8 Technology-Driven Healthcare Trends in 2024

With mounting challenges facing the healthcare space today, including labor shortages and increasing costs across the board, industry leaders are looking to leverage the recent advancements in technology to address these problems and alleviate their effects on both healthcare professionals and patients. 

Let’s have a look at the technology-driven trends happening now that are at the top of leaders' minds in the healthcare space. 

Streamlining Workflows through AI

You guessed it right: artificial intelligence (AI) is at the top of the list. The healthcare industry has consistently been the leader in AI-related mergers and acquisitions, and as a matter of fact, investors have poured US$ 31.5 billion in equity funding into AI between 2019 and 2022^[1] alone.

With the shortage of labor and the increasing use of more expensive contractors to bridge the gap, as well as clinicians burning out due to administrative and documentation tasks, healthcare leaders are prioritizing integrating AI into the day-to-day operations to relieve clinicians of administrative burdens and focus on providing quality care to patients.

AI can be used to automate routine tasks, handle pre-op workflows, and simplify the insurance claims process, among many other things. The most popular use case is having the ability to automatically document the conversations between the patient and the doctor. HCA Healthcare, the largest health system in the United States, is developing an AI tool that converts clinician's and patient’s conversations into medical notes, which then augments the patient’s electronic health records (EHR). Carbon Health is using a similar tool, OpenAI’s GPT-4, to generate comprehensive and accurate medical notes in a hands-free manner. According to a study made by Deloitte, this tool decreased the documentation time from 16 minutes to four minutes and increased the patient volume by 30%^[1].

Caring for the Aging Population 

Longer life expectancy has contributed to the increasing costs of healthcare. With people living longer, healthcare leaders are pressured into finding cost-effective solutions to care for our aging population.

National Health Service (NHS) England has implemented virtual wards in the UK to allow patients to get the care that they need in the convenience of their own homes, rather than in the hospitals. Innovative solutions such as this enable our elderly population to remain in their own homes longer where they are more comfortable getting the care and treatment they need and delay the need for hospital space, hospices, and nursing homes.

Telehealth for Acute Care and Long-term Chronic Disease Management

Although we have seen a decline in growth for telehealth services in 2023, on average, this industry still has grown 30.3% per year on average between 2018 and 2023, with a revenue of US$ 21.5 billion in 2023.

Telehealth will continue to remain relevant and used as one of the primary tools in providing healthcare services. According to a survey conducted by Accenture in 2020^[2], 62% of healthcare consumers still prefer virtual healthcare options, and 57% would like a remote monitoring option for ongoing health issues. 

Remote patient monitoring programs are helping patients to have better recovery experiences at home after medical procedures. At the same time, this also reduces hospital admissions and cuts down the costs of emergency room visits. Virginia Health System implemented a hospital-at-home program, where medical care is provided through video and remote patient monitoring, and staff provides in-person visits to patients in their homes. This program saved an average of US$ 3,000 per patient visit, or more than US$ 4 million annually for the average hospital^[1]. 

Development of Medical Devices for Remote Care

To augment the medical care provided remotely through telehealth and virtual hospital programs, companies have been busy developing portable devices that patients can use at home to administer medications or monitor their condition without needing to constantly access hospital equipment.

In the United Kingdom, Medway NHS Foundation Trust develops a remote monitoring technology for an elastomeric pump that allows the administration of chemotherapy drugs to patients at home. The monitoring technology allows the hospital staff to ensure proper dosage and rate and track the patient’s vital signs remotely^[4]. This innovation saves approximately 496 hospital bed days in the first 10 months of use, amounting to almost US$ 200,000^[1].

Meanwhile in Tel Aviv, Sheba Medical Center developed a portable ultrasound probe paired with a computer tablet and integrated it with an AI tool to diagnose cardiac issues in minutes^[5]. Although this does not replace echocardiography machines, it does offer a more affordable option to detect heart-related issues and save specialty consultations for complex cases.

