The healthcare industry has become decidedly significant over the past decade. In the contemporary society, more individuals are health conscious leading to an influx of patients. While some of these patients seek medical attention, others undergo regular checkups and monitoring to maintain their health status. As such, the healthcare industry has grown to an unprecedented rate with medical professionals affirming that this rate will remain this way for quite some time. While various trends have evolved over the past two years ultimately becoming persistent in 2018, some have transformed to suit the volatile healthcare market.
Top Trends in the Industry
Central to the growth of the healthcare industry is the advancement and implementation of information technology. Skinner & Staiger (2015) assert that the adoption of technology has become the most notable trend in the healthcare sector. While Information Technology (IT) remains central in healthcare, its consumer base continues to shift dynamically, thereby requiring disruptive applications along with the delivery of pertinent information on time. Technology has thus significantly transformed market trends within healthcare subsequently leading to the adoption of customer-centric policies, a move being met with wide acceptance among healthcare consumers.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Over the past five years, the healthcare industry has experienced tremendous growth. With this growth, a new trend is emerging in the healthcare workforce. For instance, employment in the United States has gone through drastic changes with occupations requiring more training and education being on the rise. Workers have also realized that by upgrading their skills, they are able to raise their income status. Therefore, for many workers, advancing their skills through a college education has become a lifetime commitment. The current healthcare workplace has a dynamic personnel base that is characterized by variations in college education, technical training, experiences, and specialized skills. Such trends in the diversity of the workplace have resulted in management challenges, especially on communication between the different generations of employees. Proper communication among the healthcare providers is vital as it ensures the clients are served more efficiently and in the right manner thus minimizing issues such as prescribing errors.
While communication is indeed an issue among healthcare providers, the physical workplace is also transforming for both employers and employees. Presently, the healthcare workforce has adopted the term “borderless” to indicate workers abroad. In fact, the current trend entails working remotely within a satellite facility or at home as healthcare institutions are becoming more customer-centric. Research shows that 68 percent of healthcare workers are more likely to work remotely in the future. This shall bring about immense changes within the healthcare industry ranging from a workforce that is skilled to an increase in efficiency.
Another notable trend is integrated care for the health of a particular set of the population (Vogenberg & Santilli, 2018). Typically, this trend stipulates certain frameworks whereby care provider groups merge to focus on specified patient populations with the objective of achieving a certain value level regarding the quality of health care dispensed and the costs incurred thereof. The use of an integration model motivates healthcare providers to add value to patients thus reducing medical malpractices and the overindulgence in treatment options. Integrated care is becoming the norm among communities with endemic morbidities. In recent years, the emergence of integrated care for population health has emerged with the increase in outpatient medical services including intervention and surgical procedures. With this increase, providers are continuing to focus on ambulatory care (United States Census Bureau News, 2016). This shift has brought about more revenue for the industry while accumulating crucial information used to increase quality and efficiency in healthcare.
An Important Emerging Issue
Transformative market impacts and accelerated technology have become the norm of the healthcare industry as more players are seeking a return on investment with automation, integration, data storage, and communication among other functionalities enabled by information technology. Under technology, a plethora of functions, mostly customer-centric, are revolutionizing the way healthcare providers offer quality and efficient care. The most notable is the use of wearable devices. The wearable sensors are minute and critical among consumers as they measure various parameters within the body including muscle activity, blood pressure, temperature, and movements among others. Before the advent of such devices, providers used to rely on the client’s description of their conditions over a period and the measurement of such parameters only when one was ill. Presently, due to the integration of technology in healthcare, doctors are able to access the health patterns of their patients over time to come up with accurate prescriptions (Vogenberg & Santilli, 2018).
In relation to the type of wearable sensors, biometric data can be collected through pressure sensors, magnetometers, gyroscopes, image sensors, biosensors, and touch sensors among others. The application of wearable sensors in healthcare is wide-ranging and has even brought about the medical internet of things (MIot), which has been demonstrated through proper designs, both software and hardware, and the use of sensors with smart capabilities and connectivity to synchronize various data (Haghi et al., 2017). Moreover, when personalized medicine facilitated through wearable sensors and genomics combine, therapy becomes customized to the point of reaching the molecular makeup (Vogenberg & Santilli, 2018). Such advancements, according to Nikhil Krishnan, a researcher at CB Insights, portends new trends in healthcare such as genetic counseling, which is the precise and significantly augmented treatment based on the genetic code; and lifestyle planning and coaching that decidedly personalizes healthcare (Krishnan, 2016)
Under technology in healthcare also, telehealth services and supporting systems are rapidly mutating into models of remote management predominantly among post-acute care patients or those with chronic co-morbid conditions. These advancements are primarily seen across four major segments, which include telehealth virtual visits, personal emergency response systems, mobile health, and remote patient monitoring. Being consumer-driven, this form of health dispensation always has novel innovations in communication solutions to cater to the wide range of client generation (old or young) in need of medical services.
In addition to telehealth is telemedicine, which refers to the dispensation of medical information through both asynchronous and synchronous telecommunication. According to HIMSS Analytics, between 2014 and 2016, the integration of technologies in telemedicine increased by 6.8 percent indicating an upward trend and the need for such technologies in the service of patients (FitzGerald, 2016). Technological advancements in the healthcare industry that are customer-centric include augmented reality training, the leveraging of healthcare data, and the use of smart technologies among others.
Conclusion
Health care trends continue to increase within the industry as it gets more dynamic with advancements in technology and demographical variances among others. At the forefront of this increase is technology. Indeed, technology shall continue to impact healthcare dispensation, thereby affecting all major stakeholders commencing with the patients. In the near future, while some of the already established trends will survive, the breadth and depth of current technologies shall increase rapidly in terms of both applications and systems. Resultantly, there will be an addition of newer pipelines of germane functionalities and consumer market transformations. As such, to produce lasting and positive effects, innovations deemed successful need to display a reasonable return on investment be they economic, clinical, or an amalgamation of both. At the moment, technologies such as wearable sensors are making headway in the realization of efficiency and precision within healthcare. Although its genomic advantages need further research, applications of the technology are still emerging and look promising.
References
FitzGerald, B. (2016). Telemedicine Adoption Continues Growth in 2016 and Beyond. Retrieved from http://www.himssanalytics.org/news/telemedicine-adoption-growing-35-annually-2014
Haghi, M., Thurow, K., & Stoll, R. (2017). Wearable Devices in Medical Internet of Things: Scientific Research and Commercially Available Devices. Healthcare Informatics Research , 23 (1), 4. doi: 10.4258/hir.2017.23.1.4
Krishnan, N. (2016). Genomics 101: understanding how the genomics revolution is changing medicine. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/genomics-101-understanding-how-revolution-changing-nikhil-krishnan/
Skinner, J., & Staiger, D. (2015). Technology Diffusion and Productivity Growth in Health Care. Review of Economics And Statistics , 97 (5), 951-964. doi: 10.1162/rest_a_00535
United States Census Bureau News. (2016). Quarterly estimates for selected service industries: 2nd quarter 2016 .
Vogenberg, F., & Santilli, J. (2018). Healthcare Trends for 2018. Am Health Drug Benefits , 11 (1), 48-54.
