In the age of digital transformation, the ability to harness video and audio communication technologies has revolutionized various sectors, including healthcare. For rural and remote communities, these advancements have become a beacon of hope in addressing health disparities caused by geographical barriers. By leveraging the internet’s power, telehealth – the provision of healthcare remotely via telecommunications technology–has been instrumental in overcoming these barriers, allowing patients to receive medical services without the need for physical travel.

Companies like Dogtown Media, a leading medical app development company, are at the forefront of these advancements. With their expertise in creating telehealth applications, they’re enabling more robust and flexible ways of providing healthcare services remotely. Let’s discuss how.

The Benefits of Using Audio and Video Technology to Deliver Health Services in Rural and Remote Areas

The use of audio and video technology in the delivery of health services, also known as telehealth, has opened up a myriad of benefits for patients in rural and remote areas. These benefits, ranging from improved accessibility to cost savings, have a significant impact on patients’ lives and the overall healthcare system.

Promoting Accessibility and Convenience

One of the most significant advantages of telehealth is its ability to promote accessibility and convenience. For rural and remote patients, distance, travel time, and costs can often pose a considerable challenge in accessing healthcare. Video and audio communication technologies circumvent these issues, allowing patients to consult with healthcare providers from the comfort of their homes. This not only enhances the convenience of accessing healthcare but also enables timely medical interventions, particularly crucial for those with chronic conditions or those who may need immediate attention.

Improving Patient Outcomes

By reducing the barriers to accessing healthcare, telehealth has also demonstrated its potential to improve patient outcomes. Studies have shown that continuous patient monitoring and frequent virtual consultations can lead to better disease management and improved health outcomes. Moreover, telehealth services can enable prompt medical intervention, which can be life-saving in critical situations.

Reducing Healthcare Costs

Cost savings are another notable benefit of using audio and video technology in healthcare. By eliminating travel costs and reducing the need for hospital admissions through proactive management of health conditions, telehealth can significantly decrease healthcare expenses for patients. Furthermore, it allows healthcare providers to optimize their services and resources, contributing to overall cost efficiency within the healthcare system. These savings can then be redirected to enhance patient care services, fostering an environment of sustainable healthcare provision in rural and remote areas.

What Types of Services Have Proven to be Effective in Rural Areas?

In the scope of telehealth, several services have demonstrated effectiveness in improving healthcare access and outcomes for rural communities. These services utilize the flexibility and convenience of video and audio communication technologies to offer personalized healthcare solutions that cater to the specific needs of rural and remote patients.

Remote Patient Monitoring

Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) is a form of telehealth where medical professionals use digital technologies to track a patient’s health data remotely. This service is particularly beneficial for patients with chronic diseases like diabetes or heart conditions, as it enables healthcare providers to continuously monitor vital signs and symptoms, making it easier to manage these conditions and prevent hospitalizations. By catching potential issues early, RPM can improve health outcomes and even save lives.

Virtual Consultations and Diagnoses

Virtual consultations and diagnoses are another critical service in rural telehealth. These services enable patients to consult with healthcare providers via video or audio calls, eliminating the need for physical travel. Moreover, virtual consultations have proven effective in diagnosing a range of conditions, from skin disorders to respiratory illnesses. The ability to access professional medical advice from home increases the likelihood of early detection and treatment, leading to better patient outcomes.

Mental Health Services

Access to mental health services is often limited in rural areas due to a lack of specialized providers. Telehealth bridges this gap by offering teletherapy or telepsychiatry services. Patients can connect with therapists and psychiatrists through video calls, allowing for real-time interaction and treatment. Studies show that teletherapy can be as effective as in-person therapy, making it a promising solution for mental healthcare access in remote regions.

Post-Operative and Chronic Disease Management

Managing post-operative care and chronic diseases is a significant challenge for patients living far from healthcare facilities. Telehealth services provide an effective solution by offering remote post-operative check-ups and continuous management for chronic diseases. This includes medication management, routine follow-ups, and health education. Not only does this minimize the risk of complications and readmissions, but it also empowers patients to take charge of their health, thereby enhancing their quality of life.

By integrating these services into the healthcare system, telehealth can significantly enhance healthcare delivery, especially in rural and remote areas where access to quality healthcare is often challenging. The possibilities are endless as technology continues to evolve, bringing about a promising future for healthcare delivery in these regions.

Challenges for Telehealth in Remote Areas

While telehealth offers numerous advantages for rural healthcare, it is not without its challenges. Several obstacles need to be overcome to fully realize the potential of this technology.

Technology and Infrastructure Challenges

One of the significant barriers in remote areas is the lack of robust internet infrastructure. Slow or unstable internet can hinder the effectiveness of video consultations or real-time data monitoring. Additionally, not all patients may have access to the necessary devices or technical skills to use telehealth services, creating a barrier to its adoption.

Lack of Training or Experience in Telehealth among Healthcare Providers

Telehealth requires a new set of skills from healthcare providers. They need to navigate different technologies, manage virtual patient interactions, and interpret remote data. This transition can be challenging, particularly for those not familiar with digital technologies.

Privacy and Security Concerns

Data privacy and security are also significant concerns in telehealth. Transmitting sensitive health information over the internet poses a risk of data breaches, which could compromise patient privacy. There is a need for stringent security measures and protocols to ensure the secure transmission and storage of patient data.

Addressing these challenges is critical to making telehealth a truly viable solution for rural and remote healthcare delivery.

Future Perspectives: Opportunities and Predictions for Telehealth in Rural Areas

Looking forward, telehealth in rural areas presents an array of exciting opportunities. As technology continues to advance, we can expect to see the development of more sophisticated tools for remote patient monitoring, diagnostic technologies, and digital therapeutic interventions. These advances will likely make telehealth even more efficient, accessible, and effective, potentially transforming rural healthcare delivery.

