2021 & 2020 were unique years for the digitization of healthcare. Telehealth was rapidly adopted and with healthcare workers being worked to the bone, relying on digital tools to help reduce their burden was at the front-mind of health informatic professionals. In this blog post, I am going to dive into some health tech trends I believe will be impactful in the year 2022 and beyond!
- Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing which is a subset of Artificial Intelligence can have huge benefits for the healthcare field, due to the massive volumes of data, specifically unstructured text data, which is collected daily from healthcare organizations. Helping to auto-populate the EHR records is one way to reduce the burden on the medical scribe or clinician when it comes to data entry, so they can spend more time with the patient and less time staring at a screen. In addition, on the administrative side of healthcare, integrating healthcare chatbots which use natural language processing to answer FAQ’s can be a way to reduce the administrative load for healthcare organizations. - Personalized Medicine
Photo by Andres Urena on Unsplash
With health tech gadgets such as, Fitbits and mHealth apps to help you track your sleep and fitness levels, more and more people are becoming interested and invested in learning about their own personal health. With this knowledge and access to their healthcare data, this could manifest a different relationship between the patient and care provider. Instead of the clinician telling the patient about their symptoms, with this knowledge, some patients can move towards having a conversation about their health, once patients are empowered to learn more from these digital devices. In some cases, the clinician could lean on the patient for some of the data entry aspects (e.g. filling in their current address and if any of their symptoms have changed recently) prior to their in-person or virtual meeting, and the conversation can be more collaborative on how best to manage care. - Telehealth
Telehealth had a big boost during the pandemic where patients were able to realize the cost and time savings. I hope that for routine check-ups, the option for virtual appointments will remain. If this will allow people to make the time to see their clinician more often by reducing barriers to seeing a doctor, as people might not be able to get time off work, this will be a huge win and a reason for this healthcare model to remain as a permanent option. - APIs
I was listening to the This Week in Health IT podcast where a designer was trying to get four orthopedic surgeons to agree on one product design and this was not possible, everyone was firm in their beliefs of what the design should look like. When it comes to healthcare, there will always be a degree of customizable features that clinicians would like to have because there can be great variability between patients. The advancement of FHIR (fast health interoperability resources) which is a standard developed by HL7 is allowing greater interoperability between healthcare data sources and the ability to build apps on top of existing infrastructure. EHR vendors such as, Epic and Cerner are partnering with big names such as, IBM to carry out healthcare analytics through open API’s which allow for data to be shared and data insights to arise. - Voice-to-Text Technology
When it comes to reducing clinician burnout due to excessive data entry in the EHR. Voice-to-text is a way to reduce the constant scrolling and typing clinicians have to do, taking time away from their patients and in some cases adding to their long day. The future is not just transcribing what the clinician is saying into the EHR but to go as far as treating the EHR like Google Nest or Alexa. Where the clinician can ask questions and get quick responses from the EHR. In addition, there will have to be flags built-into the system where transcription errors can be flagged easily.
These are the five health tech trends I see rapidly developing in 2022, how about you? What tech trends do you think we will see in the healthcare field? I also wrote a blog post on the jobsinhealthtech site where I talk more about these trends which you can find here.
0 Comments