Over the years, the health sector has always been one of the major beneficiaries of new technology inventions. Yes, some of the new tech inventions may not be perfect, but what is evident is the fact that technology has positively impacted the way we get health services.
In the last couple of years, we have had several Medical Software Development inventions that have the work of doctors and other medical personnel much easier and more effective. The rate at which these inventions are coming up is one of the reasons experts predict the digital health market to be worth $189 Billion by 2025.
In today’s blog, we want to share some of the innovative trends in Medical Software Development that everyone needs to know about.
- Telemedicine
Telemedicine is the practice in medicine that involves using technology to offer health care services at a distance. Studies show that the number of telehealth visits increased by over 50% in the first quarter of 2020. This trend clearly indicates that both patients and medical practitioners are starting to embrace the use of technology to handle medical issues that don’t require a patient to physically visit a medical facility.
With telemedicine, doctors can review and follow up on their patients using a software application on their computer or smartphone via the internet. This is not only convenient, but it is also much cheaper than a physical visit.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial Intelligence has become part of many industries thanks to its ability to solve problems that would initially take humans more time to solve. For instance, AI algorithms can now perform clinical diagnoses and even suggest the ideal medicine if it is fed with enough information about the patient.
Besides diagnosis and suggesting treatment, AI can also predict the results for the different medications. So, in this situation, doctors will be able to administer medication that will bring about the best possible results based on the patient’s condition.
AI is also being used to identify epidemics and notify the concerned stakeholders about their existent and the extend of danger they can cause. It is on record that the very first warning about the covid19 pandemic was sent by an AI algorithm in Canada. This actually happened a week before WHO announced Covid19 in Wuhan.
These AI-powered applications even get better at what they do the more they are fed with the data.
- mHealtth applications
According to studies, over 60% of smartphone users have downloaded a mHealth application. There are also over 318,000 mHealth applications on the different mobile application platforms. These stats clearly show that many people are starting to embrace the use of Medical software development inventions to monitor their health.
Most of these applications are paired with wearable hardware devices like smartwatches and smart rings in order to get accurate health parameters like blood pressure, blood oxygen levels, body activity, quality of sleep, and many more. With such applications, a doctor can monitor their patients in real-time and also make recommendations without having to meet them physically.
- Virtual Reality applications
Virtual Reality has become a breakthrough technology in several industries. The idea of this technology is to have a virtual experience that is almost similar to the real experience. One of the major applications of Virtual Reality in the medical field is doing virtual surgery rehearsals.
This is all possible with the aid of VR hardware and an application designed for the kind of surgery a medical practitioner wants to rehearse. The major beneficiaries of this VR tech are medical students and inexperienced doctors. This technology also makes it cheaper to rehearse surgeries than using dead bodies – as it has always been in the previous years.
What does the future hold?
As technology continues to get better (especially on the hardware side), we expect to see more Medical Software Development innovations in the coming years. With technologies like 5G and more capable mobile devices, medical software developers will have the opportunity to make their applications more capable than ever before.
However, one of the major concerns about medical health software innovations is privacy. No one would like to have their health status declared to any third parties without their consent. So, as developers continue to enhance the capabilities of their apps, privacy should be one of the issues they pay attention to.