AI-powered diagnostic tools and health tracking applications are already showing promise, and their further refinement and integration into telehealth platforms will likely improve patient outcomes. Moreover, advancements in wearable technologies could augment remote patient monitoring, providing healthcare providers with a more comprehensive view of their patients’ health.

Meanwhile, ongoing improvements in digital infrastructure, such as the roll-out of 5G and satellite internet services, could alleviate some of the connectivity issues in remote areas. This development will make telehealth services more reliable and accessible for a broader range of rural patients.

The future of telehealth in rural areas is bright, and it is poised to play an increasingly integral role in healthcare delivery. While challenges remain, the potential benefits for patients in terms of accessibility, cost-effectiveness, and improved health outcomes are substantial and compelling. Telehealth represents a critical area for continued focus, innovation, and investment in the years to come.

In our last post, we discussed UI-based design tips to integrate into your wearables interface, and in this post of the series, we’ll cover some UX-focused design guidelines.

1. Check What’s Viable

Before overhauling any designs or interface components, try to gain an understanding of what’s possible and viable. Your chosen tech stack may not make it easy to develop new ideas, and the platform you use may come with limitations that restrict your full range of possibilities. Research what the software development kit makes possible, and know what the device can measure with its current hardware. If you make the mistake of skipping this crucial step, you’re going to be disappointed when you realize that the idea can’t be implemented until new hardware is released, a new tech stack is used, or is just not possible at the moment.

2. Minimize Interruption

Keeping users engaged requires commanding their attention periodically and in a focused way. When the interface shows a long list of notifications, shows unimportant notifications to the user in real-time, and alerts the user to non-urgent items, the user can become overwhelmed. Over time, the user can stop engaging with the wearable completely and never put it back on. These users may never use their wearable again or swear off of purchasing any new type of wearable in the future.

To mitigate a drop in users, reduce how many notifications the user is subjected to every day. The information sent in the notification should be minimal, and the user should be prompted to edit what kinds of notifications they receive when they first set up the device. In case the user skips this part of the onboarding process, they should be able to edit their preferences later on from an easy-to-find location. Notifications should also be sent infrequently.

When the device does send a notification, it should contain valuable information for the user. It may be worth building a feature into your wearable that tracks what notifications are swiped away the most and what notifications and clicked into the most. From there, you can prompt the user to edit their notifications in the accompanying mobile app or desktop app. Like we mentioned in the last post, contextuality and relevance are crucial to the user experience, and notifications are already a big component of the user experience.

Users should also be able to set how they want their notifications to alert them. Whether it’s silent or full of vibrations and screen glows, give the user the power to manage their preferences.

3. Opt For More Privacy

Wearables often don’t have a password enabled because the user is usually wearing the device on their body, making it difficult to lose, forget, or get stolen. As a result, confidential and personal information can be seen by others. Whereas smartphones mostly stay in a pocket or purse, a wearable screen can be seen by anyone.

If possible, build more privacy options into the UI for users. For example, display content according to the direction the wearable is facing. If your developers can figure out the angle when the user is looking at the device, rather than letting the device hang with their arm, you can add more privacy into the wearable. Another way to incorporate privacy into a wearable UI is to vibrate first and then display the notification, allowing the user to quickly look at the wearable screen before someone else does.

4. Design for Offline Usage

These days, optimizing an application for offline usage isn’t out of the ordinary. With more options than ever to build offline capabilities and sync the data later, there’s no reason why wearables should lack this feature. Wearables, like any other device, will experience Internet connection problems, and preparing for this possibility ahead of time can set your wearable apart from its competitors. At the very least, there should be text displayed that explains to the user why they can’t interact with some portions of their wearable.

5. Interaction With Other Devices Is Important

The Internet of Things isn’t just for industrial applications anymore. Connecting your wearable to other devices, like the Alexa, the Nest doorbell, a thermostat, and even a washing machine is a great way to stand out and attract more home-based users. Integrating the wearable into the user’s digital ecosystem can create more value for the user, which in turn can create a loyal engaged user. One example of this is the Fitbit app that shows much more detail than the smartwatch about the user’s fitness goals, daily habits, and tips to improve wellbeing. San Francisco-based Apple also shows more detail in their mobile apps than their Watch does, particularly for health and fitness metrics.

6. Leverage Non-Visual User Interface

With wearables, the user should feel as if the device is both there and not there. The difference in acknowledgment depends on the context of the situation, and wearables offer multiple ways to get in touch with their users. For example, there is not only touch but also vibration and sound to utilize for various needs.

The Wearables of Tomorrow

Wearables are becoming more ubiquitous. Although we expect their feature sets to grow over time, we also expect their UI and UX to improve greatly over time. You may not think it’s true, but a wearable can be unforgettable depending on how well or how badly it accomplishes contextual awareness, notification frequency, and integration with other devices.

Have you encountered a wearable app with a bad UI or UX? What stood out to you about the experience? Let us know in the comments below!

Not only have the competitors grown, but the types of wearables are also expanding from smartwatches to rings, glasses, and even clothing. Designing for wearables presents its own set of challenges, limitations, and use cases. In this first post of our wearables design series, we’ll go over five design tips that are crucial to wearables UI and UX design.

1. Prioritize Contextual Design

Wearables are considered “smart” because they can understand the context and actions to take within a certain context. For example, if you’ve started recording a run, your smartwatch should know that you will probably want to play music and pause or fast-forward songs while in motion. Smart devices have a lot of movement and motion sensors that you can utilize to develop a contextually intelligent UI.

