Healthcare and technologies have always been a good match. Healthcare strives to improve services and technologies give it power and momentum to continuously revisit what it does and improve it. It is a long-standing great partnership between science, innovation, technologies and the will to do better for people’s health. Since the invention of the internet that propelled a new technology-driven reality for our society and the introduction of smart technologies a decade ago, that partnership has picked up speed… and it keeps accelerating.
In my recent article on artificial intelligence (AI), I stress that technology is on the verge of generating a major paradigm shift in health systems. Healthcare is going somewhere it has never been before. AI is one important vector of that change. Awareness that 5G connectivity is another one is increasing. 5G will drive forward healthcare evolution as it enables us to dream beyond our historical limited capacity to aggregate and manage massive amounts of data. 5G networks create almost limitless possibilities to monitor, gather, synchronize, aggregate, analyze and use data. It also enables us to interact, in real-time, with smart medical devices. The internet of things (IoT) has numerous, if not endless, applications. Clearly, it underpins our future in many fields. Healthcare will be profoundly transformed with such technology that will increasingly connect our health to smart devices.
The global market for remote patient monitoring is 43B$ says Forbes Technology Council member Ben Forgan and we are just at the beginning of the trend. 53% of U.S.-based hospitals already have a remote patient monitoring system. These systems will only grow in numbers and our capacity to monitor our health will increasingly be made accessible to caregivers and patients. One example of such paradigm-shifting technology is the smart-phone connected pacemaker device. New pacemakers can now be connected to our smartphones to monitor the health metrics of our hearts. The connected pacemaker sends our data and enables our heart to be monitored by remote computers and health professionals. Amazing, isn’t it? Yes, indeed. But such technology also raises questions regarding the security and use of the data collected…
Cybersecurity and management protocols for the collected health data raise legitimate concerns. The British Columbia Auditor General agrees. In his 2021 audit findings on the management of medical device cybersecurity at the Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA), the need to stay ahead of new technologies to protect privacy is stressed. The independent report is well done and captures the essence of what the underpinning issue may be: oftentimes, technology outpaces our capacity to adapt and adjust in a way that ensures that all angles are covered. It does not mean that emerging technologies should be stopped or even slowed down. They represent too great a value to improve health services to be questioned that way. It nevertheless calls upon us to roll up our sleeves and get to work in order to improve on our capacity to respond to the challenges that our evolving technological world brings about.
5G connectivity and smart devices open up a whole new world. The potential to improve healthcare through remote technologies is immense. It will certainly be worth exploring further that potential. By doing so, we have to be mindful that we will need to keep up with our evolving technological world in order to harness it in a safe and responsible way. We may be challenged in many different and perhaps surprising ways. But these are different stories and good ones for other articles…
In the meantime, may you be well, may you be happy.
B.