Emerging Technology Trends Enable “Online Health Services”
Remember the old adage “prevention is better than cure?” Well, for many patients with chronic conditions this may soon be true. Researchers at Accenture Technology Labs are developing a vision of next-generation healthcare built around the premise of patients receiving continuous healthcare from any location—their home, their office, even their holiday villa. Gone are the hours spent wasted in the doctor’s office or emergency room, replaced by around-the-clock monitoring and proactive intervention. In this article, we look at the three underlying trends supporting Accenture’s healthcare vision of the future.
Trend one: the rapid rise of consumer health electronics
Today you certainly don’t have to go to a doctor’s office to have a check-up. Blood pressure cuffs enable us to take our own reading; bathroom scales weigh us and read our body weight-to-fat ratio; and home cholesterol monitoring devices are all available in the marketplace. Soon there will be widely available newer, more sophisticated devices such as “armbands” that track energy expenditure; home ECG (electrocardiogram) units that monitor and record every heartbeat; and the ultimate ”LifeShirt” that monitors more than 30 physiological signs in real time. And together with “patch” technologies for everything from tobacco use to diabetes and a new generation of “embedded” and “swallowable” devices (internal thermometers and stomach cameras), consumer health devices are fast becoming affordable items for many households. The exciting thing about these technologies is not just that they are becoming usable and affordable, but by leveraging today’s wireless infrastructure they also become communicable.
Trend two: wireless, wireless everywhere
The concept of wireless is nothing new. We roam around chatting on mobile phones and sit in remote locations e-mailing from our wireless laptops. But what if your pacemaker or cholesterol patch could share health diagnostics with your healthcare provider using wireless capabilities? Think of the possibilities. Most of the devices discussed earlier can be configured with minimum effort to interface wirelessly with a home computer, a cell phone (using Bluetooth technology) or even a remote Internet application.
Trend three: a spoonful of analytics
Of course being inundated with data from multiple devices and multiple patients is not going to help doctors or healthcare providers to be more effective than they are today, unless they have the benefit of real-time analytics. These offer healthcare providers a means of aggregating and interpreting data about an individual’s health and environment. For instance, instead of seeing that a patient’s blood pressure is up today, real-time analytics would enable the doctor to see what the pattern has been over the past week or two weeks. Real-time analytics offers healthcare providers the ability to better interpret information and filter out only what’s most relevant so that they can act immediately.
Bringing it all together…
So while Accenture’s vision of next-generation healthcare might sound futuristic, each of the fundamental building blocks is already in place. Many of you reading this article may even have two of the three elements (trends) within your own home. Intelligent scales and a mobile phone perhaps? The R&D team at Accenture Technology Labs has taken this one step further, developing an innovative prototype called Online Health Services. This technology prototype brings together each of the trends in a dynamic fashion to deliver continuous care to chronically ill patients. Look for more details in coming months.
Remember the old adage “prevention is better than cure?” Well, for many patients with chronic conditions this may soon be true. Researchers at Accenture Technology Labs are developing a vision of next-generation healthcare built around the premise of patients receiving continuous healthcare from any location—their home, their office, even their holiday villa. Gone are the hours spent wasted in the doctor’s office or emergency room, replaced by around-the-clock monitoring and proactive intervention. In this article, we look at the three underlying trends supporting Accenture’s healthcare vision of the future.
Trend one: the rapid rise of consumer health electronics
Today you certainly don’t have to go to a doctor’s office to have a check-up. Blood pressure cuffs enable us to take our own reading; bathroom scales weigh us and read our body weight-to-fat ratio; and home cholesterol monitoring devices are all available in the marketplace. Soon there will be widely available newer, more sophisticated devices such as “armbands” that track energy expenditure; home ECG (electrocardiogram) units that monitor and record every heartbeat; and the ultimate ”LifeShirt” that monitors more than 30 physiological signs in real time. And together with “patch” technologies for everything from tobacco use to diabetes and a new generation of “embedded” and “swallowable” devices (internal thermometers and stomach cameras), consumer health devices are fast becoming affordable items for many households. The exciting thing about these technologies is not just that they are becoming usable and affordable, but by leveraging today’s wireless infrastructure they also become communicable.
Trend two: wireless, wireless everywhere
The concept of wireless is nothing new. We roam around chatting on mobile phones and sit in remote locations e-mailing from our wireless laptops. But what if your pacemaker or cholesterol patch could share health diagnostics with your healthcare provider using wireless capabilities? Think of the possibilities. Most of the devices discussed earlier can be configured with minimum effort to interface wirelessly with a home computer, a cell phone (using Bluetooth technology) or even a remote Internet application.
Trend three: a spoonful of analytics
Of course being inundated with data from multiple devices and multiple patients is not going to help doctors or healthcare providers to be more effective than they are today, unless they have the benefit of real-time analytics. These offer healthcare providers a means of aggregating and interpreting data about an individual’s health and environment. For instance, instead of seeing that a patient’s blood pressure is up today, real-time analytics would enable the doctor to see what the pattern has been over the past week or two weeks. Real-time analytics offers healthcare providers the ability to better interpret information and filter out only what’s most relevant so that they can act immediately.
Bringing it all together…
So while Accenture’s vision of next-generation healthcare might sound futuristic, each of the fundamental building blocks is already in place. Many of you reading this article may even have two of the three elements (trends) within your own home. Intelligent scales and a mobile phone perhaps? The R&D team at Accenture Technology Labs has taken this one step further, developing an innovative prototype called Online Health Services. This technology prototype brings together each of the trends in a dynamic fashion to deliver continuous care to chronically ill patients. Look for more details in coming months.
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