When designing contextually, you’ll want to research and analyze your users, their environment, distractions, goals, and subtasks to make the perfect UI. By designing for context, you enhance your user’s experience greatly.

2. Make it Easy to Understand at a Glance

When you design for context, you’re going to want to ensure that many of the options available to the user are easy to access and understand at a glance. For example, while you’re tracking your daily run, you don’t need to be inundated with the weather, traffic patterns for your commute, or even your reading list. You simply need a few options, like music, workout settings, and phone and messaging capabilities.

Glanceability is what many wearables designers aspire to have their UI reach, and it refers to designing information for short bursts of interaction. This can include lights on the outside of the device, a large confirmation that something worked, or simply less engagement needed to get a task done. Because wearables that have screens often have limited real estate, the screen should prioritize the most important information.

According to health app development experts, a user should be able to quickly understand the screen’s contents. How quick, exactly? Less than 5 seconds.

3. Limit Interaction Requirements

Wearables are often purchased to ease a person’s stress and worries. While desktop and mobile apps measure their user engagement in minutes or hours, a wearable user may only interact with it for half a minute. This is intentional: wearable interactions should be as short as possible out of the box. If a user needs to interact with your app for more than 10 seconds, you’ll need to optimize the design and user experience.

The music-finding app Shazam does a great job of keeping interaction limited. It requires the user to press the app to open it, press the large Shazam logo (usually the only thing on the screen), and wait for Shazam to match the song and return the name. Apple’s messaging app also keeps interactions limited by offering pre-defined responses to text messages and a voice-enabled response system, rather than a tiny keyboard to type up a custom response.

4. KISS!

This is a well-known design principle for designers across every medium, whether that’s print or digital. But keeping it simple is easier said than done, especially in the wearables arena where screen space is severely limited. It may come down to eliminating more information from the screen than you’re comfortable with, but don’t let it reduce any functionality or cheapen the user experience.

A good approach to keeping it simple might be to focus on each use case and design a user flow for it before moving on to the next use case. This way, it will keep the interface minimal, information glanceable, and options contextually relevant. It may also require you to break up a simple task into multiple windows or screens so the user feels like you’re walking them through the process.

5. Keep it Minimal

Minimalism is a trend that we’ve abided by on digital interfaces for the past few decades. While the small details are always in flux, for example, drop shadows, border thickness, and positioning of main elements, the idea is still the same: to keep the interface easy to understand, easily readable, and easy to interact with.

Don’t forego the minimum design guidelines for minimalism. For example, you’ll still need sharp contrast to make things easily readable. For small screens especially, contrast is key to the variety of environments your users will be subjecting to their wearables.

Typography is still a major design foundation, and on wearables, typography needs to be simple and easy to read. Nothing fancy or modern is needed, and even a familiar font like Times New Roman can get the job done well.

Spacing through margin and padding is still extremely important. Too little space and people with larger thumbs will get frustrated. Too much space and something important could be overlooked easily. Finding a balance with element spacing is crucial, and keeping it consistent should go without saying.

Design for Humans, Not Computers

When you design for human eyes and brains, it takes longer because of user research and feedback, but the result is a highly optimized app that can deliver the most delightful user experience. Designing is difficult and, if done right, is thankless, but it’s critical to every part of the wearable: the user, interface, and even the device itself. Stay tuned for our next post that will cover more design principles for wearables.

What’s your favorite part of your wearable? Do you have a favorite app that makes things easier for you as a user? Let us know in the comments below!

To help medical providers save more of their limited time, we’ve found five of the best medical apps that doctors can download to get ahead on the go.

1. PEPID

The Chicago-based medical information company, PEPID, has a data-rich mobile app that offers evidence-based conclusions for paramedics and doctors. This app is specifically aimed at helping emergency room paramedics and doctors diagnose their patients as quickly as possible. It’s also a great learning tool for nurses, students, residents, and interns during simulations and training and in time-sensitive situations.

The PEPID mobile app is available for Android and Apple devices, and it allows providers to filter by conditions, symptoms, and prescriptions. It even takes care to include possible multi-drug interactions during the patient’s treatment. With PEPID, doctors can diagnose patients based on several factors: lab results, symptoms, and exam results. The app also offers videos that show clinical exams and procedures. And to help providers stay current on cutting-edge treatments, it has an option to turn on push notifications for the latest medical news, research, and tools.

2. Epocrates

Epocrates is a wildly popular mobile app with medical professionals. It’s been downloaded millions of times, and providers use it to look up and reference drug information, find peers for consults and referrals, interact with patients, and even perform quick calculations like BMI during patient exams. This app offers a freemium model, where the free version is good enough to be used on its own, but upgrading to premium will unlock even more value.

For example, the premium version helps providers interpret lab results, find more information on diseases, or look for medication alternatives. This app is available for Android and Apple mobile devices.

3. Lexicomp

The Lexicomp app is a hospital system app that comes equipped with a large database of diseases, including oral diseases, toxicology, and infectious diseases. It’s an intuitive app that also includes information about drugs, their uses, and their effects on patients. Lexicomp comes with several medical dictionaries, and similar to the Epocrates app, it offers calculators for quick computations.

This app is available for Android and Apple users, but there is no free version, unlike Epocrates. It offers several subscription plans for providers to choose from, allowing them to pick a paid tier that fits their needs and budget.

4. Medscape

The Medscape mobile app is great for specialist providers because it allows them to choose their specialty and customize the information they want to see in the app. Choices include the latest news, treatments, research, drugs, and procedures. This app prevents information overload for providers by subjecting them to what they actually want to read about.

