The healthcare system has undergone seismic changes over the past few years, which have been even further accelerated by the pandemic.
From virtual visits to the GP, to self-administered blood sampling, patients and providers have had to embrace processes that were still in the early adoption stages pre-pandemic.
And while we are still living in a period of disruption and uncertainty, it is important to reflect upon the impact of these changes on our relationship with healthcare at an individual and collective level.
This will help to understand the future of healthcare service delivery in the next year and beyond.
Increasing decentralisation of care
In recent years, the hospital’s traditional role as a hub for providing and receiving healthcare services has become less central in the healthcare journey of patients and providers alike.
Today, due to advances in communications, remote monitoring technology and wearable devices, GPs and specialists are increasingly able to reach patients in their homes or other locations.
Smaller, yet more powerful and accurate technology-enabled devices equipped with miniaturised sensors are also catalysing the shift from a physician-centred model to a patient-centred model.
It would be easy to dismiss this trend as just a collateral impact of the pandemic, but the truth is healthcare professionals and innovators have always looked at decentralised care as critical to improving health outcomes.
This trend plays in the patient’s favour and constitutes tangible and life-changing progress both in vital signs monitoring (and timely interventions) and many other areas of our health and wellbeing.
The shift to digitisation and remote patient monitoring will help tackle public health challenges at a larger scale.
For example, for the 15 million people in the UK, or more than one in five Britons, who suffer from a long-term chronic disease, technological advances can offer a broader and more diverse way to monitor and treat them, which will help reduce wait times and improve collective health outcomes.
Telemedicine and wearables
Another shift accelerated by the pandemic is that of telemedicine adoption and the rise of wearable devices.
The onset of the pandemic spurred a huge increase in the adoption of telemedicine in the UK with the Royal College of GPs reporting 86% of GP consultations were conducted remotely in July 2020.
While these numbers may decrease slightly after the pandemic, telehealth will be key in responding to GP shortages and the staggering NHS backlog by opening a larger pool of GPs to patients online.
Beyond the ability to communicate with patients irrespective of their location, telehealth technology must deliver accurate and actionable information to healthcare providers.
To this end, sensor integration into wearables and miniaturisation help deliver greater benefits than sporadic hospital visits by providing a more accurate, consistent, and regular picture of the patient’s health.
The miniaturisation of sensors allows them to be more easily integrated into wearable devices, which represents a huge step in efforts to record relevant data more easily, giving physicians the opportunity to intervene earlier and more efficiently.
Ofcom’s technology tracker found 44 per cent of UK households owned wearables in 2021.
However, while popular consumer wearables such as the Apple Watch and Fitbit do capture important health data, they are not equipped with the advanced technology to reliably and accurately deliver clinical-grade data that aids decision-making by healthcare professionals.
To accelerate the shift from reactive to predictive care, we need more powerful devices that can sense and collect actionable data more precisely and reliably, while also consuming less power.
These clinical-grade wearable devices measure and speak in the languages of healthcare providers, making it easier for them to understand and interpret the data.
Ultimately, only medical-grade wearable devices can offer the flexibility of at-home disease management while delivering life-saving measurements.
Digitalised imaging
Another example of the digitalisation of healthcare are medical imaging technologies. Imaging modalities, such as X-rays and CT scanning, can now give access to powerful diagnostic information thanks to advances in analytics.
AI, machine learning, and algorithms can be applied to the images, which reduce the amount of time that a healthcare professional might have to spend looking at them while also reducing errors in diagnoses.
Overall, the digitalisation of imaging is providing a better outcome for the patients and better decision-support for the GPs.
In summary, advances in telehealth, clinical-grade wearables, and digitalised imaging have facilitated the decentralisation of healthcare from its traditional hub, giving patients more control over their health while adding convenience and more accurate diagnoses for healthcare providers.
Technology has the power to rebalance our focus on health from reactive care to preventive care. Spending time investing in your wellbeing and health used to happen at a later stage in life.
However, as the pandemic reinforced the importance of health and wellbeing in the lives of millions of people, patients of all ages are moving towards a desire to get more control, transparency, and frequency over their health monitoring.
While continued change will bring its share of disruption and doubt, this transition has the ability to not only transform patients’ lives, but also an industry that needs to seize this opportunity to put patients, accessibility and transparency at the centre of everything it does.