Predictive Analytics for Better Diagnostics

The healthcare industry generated more than 2.3 zettabytes of data worldwide in 2020^[1], and we continue to build on this vast amount of data through our electronic health records, sensors, and wearable devices that we use every day.

Clinical algorithms and predictive analytics can be applied to this massive amount of information to provide patients and consumers with personalized and actionable insights - think about the applications we use on our smartphones that coach us about our health.

AI can also be leveraged to analyze the data and predict the patient’s health or treatment outcomes based on their profiles. It can also analyze large datasets and identify patterns of health trends within a population that are not immediately obvious to a human. Epic, one of the largest Electronic Health Records (EHR) providers in the United States, launched Cosmos in 2019, a program that will mine data from millions of patient medical records to support various research such as the effectiveness of treatments for patients^[6]. 

Wearables Democratizing Healthcare

The recent advancements in technology allowed our smartphones, smartwatches, and fitness trackers to provide us with the data we need to manage our health and make informed decisions along with our healthcare providers. Powerful AI capabilities are already embedded into our Android and iOS devices, which can support clinicians in making diagnoses through the inputs from these wearable devices. 

Virtual and Augmented Reality

While VR and AR have been around for a while, it is also now finding their way into healthcare applications. VR is found to be beneficial for chronic pain management and has been helping patients manage pain more effectively than traditional alternatives^[7]. Its applications include pain management for burn pain therapy, patients coping with cancer, and labor pain management. AR has also been increasingly used by healthcare practitioners in wound care management, which helps determine the best treatment option while eliminating invasive methods of assessing wounds. 

Accessible Knowledge and Expertise Through Remote Collaboration

Lastly, technology facilitates collaboration across various healthcare disciplines, which ultimately improves patient care. Virtual collaboration allows healthcare professionals to access a broader range of knowledge and expertise. Technologies for remote collaboration also have the potential to help address labor shortages as the current workforce ages. These platforms offer new career opportunities for experienced practitioners, enabling them to guide and mentor younger colleagues remotely. This approach helps retain valuable knowledge that might otherwise be lost due to early retirements or professionals leaving the field.

LiveSwitch is the real-time audio and video provider of choice among the leading brands in telehealth. If you’re thinking of building your telehealth application with WebRTC technology, get in touch with our team or check out our telehealth demo here!

Sources

[1] Siegel, Sara. 2024 Global Health Care Sector Outlook. https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/Industries/life-sciences-health-care/analysis/global-health-care-outlook.html Deloitte. 2024.
[2] Safavi, Kaveh, MD, JD, and Kalis, Brian. 2020. How can leaders make recent digital health gains last? https://www.accenture.com/gb-en/insights/health/leaders-make-recent-digital-health-gains-last#:~:text=If%20given%20the%20choice%2C%20many,%2Dhome%20devices%20(57%25). Accenture. 2020. 
[3] Philips. 10 Healthcare technology trends for 2024. https://www.philips.com/a-w/about/news/archive/features/2023/20231114-10-healthcare-technology-trends-for-2024.html. 2023.
[4] Lydon, Cora. Medway virtual ward strategy enables drug administration at home. https://www.digitalhealth.net/2023/05/medway-virtual-ward-strategy-enables-drug-administration-at-home/. Digital Health. 2023. 
[5] Ghert-Zand, Renee. Israeli startup uses AI to help doctors image and diagnose cardiac issues in minutes. https://www.timesofisrael.com/sheba-startup-uses-ai-to-help-doctors-image-and-diagnose-cardiac-issues-in-minutes/. The Times of Israel. 2023.
[6] Drees, Jackie. Epic unveils patient data research initiative, new software. https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/ehrs/epic-unveils-patient-data-research-initiative-new-software.html. Becker’s Health IT. 2019.
[7] Alkhaldi, Nadejda. How healthcare professionals use virtual reality for pain management. https://itrexgroup.com/blog/virtual-reality-for-pain-management/. ITRexGroup. 2023.