It also provides opportunities for medical providers to earn continuing education credits, which is an ongoing requirement for all medical professionals. Medscape is available for Android and Apple mobile devices, and it’s completely free to use.

5. DynaMed

The DynaMed app is highly rated for what it provides to healthcare professionals. It includes disease information, graphics, and images for learning, drug recommendations, an excellent search engine, content for specific specialties, information from accredited experts, and verified medical content. With this level of value, it’s not surprising that DynaMed is a paid app.

The app offers different pricing levels depending on if you’re registering with an institution (free), as a student ($99.95/year), or as a professional with no institutional affiliation ($395/year). It does offer a free trial so that providers can check if it works for them before taking the plunge with their credit card. Users on Android and Apple devices can download this app that’s been reviewed as intuitive, easy-to-use, and easy to search through.

The Future of Healthcare Is Mobile

For our medical providers, getting the best education and continuing education directly benefits patients and healthcare systems. These five apps promise the latest guidance on drug recommendations and interactions, procedure protocols, patient exam calculators, and even continuing education. With these apps, even the smartest and most up-to-date providers will find something new to learn.

These processes are a perfect fit for the Internet of Things (IoT), which can help with untangling complex supply chains and keeping track of chemical processes without a loss in efficiency or quality of drugs. In comparable industries, like chemical manufacturing, these operations are being phased out in favor of IoT applications that simplify and streamline many of the tedious tasks involved in each process.

The Numerous Challenges of Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

Manufacturing relies on time and continuity for maximum efficiency. But in the pharmaceutical industry, things aren’t so cut and dry. Drugs are usually developed in large batches, involving mixing compounds in large vats. Upon mixing, the product needs to sit for a while to measure the quality of intermediate products. This can cause delays across the entire company.

After the new chemical compound is measured for its quality, it moves to another step, which can sometimes involve another facility. Because of the timeline and amount of floor space required for each drug’s development, machinery isn’t used continuously. And information and data about the quality, status, and condition of the chemical compound are often stored and distributed through a variety of systems. Many companies still record and store data on paper.

For manufacturing to be optimized for maximum output and efficiency, machinery needs to be used continuously. This means planning ahead, even by years, to experience the biggest cost savings. This is how it’s done across a variety of industries, and pharmaceutical companies need to catch up.

IoT technology is a perfect match for these business and processes problems, and it offers more flexibility, transparency, and return on investment than anything else on the market. But the road to modernizing the pharmaceutical industry’s manufacturing processes is a very rocky one.

Navigating Necessary Regulations

The pharmaceutical industry is heavily regulated due to the life-or-death consequences of its products. When regulations need to be considered, lengthy delays usually follow. For example, to submit a drug for approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), you’re required to submit detailed paperwork of every single part about the drug’s manufacturing process.

This includes the active compound, the manufacturing process, and even the layout of the chemical plant. If there any changes to be made in the process, it first requires direct approval from the regulatory committee along with some paperwork. Because of these regulatory hurdles, pharmaceutical companies require much more planning of their experiments and drug development.

To help cut down the time it takes to navigate regulations and receive approval, the FDA started the Emerging Technology Team (ETT). The ETT’s goal is to encourage new manufacturing methods, like continuous manufacturing. This enables pharmaceutical companies to submit their ideas before submitting the regulatory paperwork

IoT and Compliance

The FDA isn’t the first regulatory body to improve drug development. In fact, more than 100 such agencies exist across the world, and they all require their own paperwork, which can be a major timesink for global pharmaceutical companies. The ETT has made positive change and growth for the pharmaceutical industry, however.

Boston-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals has been using continuous manufacturing for their cystic fibrosis drug, Orkambi, since 2015. In 2016, Janssen Pharmaceuticals switched over to continuous manufacturing for their HIV drug, Prezista. Both companies worked closely with the FDA to ensure approval of the modern manufacturing process before they submitted their drug approval paperwork. According to Johnson & Johnson, separating testing and sampling using IoT sensors afforded the company a significant improvement over their previous methods.

By combining medical applications with IoT, pharmaceutical companies can remotely monitor and document every step, variation, and concentration during each part of the manufacturing process. The best part is that they can do everything in real-time, enabling plant operators, researchers, and chemists to know what’s happening during the entire process. Companies can also track drugs for recalls if a specific chemical poses a problem for consumers.

Pharmaceutical supply chains are complex and finicky. Often, a reliable chemical supplier can lose their inventory overnight, causing global problems in drug manufacturing. With IoT, pharmaceutical companies can monitor and document the activity of their contract manufacturing organizations, which are hired to complete much of the manufacturing of the drug.

Additionally, pharmaceutical companies often use different suppliers and vendors to manufacture the active ingredient, formulate new drugs, and package the medication. Regulatory bodies want to monitor, track, and report on each company’s vendors, and IoT can deliver everything in a nice wrapped-up package with a bow.

The Future of Pharma

We need pharmaceutical companies to survive, but we can lower drug prices and the cost to research and develop new medications by introducing IoT technology into the current outdated manufacturing processes. Above all, pharmaceutical companies need to maintain a strict level of high quality in their drugs. Currently, if a drug has possible quality issues, it’s treated as spoiled. But with IoT, tracking down chemical sources will be easier so that action can be taken quickly.

As pharmaceutical equipment tends to be expensive and labor-intensive to produce, continuous manufacturing is even more necessary to improve drug development. And although continuous manufacturing saves a lot of time and resources, it can cause major disruptions in manufacturing from equipment failure. As a result, IoT sensor data, real-time asset management, and preventative maintenance will become bigger priorities.

