Healthcare Innovation: Information technology brings huge benefits to industry
TELEHEALTH and healthcare informatics can bring huge opportunities to the healthcare sector, according to experts.
Telehealth – the delivery of health related services and information via telecommunications technologies; and healthcare informatics – the delivery of information to healthcare professionals so that they can provide the most appropriate care, are emerging and developing areas for the industry.
Yorkshire healthcare professionals said that as information technology becomes increasingly embedded in the delivery of healthcare services it brings potentially vast cost savings and opportunities for a more personal and bespoke service. As such, it’s an area that still faces some considerable challenges.
Tim Straughan, director of health and innovation at Leeds & Partners, said: “It’s shifting care out of hospitals and into the home. Home care and personal responsibility for your own care is a fundamental.”
The opportunity to implement telehealth services has been accelerated by the acute need for cost savings within the NHS. Straughan added: “How do you increase or improve the outcome with the same or less money? Technology is part of that but it is changing faster than we can cope with so the human element is a challenge.”
The market trends, opportunities and challenges businesses face in healthcare services and medtech are outlined in TheBusinessDesk.com’s Healthcare Innovation supplement. Click here to read it.
AQL is a national telco based in Leeds with three data centres in the city. The data centre and telephone network operator has been working for years on security accreditation to hold patient medical records and has now achieved three levels up from what is required in terms of security.
Adam Beaumont, chief executive of AQL, says it has seen a massive growth in 3G devices in the field – 300% year-on-year for the last three years.
He said: “We do a lot of engineering work for mobile networks. Three years ago we built secure sims that can’t access the internet but allow remote devices to contact the mother ship and ping back sensitive information. We are shifting a ballistic amount of sims through ISPs and some medical informatics companies.
”It is low level stuff but we are starting to see a few devices sending huge amounts of data – such as medical image sharing in the field.”
Beaumont said the rollout of 4G will allow for remote diagnosis.
“The increase of mobile bandwidth will be a big enabler for these opportunities in the field. All the way along security of data is underpinning that,” he added.
