Technology healthcare trends: Outsourcing, digital transformation, and more

As of now, the latest healthcare tech trends are online medicine, telehealth services, virtual and augmented reality, and artificial intelligence. According to the 2021 Future of Healthcare Report, nearly 80% of Healthcare systems are planning to increase their investment in these digital healthcare trends over the next five years.

High demand for personalized medicine and growing pressure to cut down on healthcare costs are the key factors that directly impact these unavoidable measures. Covid-19 pandemic has had an incredible impact on healthcare digitalization, so it is expected that more healthcare providers will lean towards these technologies in the upcoming years.

In this article, you will discover how digital transformation will impact healthcare in the future, which tech trends have the biggest potential to become widespread, and how to hire software developers to help you build data-driven healthcare solutions.

The list of top healthcare technology trends that will increase in popularity in 2022 includes:

• Big Data;
• Internet of medical things;
• Artificial Intelligence;
• Digital therapeutics;
• Remote patient monitoring;
• New technologies in mental healthcare;
• Virtual Reality.

Big data in healthcare refers to the massive amount of information created by adopting modern technologies that collect patients’ medical records and are used for managing hospital performance. It can be used for a variety of purposes, from curing individual patients to predicting and preventing epidemics and cutting costs.

This healthcare technology trend is transforming healthcare as we know it today. The biggest medical systems in the future are going to use devices that will monitor patients’ well-being and help medical experts provide high-quality care.

Global big data in the healthcare market is expected to reach $34.27 billion by 2022 at a CAGR of 22.07%. Globally, the big data analytics segment is set to be worth around $68.03 billion by 2024. These numbers will be mostly motivated by continued North American investments in electronic health records, practice management tools, and workforce management solutions (source).

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) – is a connected infrastructure of health care systems and services, aimed at providing effective care to rural, and isolated communities, as well as those patients who are unable to attend their healthcare provider. Innovation and data integration enable patients to receive convenient and high-quality treatment in the comfort of their own homes. Personal health monitoring equipment provided by their hospital allows patients to monitor their health data and send it to their attending physicians.

Some confuse IoMT and remote patient monitoring — however, there is a big difference between them. Internet of medical things is a broad term that defines the entire industry and all technologies, while remote patient monitoring is a system of technologies that help gather, monitor, and process data for improved patient outcomes.

Artificial intelligence in healthcare is aided by NLP applications that can systemize clinical documentation by structuring the records and improving overall results for patients. 

The global artificial intelligence in the healthcare market size was valued at USD 6.7 billion in 2020 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41.8% from 2021 to 2028 (source).

Digital therapeutics is a patient-centered trend in healthcare that delivers evidence-based care via software. It can become a full replacement or a complement of the existing disease treatment (source). This healthcare technology is developed both for clinicians and patients and includes clinical assessment, patient reported outcomes and clinician monitoring dashboards.

Remote patient monitoring is a healthcare IT trend that keeps patients and their care providers continuously in touch to coordinate treatment and manage complex illnesses. To ensure non-stop patient monitoring, clinicians provide their patients with house sets that consist of a number of wearable measuring devices. These house sets measure critical health data, remind patients to take their medication, and send relevant data to the healthcare providers.

This solution helps healthcare institutions cut down on time, costs, and deliver high-quality healthcare even without meeting their patients.

As Covid-19 continues to impact the population’s mental health, the demand for effective healthcare technology keeps growing. Here is a list of the most promising technologies that will define the future of mental healthcare:

• Video game treatment

Mental healthcare has also been dramatically impacted by the latest technologies. In 2020, US Food and Drug Administration permitted marketing of the first video game for children with ADHD and similar mental health issues (source). The game is called EndeavorRx, and is intended to work with young patients ages 8 to 12 years old to improve their attention problems. This solution can be combined with medication, clinician-directed therapy, and/or educational programs to further improve the patients’ well-being.

• Smartphone-assisted therapy

It is expected that smartphone-assisted therapy will become increasingly popular in 2022. Many chatbots and mobile apps are already used to analyze patients’ voice and speech patterns to indicate any signs of emotional instability. These technologies are not providing any solutions, rather provide support and redirect the data to healthcare providers.

• Online symptom tracking

Online symptom tracking solution enables patients to report their symptoms daily, which significantly improves and speeds up the treatment. In the past, most patients reported any new symptoms during the regular therapy visits. Now, mental health professionals have access to any updates 24/7, meaning they can come up with a treatment based on the health data they receive from the patients daily.

Virtual reality has recently started to revolutionize the healthcare industry by improving patient recovery time and hospital management. VR headsets are used in various ways:

• For medical training purposes;

VR headsets have become a useful tool for medical interns to improve their skills and knowledge. Medical schools do not need to rely on cadavers to help their students understand human anatomy — instead, virtual reality enables training in a completely different environment.

• To treat patients;

Virtual reality is incredibly useful in complex surgery planning. For example, in case of any neurosurgical procedures, surgery teams can rehearse their planned intervention with the help of VR sets.

• To help people with developmental disorders;

This latest health technology helps people with ASD train their social and coping skills in virtual environments.

• To simulate surgeries for error reduction;

Thanks to virtual reality in healthcare, doctors now can continuously train and improve their skills by using virtual environments. It significantly decreases the probability of medical errors and improves value-based care.

The combined augmented reality and virtual reality markets were worth $12 billion in 2020 with a massive annual growth rate of 54%, resulting in a projected valuation of $72.8 billion by 2024 (IDC, 2020).

All these emerging technologies in healthcare are steadily getting more popular and will soon take over the healthcare industry. Needless to say, companies need software developers and engineers who will bring the future into the present by developing these most important solutions in the healthcare industry.

Since the future of healthcare technologies starts now, Grid Dynamics can help you transition to value-based and patient-centered care by hiring experienced software developers. We provide an extensive list of services: from service-based options to talent-based ones.

Our clients have the option of choosing a talent engagement model which best suits their project requirements, including team extension, dedicated teams, pod teams, and remote development centers. Grid Dynamics has offices across the Americas, Europe, and India, meaning that we can provide access to the top global software engineering talent to meet the needs of companies anywhere in the world. Our distributed tech hubs allow us to leverage skilled IT professionals from many regions and time zones in order to assemble high-performance, dedicated teams tailored to each client’s unique business goals.