This marriage of two seemingly unrelated fields has been named “The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)”. Here are five examples of IoT and IoMT innovations we can look forward to.

Digestible Sensors

This concept may sound like it’s straight out of a sci-fi movie, but it’s a real technology in today’s healthcare ecosystem. Pharma companies have figured out how to manufacture pills with sensors embedded inside of them. The patient swallows and digests the pill, and your doctor has a first-hand look into your body.

The sensor is often no bigger than a grain of rice, and it transmits data to a patch worn by the patient. Information like vitals is sent to the patients’ care team’s smartphones, including the caregiver, family, and provider. For elderly patients, these ingestible sensors can help families keep track of their loved one’s medicine consumption and dosage from afar.

Reduced ER Wait Times

It’s well-known that going to the emergency room can result in long wait times, sometimes up to 12 hours. Although most of us won’t go to the ER until the last minute, most of our time spent in the ER is in the waiting room. At New York City-based Mt. Sinai Medical Center, the hospital staff knew they had to work on fixing this major issue.

They used IoT technology in the form of bed-tracking software from AutoBed and existing tools from GE Healthcare to track the status of 1,200 beds in their hospitals. The software used 15 different factors to determine each patient’s needs and estimated time of leaving the ER. With this information, the hospital staff was able to better prioritize patients in the waiting room and optimize down the time spent waiting by 50%. This is a massive improvement that immediately elevates the patient experience.

Automated Insulin Delivery

Monitoring blood glucose levels and taking action is arduous and repetitive. It requires attentiveness all day every day for life. Without enough focus, a patient can be at risk of death, so it’s extremely important to automate this technology when and where possible.

A new closed-loop insulin delivery system named Open Artificial Pancreas System (OpenAPS) brings us the benefits of custom IoT development. It automates the checking of blood glucose levels in the patient’s body and gives the patient the correct insulin dosage. By connecting an insulin pump and glucose monitor to the system, OpenAPS’s algorithm can create a stream of communication between the sensors and devices.

The automated delivery of insulin is especially invaluable at night when many patients are too busy sleeping to worry about staying within their required blood glucose range. Unfortunately, night-time hypoglycemia can be fatal, and OpenAPS can be customized for both hyperglycemic and hypoglycemic patients.

Treat and Monitor Cancer

Cancer is a widespread medical problem that affects hundreds of thousands of patients every year. With IoT, we can determine a baseline for cancer symptoms in their early stages and use it to compare daily sensor and device readings. IoT can also help us adjust and create treatment plans based on need and progress.

New wearables technology is being used to detect early signs of breast cancer using a combination of machine-to-machine communication, artificial intelligence (AI), and predictive analytics. This technology tracks the breast tissue’s temperature over time and looks for abnormalities. These types of noninvasive and nontoxic treatment and monitoring solutions are possible because of emerging technologies like IoT and AI.

Remote Patient Monitoring

Beyond the pandemic, remote patient monitoring (RPM) has become a popular way for providers to get in touch with their patients without requiring them to leave their homes for an in-office visit. For patients with chronic illnesses or cancer, this technology can save them from fatigue or immunocompromising situations. RPM is also a great tool for the 60 million Americans who live in rural areas where the nearest hospital can be hours away. Additionally, RPM wearables can be used to monitor patients after an operation.

RPM devices and sensors send accurate medical data to providers, offering the patient faster medical treatment and testing for any abnormalities. In general, RPM saves patients hospital expenses and helps medical facilities keep down their readmission rates. 60% of Americans have at least one chronic disease, and RPM technology can save them a lot of time and money. Studies have shown that RPM can reduce all-cause mortality by a massive 20%.

A study undertaken by the University of Mississippi Medical Center involved using RPM to monitor Type II diabetes patients living in rural Mississippi. All regular appointments were scheduled through the RPM software and with connected devices. Ultimately, patients were able to save themselves from driving about 10,000 miles for medical appointments, and none had to visit the ER.

The Future of IoMT

Medical care has become indispensable during the pandemic, and IoT is helping care teams and hospital staff provide more efficiency, faster response times, and reduced waiting time. IoMT is saving the lives of patients who have diabetes, chronic illnesses, post-operation woes, and those who live in rural areas. We can’t wait to see how these five technologies will be used across the world within the next few years.

Unfortunately, the success rate of traditional IV is around 22% to 30%, which is still low. But Embryonics is using AI to push the success rate to new highs.

What is IVF?

IVF is a taxing process that involves fertilizing a woman’s egg outside of her body using her partner’s or donor’s sperm. The fertilization creates an embryo that’s then surgically implanted into the woman’s uterus. This isn’t completely unnatural: this exact process takes place in a woman’s body during a regular pregnancy. IVF, however, is a great option for couples who have fertility problems or issues conceiving.

The IVF process is difficult for the woman and the couple — financially, emotionally, and physically. The cost for IVF, which is not usually covered by insurance, ranges from $12,000 to $25,000 per cycle which is a month. During each month, the woman has to give herself a hormone shot daily to stimulate egg production in her ovaries. These shots are not without their own side effects or issues, though.

And IVF can consist of several months of these shots, extractions, and implantations. When all is said and done, the success rate of IVF is still so low that is disheartening to learn that many couples leave IVF with a drained bank account and no baby on the way. If the one-in-three success rate could be improved, IVF would become a much less arduous process.

One major factor that has a hand in determining whether an IVF cycle will be successful is the quality of the embryo. Doctors look at a woman’s embryos through a microscope to pick out the one with the most cells, best appearance, and most viability. This is where Embryonics is improving the IVF process with AI.

