmission risk in certain patients.
image 4
Source

A Grain of Salt

AI algorithms can amplify existing biases in data sets. Since medical data can be very biased, we must build AI models that are fair and on the level. The other challenges that can come up are integrating engineering with complex human biology, data privacy, upgrading technology & infrastructure, and more. Mastering these complexities will be arduous but equally impactful.

The Editor’s Note

Technology can’t replace human expertise, but the convergence of the two will help drive innovation swiftly. Artificial intelligence is helping healthcare practitioners and experts eliminate manual tasks. Companies need to understand and define their north star to make progress in the right direction, and AI will help them move there faster.

Human ingenuity combined with the power of AI and machine learning will not only help achieve the present results at a breakneck speed, but also achieve things the healthcare industry previously deemed impossible.