3 ways your health organization can harness IoT — starting now
How can you start harnessing the Internet of Things (IoT) to improve patient care and satisfaction, efficiency, and the bottom line? In September, Microsoft announced the availability of the Azure IoT Suite and a new Microsoft Azure Certified for IoT Program, which can help you answer this question. You can get IoT use cases up and running quickly and easily with preconfigured solutions offered by the Azure IoT Suite. And you can identify hardware and software offerings verified to work with Azure IoT services with the Azure Certified for IoT program. (If you are a partner, learn how you can get your device certified here.)
So how can IoT solutions help your health organization achieve its goals? Here are just a few examples:
Optimize patient flow
Provide more timely medical services and reduce wait times to improve care quality, efficiency, and patient satisfaction. IoT solutions can help you make sure the right people and things are at the right place at the right time. For instance, you can provide patients in the ER—or those who are going through pre-operation procedures—with wearables so you know where they are in the clinical workflow. You can also track medical equipment and devices. That means you can streamline getting the patient and necessary equipment in the right exam or operating room at the right time. Privacy concerns must be taken into consideration when developing such a use case.
Enable care without walls
With IoT solutions, readings from medical devices—such as glucose monitors, asthma monitoring devices, or pulse oximeters—in patients’ homes can be monitored. When a reading is out of a preset range, an alert can be sent to the patient’s care team for early intervention. This can reduce clinic and hospital visits or can prevent readmissions. Your health organization can transform how you provide care and help patients better manage their conditions. Check out a great example in a recent blog about how a hospital in Norway is helping patients better manage COPD and reduce the need for them to travel to doctor visits.
Proactively track and maintain devices and equipment
Whether it’s medical devices and tablets you’ve sent home with patients, or beds, wheelchairs, IV pumps and the like in your clinic or hospital, IoT solutions can help you track and maintain your devices and equipment. No more wasted time searching for missing inventory or being surprised by maintenance issues. You can predict servicing and replacement needs to increase uptime and better manage inventory. The Aerocrine case study is a great example of how predictive maintenance can help increase the reliability of medical devices and improve user satisfaction. Predictive maintenance is one of the first preconfigured solutions for common IoT scenarios offered by the Azure IoT Suite.
You can start now
You don’t need to wait to start taking advantage of IoT until you have a big-bang strategy for connecting everything, everywhere. You can start small and organically. Just connect a few devices that you already have and go from there. We’ve designed our solutions so your health organization can take a step-by-step approach and start harnessing IoT right away to achieve your goals.
Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback via email, Facebook, or Twitter.
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