Because the human eye can only see so many details, and because success rates are still so low, there’s massive potential to improve the success rate of an IVF cycle by optimizing which embryo is chosen. According to Embryonics founder and CEO Yael Gold-Zamir, “Many decisions are based on gut feeling or personal experience. Even if you go to the same IVF center, two experts can give you different opinions on the same embryo.”

Training the Algorithm

To train their AI algorithm, Embryonics showed it 8,789 time-lapse videos of embryos developing. Less than half of the embryos in the videos were graded or tagged by embryologists, and when data became available about the IVF cycle’s success, it was integrated into the dataset. The algorithm relies on geometric deep learning which is a machine learning technique that applies a regular neural network to more complex data features like 3D objects and graphs.

Days into successful fertilization, a blastocyst has formed, which is a tiny clump of 200 to 300 cells that will eventually evolve into millions of cells and into a baby. The algorithm works to pinpoint and identify patterns in embryo development that doctors wouldn’t normally see or would otherwise require a lot of data to find.

To further bolster the algorithm’s performance, the Embryonics team added patient and environmental data into the dataset. With this additional dimension of information, the algorithm’s success rate is 12% over the traditional method. It finds embryos that would lead to successful fertilization and healthy pregnancy at a much better rate than even the most experienced embryologists. In pinpointing embryos that wouldn’t result in a successful IVF cycle, the algorithm performed 29% higher when compared to embryologists.

A Promising Success Rate

In an initial launch of the Embryonics algorithm, 11 women participated. Of those 11 women, 6 have had a successful pregnancy, while the others are waiting on test results. This success rate, more than 50%, is already much higher than experienced embryologists and IVF doctors.

Embryonics’ research follows in the footsteps of work done at New York City-based Weill Cornell Medicine. In 2019, researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine developed a similar algorithm to classify the quality of an image of an embryo with an astounding 97% accuracy. But Embryonics is taking the research a step further by introducing it to market.

The company wants more and more women to have access to this technology so that their IVF cycles have a better chance of success. Right now, Embryonics has applied for approval by European regulators to sell the algorithm to fertility clinics across Europe. One day, the company wants to bring the technology to the U.S. too.

A Helping Hand

As society shifts and women focus more time and effort on their careers and lifestyles, the demand for IVF will only continue to grow rapidly. In the coming years, experts say, the demand for IVF is expected to skyrocket. Embryonics is focused on bringing its promising medical application to women all over the world and in furthering its research to optimize another part of the IVF process: hormonal stimulation of the ovaries to produce more healthy eggs to pick from. For many women, this will save money and physical effort while allowing them to become pregnant faster and more safely.

COVID-19 brought many changes to our world over the past year, and healthcare and medicine were hit hardest by the pandemic as hospitals constantly scrambled to find enough personal protective equipment, hospital beds, and space to house infected patients during each surge. While hospitals were barely staying above water, providers and patients who weren’t infected were able to continue their appointments using telehealth technology. This technology is relatively new for most people, and it offers a variety of benefits.

Here are five changes caused by the pandemic for telehealth technology that you should know about.

1. Mass Usage of Telehealth Was Possible Only Because CMS Paid For It

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) acted swiftly to enable all patients and providers to use telehealth technology during the pandemic. They covered the unknown costs of payment parity, allowed payment for codes that were previously non-payable, and they worked with the Office for Civil Rights to waive HIPAA guidelines, allowing providers and patients to meet over Zoom and FaceTime for the first time ever. These regulatory flexibilities were invaluable and instrumental in helping telehealth get off the ground faster at the beginning of the pandemic.

While telehealth existed in several hospital systems before the pandemic, it was confined to specific areas like larger Easy Coast medical systems. Telehealth had a difficult time expanding “due to the lack of reimbursement and payment parity when there was reimbursement all,” according to Iris Berman. Berman is the vice president of telehealth services at Northwell Health, a New York City-based 23-hospital healthcare system. But CMS fixed this issue by directing much of the reimbursement to rural communities, allowing nationwide access to telehealth technologies.

2. Telehealth Offers A Safe Alternative to In-Person Care During the Pandemic

With telehealth, doctors are still able to attend to their patients who need medical attention at home. But telehealth technology has played an important role in inpatient care as well. Dr. Natalie Pageler is the chief medical information officer at Stanford Children’s Health and clinical professor of pediatric critical care at Stanford University.

Pageler says, “During [the pandemic], we also found ways to implement telehealth among our inpatients in the hospital. This allowed physicians to care for patients in isolation while minimizing the spread of infection and conserving personal protective equipment, such as masks and gowns.”

Many hospitals have also had to conference in specialists from other parts of the country that were experiencing fewer COVID-19 cases. This helped prevent hospitals from becoming even more overwhelmed with patients who did not truly need emergency care.

At Northwell Health, two telehealth platforms are being used to take care of inpatient care. These include eICU, which communicates with hardwired ICU beds that come with cameras, a monitor, speakers, and a button that alerts a remote critical care team. The other platform is DTC (direct to consumer), which is used for ER consultations, home televisits, and hospital floor care.

3. Telehealth Can Be More Convenient for Children and Pediatric Care

Childhood requires a higher-than-normal amount of medical care, and many of these visits can be conducted with telehealth. If a child isn’t in need of a vaccine, chronic condition check-ups, or regular testing, telehealth can save everyone some time and money. Pageler says that telehealth for pediatric services also enables children to see a doctor without missing school, sports, or extracurricular activities. Telehealth is also a great alternative to in-person follow-up appointments when possible.

