There are two major challenges to implementing IoT solutions in healthcare

Thomson Reuters

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The healthcare sector has been slowly adopting IoT technologies including wearables and sensors that allow healthcare providers to remotely monitor their patients, as well as analytics to process medical data for insights.

However, there are still two major barriers hampering IoT adoption in the US healthcare system, according to an article in the Chicago Business Journal.

Healthcare providers have not been encouraging their patients to use IoT healthcare tools like wearables. The article cited a survey last year that found that only 15% of doctors have talked with their patients about using wearables or health apps in their treatments. There are a variety of reasons that doctors may not be pushing the use of IoT technologies including potential privacy concerns and lack of familiarity with the technologies, the article said.

Adoption of electronic health records systems in the US has been slow and haphazard, the article stated. Many doctors don’t even know how to use the systems, which the US government has spent billions of dollars to implement to modernize the healthcare system. Electronic records systems can store all of a patient’s data generated from wearables and other connected medical devices so that all of the patient’s different healthcare providers can access it, vastly increasing the value of that data.

The combination of electronic medical records with new technologies like wearables and predictive analytics can have significant impacts on patients’ health. One Texas hospital cut its 30-day readmission rate for patients with heart failure in half by using predictive analytics to crunch their individual healthcare records, according to the article. More case studies like this will likely convince more healthcare providers to adopt IoT technologies in their treatments.

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