2016/05/08
 
8 May, 2016 | 3 min read

Connected Health - Reinventing Healthcare with Technology

  • Malinda Senanayake
  • Intern - WSO2

Demands for more personalized and convenient services from healthcare providers has steadily increased during the past decade. Increase in populations, life expectancy, and the advancement of technology are a few key contributors to this uptick in demand. These demands have resulted in creating a global eHealth market that is supposed to reach $308 billion by 2022, as predicted by Grand View Research INC.

The essence of a connected healthcare business is to deliver an efficient, effective service to its users by connecting disparate systems, devices, and stakeholders. It aims to automate most tasks and eliminate human error, trigger intelligent events for the hospitals and other stakeholders, and provide medical information via a range of devices at various locations. By becoming a connected ecosystem, hospitals have the opportunity to reduce costs, increase revenue, as well as offer a high-quality service to patients.

The success of a connected healthcare business though depends on how the enterprise will look to address key challenges via comprehensive solutions.

In the white paper “Connected Health Reference Architecture” Nuwan Bandara, a solutions architect at WSO2, discusses the significance of creating a connected healthcare system and explains how a middleware platform can be used to address each and every challenge faced at implementation.

One of the key challenges he highlights is the ability to deliver aggregated information without any latency issues between sources. In order to overcome this, you would need a centralized system that enables smooth integration of devices, services, and workflows. The use of multiple devices that take various measurements in different formats makes it a bit more difficult compared to other connected ecosystems; however, this can be addressed by consolidating the gathered data, and making it easily accessible to various services and applications from different locations.

Given that all this data is private information, it is vital to have fool proof security measures in place as well to restrict access only to authorized personnel, Nuwan notes.

Furthermore, it is important for hospitals to be geared to manage high capacities during crisis situations. If the system is unable to cope with high loads during these times, the system will crash and disrupt all workflows. Hospitals overcome this by equipping their systems with elastic scaling to handle high loads.

To learn more about the Connected Health reference architecture, download and read the white paper here .

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