Citizens' health is a barometer of society's health, and thus healthcare is a primary focus of all governments/societies. Precaution is preferable to cure. It is critical to monitor patients on a regular basis and to treat them proactively. Despite being proactive, there is a possibility that patients will require reactive treatment. Over the last century, the healthcare industry has made tremendous strides. Technology has been critical to these advancements. This has aided doctors in diagnosing patients more accurately, resulting in more effective treatment. Healthcare costs have increased, as has the incidence of chronic lifestyle diseases and the ageing population. These factors are compelling healthcare stakeholders worldwide to pursue round-the-clock activity tracking and continuous monitoring of health parameters. Hospitals are critical for monitoring and treating patients. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how hospitals are implementing newer technologies to monitor and treat their patients through the development of next generation affordable healthcare systems.
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Innovation in healthcare is inevitable to meet the demand in the healthcare industry and improve the citizens quality of life. This paper focuses on how hospitals are adopting newer technologies to monitor and treat its patients by building Next Generation affordable Healthcare systems.
The Next Generation Healthcare systems are convergence of technology. It transforms the healthcare from
Instead of focusing on disease, it focuses on well-being. The Next Generation Healthcare health solutions (Islam, M.M et al. 2020) involves
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Capturing patient health data from various sensors in a secured manner
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Applying complex algorithms to analyze the data
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Sharing the data in a secured manner, using wireless technologies, with Medical professionals for them make appropriate recommendations.
Thus promoting
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Patient’s independence,
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Focuses on prevention,
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Improves outcome.
F. Alshehri and G. Muhammad (2021) conducted detailed survey of various IoT, Cloud, Edge and AI based smart healthcare solutions and its impact, challenges on the healthcare industries. With the help of IoT edge and fog, cloud-IoT convergence can be enabled (M. Aazam et.al 2020) which helps to smart healthcare deployment and quick turnaround in healthcare delivery.
The Fig.1 depicts a typical patient journey at a hospital. The patient’s journey (Olutosin Taiwo et al. 2020) begins with registration. Medical records are created for the patient in the hospital’s EMR/HMS system. The patient can have access to the doctors, diagnostic centre, pharmacy, wellness centre, emergency care etc. The ERM/HMS system helps have all the information available to the doctors, pharmacists, wellness centres etc. This ensures that the complete medical history is stored in one location and build over a period to provide a complete picture of the patient. The patient has access to the specialists as required. The patient can be admitted to the hospital as an in-patient and go through the required treatment including any surgeries. The patient needs to continue treatment at home, and this too can be monitored, and various parameters stored in the EMR/HMS. To fulfil the mentioned journey, hospitals are adopting various technologies to provide the next generation healthcare systems.
Figure 2.
Next generation healthcare system – themes for hospitals
There are multiple use cases that make a Next Generation Healthcare system. Some of the use cases are illustrated in the blue circles in the Fig.2. This paper will focus on the few of these important use cases. Hospitals are run by multiple entities such as government, trusts, self-funded organizations etc. Each of these entities, while providing facilities by implementing the above-mentioned use cases need to focus on 3 critical areas to run their operations efficiently.