4. Telehealth Is Now a Necessity

Dr. Peter Antall is the chief medical officer of Amwell, a telemedicine platform based in Boston. He says that Amwell’s monthly visit volume went up by 300% between April and June when compared to visitor counts from January to March. Antall says that telehealth is now a necessity and no longer a nice-to-have tool in the healthcare journey.

He added, “We expect this momentum to largely continue post-pandemic. … You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Now that both patients and providers have experienced the convenience of telehealth, we don’t anticipate healthcare to ever go back to how it was.”

Pageler agrees that “we won’t return to the baseline we were at before the pandemic” because providers and patients now “see the value and incentive to continue using virtual visits.” Telehealth offers benefits like cutting travel time, reduced scheduling, and better access to specialists, among others. According to research conducted by McKinsey & Co., 74% of telehealth users were “highly satisfied”, 64% of providers are more comfortable using it than before the pandemic, and 57% of providers saw telehealth more favorably than they did before the pandemic.

5. There’s Still a Growing Digital Divide

As a medical application, experts argue, nuanced information and the human connection are missing from telehealth appointments. They also worry that telehealth is creating a deeper digital divide between patient populations. For patients who have regular, stable access to Wi-Fi and updated devices, telehealth is just a new technology in their toolbelt.

But, according to the Federal Trade Commission, 19 million Americans don’t have access to fixed broadband service at minimum threshold speeds. This encompasses many rural patients. Additionally, Pew Research estimated that 19% of Americans don’t have a smartphone. Many patients who most desperately need telehealth technology are boxed out of it due to having unstable or slow Internet connections and a lack of suitable devices.

Telehealth Isn’t Going Anywhere

Telehealth has proven itself to be an indispensable technology for patients and providers alike. Although it shines a light on ongoing problems, like rural populations’ lack of access to care, technology, and stable Internet, it brings about many more benefits by far. The pandemic may have negatively impacted the world in more than one way, but it also brought us the normalization of widespread telehealth usage. Telehealth technology has enabled patients around the world to stay safe and healthy during the pandemic.

Have you used telehealth technology to speak to your doctor during the pandemic? Share your telehealth experience with us in the comments below!

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated a change in patient care, from simple check-ups to psychiatric help. As a result, patients, practitioners, and providers have had to quickly pivot and adapt to the changing times. And although most medical needs were met adequately with the technology we have already, some parts of medical care have not remained accessible and helpful for patients as in-office care.

These areas of concern include mental health care and support, like the delivery of group-based therapies, education, and psychotherapy. Because they are reliant on the patient and provider sitting down together, communicating via body language and other non-verbal cues, and interacting without any outside distraction, mental health aspects of healthcare are more difficult to outfit with the right technology.

In short, our current technologies (like telehealth video conferencing and telephone) don’t work as well as they should for patients requiring mental health and support. But new strides in virtual reality (VR) could change the landscape of medical applications and healthcare delivery for the foreseeable future.

Extending Virtual Reality

VR has been most recently associated with gaming, seeing real estate without stepping foot inside a new building, and even medical training. But in order to extend the closeness of real-life human interaction into VR, we need to extend the reality. We need to enhance our virtual interactions with new tools and close the gap in virtual therapy so that it remains effective and high-quality even as a remote service.

Extended reality is a real technology term that encompasses VR, mixed reality, and augmented reality in a spectrum of various levels of immersion. These three technologies themselves offer various levels of immersion, from mixed and augmented reality allowing the user to see their real-world surroundings with an overlay on a screen to VR which creates a new reality using headphones and body-tracking sensors. VR is the most advanced, mature, studied, and available technology of the three.

VR’s early days included use in applications for medical care and education in the 1990s, which brings us back full circle to today. Since the 90s, VR has been used in healthcare settings for pain control, education, anxiety, exposure therapy, and even to manage the fear of death. Studies show that VR creates a literal change in perspective, creates neural correlates to manage and numb pain, and reduces pain-related brain activity in several parts of the brain.

Additionally, research shows that exposure therapy using VR has had direct, measurable effects on the prefrontal cortex, which plays a major role in cognitive and behavioral activities. These changes are similar to the effect of in-person exposure therapy on the patient.

A Perfect Companion for Telehealth?

When VR was still a young technology, it required expensive, immobile setups using computers, headphones, cameras, and sensors. But these days, consumer-ready headsets are widely available, and they remove the need for cameras and computers. The current state of VR is perfect for studying VR’s potential in telehealth and telepsychiatry.

The Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) Oncology department at the Yale-New Haven Hospital has begun researching how VR engages AYA patients in support groups. New York City-based VR firm Foretell Reality designed and developed software for the AYA project, and it runs on readily-available $400 Oculus Quest headsets. Four patients attend each support group session using their Oculus headsets.

The patients can attend from anywhere that has Wi-Fi or a cellular data connection. They virtually enter a therapeutically-curated space and sit in a circle with a moderator and the other participants. Each session lasts for 45 to 60 minutes, and each patient must attend six total sessions. The study consisted of five support groups, making it a total of 20 patients. The research team says that the initial results are very promising.

Overcoming Longstanding Obstacles

But there are some challenges to overcome. For example, the team had to ensure physical and emotional safety for all of the patients. Things like motion sickness or triggers could lead to further care or even suicidal thoughts. Headsets had to be sterilized between uses. And the tech industry part of the team clashed with the academic part of the team on timelines and urgency.

Metrics were designed before the study took place to measure depression, resilience, and anxiety before and after the VR experience. Early results show that patients performed well with lower anxiety levels and higher resilience. Attendance to the virtual group support meetings has been steady.

