As per Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) data, National Health Expenditure (NHE) accounted to $12,530 per person and it was around 19.7% of the GDP in 2020. About 25% of US healthcare spending may be categorized as waste as per academic research from Humana Inc. and this can be attributed to administration complexities, duplicate services, unnecessitated treatments, drug prices and readmission rates.
Digital adoption was at a slow pace before Covid-19 to resolve these challenges. None of us can deny the transformation from Covid-19 especially in the healthcare industry. A bulk of these changes like digital adoption and process automation moved from optional to mandatory in a short time. The Healthcare industry is adopting digitalization across departments to enhance the care experience and optimize operation. As 2022 approaches, healthcare is planning better to match the requirements of the nursing staff, doctors, and patients.
Here we will highlight the top 6 healthcare technology trends for 2022. It is not a surprise for many of us that digital technologies are poised to transform the healthcare industry this year. Let us find out what these trends are and how they will impact the healthcare industry in 2022.
It is not a surprise that digital technologies are poised to transform the healthcare industry this year. Let us find out these trends and how they will impact the healthcare industry in 2022. Here we will highlight the top 6 healthcare technology trends for 2022. As per the 2021 Future of Healthcare Report, nearly 80% of healthcare industry players plan to boost their investment in digital healthcare trends. Due to the pandemic, healthcare professionals are already adopting digitalization in their processes across departments. Now we are looking towards more personalized, better, faster, and cost-effective healthcare services with the help of digitalization.
1. AI-enabled Healthcare to improve outcomes
Do you know some exciting stats about Artificial Intelligence in the Healthcare industry? Are you keen to understand how AI can be the top healthcare technology trend for 2022?
As per research from Allied Market Research, Artificial Intelligence in the Healthcare industry is expected to reach a total value of $194.4 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 38.1% during 2021-30. Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing the healthcare industry by addressing some significant challenges. Healthcare professionals are now more empowered with AI to focus on taking care of their patients instead of doing admin tasks. A few areas that can be impacted with AI-enabled healthcare:
- Reduce Clinical Errors
- High accuracy of the diagnosis
- Health Monitoring of the patients
- Generating Health Report Documents Automatically
- Generating Diagnosis Reports Automatically
- Lower operational expenditure
- Improved efficiency
AI-enabled healthcare is not about a single area of inpatient care, operations, or diagnosis; it is about every process benefiting from Artificial intelligence-related tools and solutions. Let us look at a few in detail:
AI to continue to evolve to resolve Covid-19 challenges
From the inception of Covid-19, AI helped track the contacts and predict an outbreak to help the healthcare industry plan for the sudden surge. Apart from this, several start-ups have provided innovative solutions like analyzing crowd temperature data to identify any symptomatic individuals and mask compliance. Most importantly, Machine learning accelerated Covid-19 vaccine development by identifying protein fragments. More advances in healthcare are expected to tackle the unpredictable scenarios of Covid-19 leveraging AI in 2022.
AI-enabled Healthcare conversational assistants
Several people faced challenges identifying their symptoms related to any illness with Chatbots powered by NLP. Chatbots can reduce the workload on ever burdened Nurse lines to quickly list out the symptoms and re-route the information to the healthcare professionals. But still, the AI-powered chatbots are not ready for primary diagnosis as it involves a lot of risk factors.
New ways of extracting insights will evolve with unstructured data
Electronic Health Records (EHR) and medical images provide a lot of unstructured data to be analyzed for better diagnosis, accuracy and to avoid unnecessary treatments. A traditional approach to understanding the patient’s data and diseases is no longer valid. Also, in recent times Healthcare-associated infections are causing big troubles to the patients and associated care planning. AI is already addressing a part of these, and the future holds much potential in these areas.
2. Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM)
Remote Patient Monitoring is a part of telehealth which includes healthcare practices relying on devices such as blood pressure cuffs, implantable, and sensors. These devices collect data of the patients through passive means. RPM is used with the patients who have been discharged from the hospitals but need to visit the hospitals for their routine checkups.
RPM technology helps healthcare professionals to identify and analyze the patient’s data collected from the devices and further act on the analytics. These devices also help the patients to get their data by adding biometric data, health history, symptoms, and lifestyle.
Chronic care management needs a lot of continuous monitoring to save the patients beforehand in getting into an emergency scenario. It is essential to involve in the healthcare routing tracking to keep them healthier. A few start-ups are offering RPM to large healthcare setups and individual physicians. With Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) providing new initiatives for Remote Therapeutic Monitoring and Remote Patient Monitoring for 2022, the adoption may increase to enhance value-based care.
According to the American Heart Association
“Remote patient monitoring (RPM) can empower patients to manage their health better and participate in their health care.”
3. When Something Big Happens, there is Big Data behind
Big data is not new to healthcare. Like any other industry, healthcare has its challenges to tackle the volume, variety, and velocity of data from Electronic Health Records (EHR), wellness trackers, nurse triages, and medical diagnostics.
Big Data helps identify the health patterns and provides on-time and reliable solutions to the patients regarding the healthcare outcomes, experience, and wellness. As data grows exponentially, Big Data is set to be one of the top healthcare technology trends for 2022.
According to Fact.MR, big data analytics in healthcare is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 19% during 2021-32.
Healthy data volume is enormous with the growing trend of wearable devices, wellness monitoring, and health data tracking. Analyzing this data in 2022 can reduce costs of treatment, avoid readmissions and transform the care quality.
4. Digital Therapeutics
Digital Therapeutics (DTx) refers to an evidence-based behavioral treatment delivered to the patients through any software. It is expected to accelerate healthcare accessibility and effectiveness. The digital therapeutics programs monitor medication, diet, blood sugar, blood pressure, and exercise to improve patient care.
These programs are expected to offer guidance on treatment for a few common illnesses, use simulation techniques to promote behavioral changes, and interact with embedded medical trackers like heart defibrillators and blood glucose trackers to transform the care with minimal professional assistance.
Insider Intelligence expects the global DTx market to be a $56bn opportunity by 2025.
5. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Robotic process automation integration in the healthcare industry will strengthen clinicians and improve their processes, making healthcare more accessible. Automation in the healthcare industry will help professionals reduce inefficiencies by 30%. Therefore, we see RPA as one of the top healthcare technology trends for 2022. RPA is expected to prioritize admin and repetitive tasks over patients’ interactions and experiences. Here are some of the daily life use cases of RPA integration in the healthcare industry:
- Improving the data extraction and optimizing the patient information management processes
- Scheduling new patient appointments effectively
- Streamlining and simplifying the claims process by accelerating the data processing
- Reduction in errors
RPA solutions are expected to go beyond efficiency in 2022 and make healthcare organizations simpler and faster to handle patient loads and care management.
6. Augmented Reality/ Virtual Reality (AR/VR)
Much like many other technology interventions in healthcare in recent years, Virtual Reality was not mainstream till 2020. Backed by the pandemic, every industry has a new value for ‘virtual.’ 2021 was the year that drew attention to immersive technologies. Finally, there were venture capital investment and regulatory approvals for VR.
As per the Facts and Factors research report, VR in Healthcare is expected to grow at a CAGR of 34.9% during 2021-26. Robotic surgeries and cognitive simulations through games, lessons, and activities are expected to foster VR adoption in 2022 and beyond.
These top healthcare technology trends for 2022 are expected to improve patient care and healthcare service delivery. These technology trends were analyzed based on our interactions with many healthcare industry experts and technology advisors. Get in touch with our experts to know more about our healthcare expertise and solutions to adapt to these trends in 2022.