Patients have been encouraged to share their thoughts and ideas with the team, and the team has been grateful for the user feedback. Many patients have stated that they feel more comfortable meeting with the rest of the group when they’re feeling ill. Some patients have noted the need to take a break when their headset starts to feel heavy. Others have asked for more robust and dynamic avatars to represent themselves. And quite a few patients have expressed interest in meeting their support group in-person after their six sessions are completed.

Finding Patients

When the team is done analyzing the AYA group’s findings, they plan to expand their research with a larger, multi-institutional Phase 2 trial. In the second trial, the team hopes to assess risk, dig into the benefits of VR-based mental health support groups, and work with a larger and more diverse patient population. The AYA group was a great starting point because the patients were young, technologically-savvy, and willing to learn a new technology.

But research from other studies shows that elderly patients have performed well in virtual grief counseling, even with their propensity to not pick up new technology as fast or as enthusiastically. VR has the potential to change the lives of patients who live with rare diseases and away from adequate medical care. But the research team at Yale-New Haven worries about rural and lower socioeconomic populations that lack access to a stable, high-speed internet connection.

Coming Soon to VR Goggles Near You

The team hopes that emerging technologies like 5G and Space X’s Starlink system will provide better internet access to underserved populations, allowing VR to be a realistic therapeutic option for anyone who is interested in trying it out.

Would you attend a support group meeting with a VR headset? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments below!

The pandemic has changed many industries, but the field most affected by the coronavirus has been healthcare and medicine. As hospitals scrambled to accommodate the high numbers of emergency room and intensive care unit visits, telehealth grew extremely quickly to complement physical contact with hospitals and doctors. In fact, telemedicine grew so rapidly that The Mayo Clinic estimates the field grew ten years of progress within six to eight weeks.

As a result, things have moved too fast for insurance companies to organize their billing claims appropriately, creating a lack of transparency in how medical services are billed and reimbursed. Although telemedicine provides tremendous value for both patients and providers, doubt and confusion are rampant in the state of healthcare today. And for providers who were already opportunistic and predatory, the relaxation, elimination, and suspension of rules during the pandemic have created a massive playing ground for large-scale fraud.

Before the Pandemic

Fraud related to telemedicine before the pandemic was a sign of what could happen if we implemented telehealth on a much bigger scale. Whether it was one-off fraud or constant scheming, the most hurt groups were single-payer systems like Medicare and Tricare which consistently were victimized by telemedicine scams. Marketers would get together insurance beneficiaries and market them as telemedicine companies, giving them access to providers over the phone.

The “telemedicine company” would then recommend expensive drugs, medical equipment, and diagnostics to the physician. The cost of these scams? Just one nationwide scam before the pandemic, which involved free or low-cost orthotic braces, created $1.2 billion in false billing claims.

Before the pandemic, medical applications like telehealth technology were used to help under-served rural patients get in touch with their doctors. It was also used to “store and forward” important medical information, like radiological images. HIPAA rules regarding the technology were strict, and a HIPAA-secure connection was required. If you were a patient who was going to meet with your provider, you had to be at a pre-approved origination site, and your provider had to be at a pre-approved distant site. You also were required to speak on an audio-visual connection. But it’s well-known that American healthcare rules and regulations change daily, and it changed much more drastically when the pandemic arrived.

After the Pandemic

There’s been no question about extending telemedicine technology to everyone during the pandemic. Because of the fast timing, HIPAA and privacy concerns on telehealth platforms were largely relaxed to accommodate the massive influx of patients and providers. Today, video isn’t even required during telehealth appointments.

You can speak to your provider over the phone or over the computer. Patients now send private clinical and medical data directly to their providers. But this has created confusion and uncertainty about how to bill for medical services.

Before the pandemic, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) allowed only 101 telehealth services. On March 30, 2020, an additional 85 services were added. A month later, 51 new services were added. This brought up the total from 101 to 241 within a month.

No one knows how long the lax rules of telehealth will last after the pandemic is over. And no one has information about if telehealth will be shrunken down again as a service offered to a select group of patients. The Chicago-based American Medical Association also added to the confusion and chaos by releasing new billing codes and descriptors for telehealth services. But one thing is clear: there was likely massive fraud committed in 2020, and many schemes are still active.

Chaotic, Confusing, and Challenging

Because of the relationship of the American government with states, there are no two states that have the same healthcare guidelines and delivery regulations. State regulation depends on a variety of factors, like if the telehealth technology uses live video or just email/fax/phone or if it offers store-and-forward services, remote patient monitoring, or originating/remote site restrictions. It also depends on whether online prescribing and coding is happening, what geographic locations are offered, and what the form of consent looks like. 35 states have parity laws that require telehealth billing to be reimbursed at the same rate as in-office visits.

Identifying and analyzing telehealth claims doesn’t usually result in any actionable insights. Workers’ compensation, disability carriers, and union welfare trusts are particularly at risk for being bamboozled. When you look at the fraudulent claims singularly, they look legitimate and payable, which provides more fuel for the scam and involved fraudsters. In fact, fraudulent claims and legitimate claims are difficult to distinguish because the scammer won’t disclose that the service was provided through telehealth technology.

What’s worse is that advanced automation technology, like fraud detection algorithms, sophisticated analytics software, and previously-trained billing and clinical data applications, cannot catch the hundreds of physicians that scammers pay under the table. Bills are spread out over hundreds of payers, resulting in even more chaos and confusion, and this negatively affects any analysis because the volume is too low to analyze.

The Future of Medicine

Medical fraud has always been a part of healthcare in the U.S., especially because of the obfuscation created by adding more complexity into an already complicated system. Insurance companies must help sort out these scams moving forward, rather than remaining passive and reactive bystanders. If we don’t prepare now, we’ll have to pay much more later on.