In my last blog “India’s Healthcare Sector: "Will Challenges Become Opportunities,” I discussed how the sector is becoming an attractive destination for investment and how the investments are also being utilized for creating tech-enabled healthcare.

While the momentum is great and almost all large hospitals have covered the basic technology landscape like Electronic Medical Records (EMR), Picture Archiving Communication System (PACS), ERP etc. Now, the next phase of technology adoption and experimentation is slowly trickling in the health enterprises. The key areas where these new technologies are being experimented and/or adopted are remote patient monitoring, OPD, Doctor enablement and so on.  

Every CIO in the health enterprise is today looking for creating a responsive, system-driven organization – one that offers patients the convenience and ease of treatment on one hand and keep doctors updated on the move on the other.

DynamicCIO’s recently concluded survey identifies the key technologies that the CIOs are focusing on. A large number of CIOs (36%) CIOs suggested they are adopting one or more elements of SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics & Cloud) in their respective organizations. While the number of organizations which claim to have a matured set up is small (5%), it is still very encouraging to know that they are moving in the direction to become a truly digital health enterprise.

The data collected suggests that most of these implementations are taking place in Cloud, Mobility and Analytics. The Internet of Things isn’t really on the radar of CIOs in its current form. Merely 10% CIOs said they are willing to experiment or are doing some work using IoT in their organizations.

On this point, I personally called a few CIOs from health enterprises just to find who’s doing what and how and specially with the use of IoT.

Kapil Mehrotra, Head IT at Artimis Hospital in Gurgaon is pretty enthused about IoT and its usage in the patient care. Artimis is currently piloting sensor-based devices for critical cardiology and cancer care patients who need constant monitoring. His logic is simple. The use of IoT not only provides critical patients a safety net but also saves them from expensive in-patient procedure. “These devices, unlike in the past, aren’t cumbersome. They are SIM-based so no issues of wireless connectivity too. They are connected to a 24/7 monitoring center in the hospital that issues an alert the moment the threshold is breached. This gives the doctor and patient enough time to take proactive steps,” says Kapil, who is in process of rolling this out anytime soon. The end user devices are procured from Singapore and are quite reliable and inexpensive.

Rajesh Batra, CIO of Mumbai-based Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital is also quite a bullish on IoT and is ready to test in real world. He has discussed and zeroed-in on a certain technology that could prove a boon for the patients and doctors alike. “We spoke to BPL in India for handheld devices to be used in Home/Elderly care. These devices transmit the data to a central server which can press an emergency switch for Ambulance in case its mandated,” explains Rajesh. But Rajesh also feels that the success rate of such experiments will be slower than expected. He attributes this to many reasons like higher cost of end user devices, poor quality mobile network and data loss. “It’s the beginning and this will take time to mature and become a popular stream,” he feels.

When we talk of IoT, what comes first to our mind is a popular device like Google Glass. It’s a very futuristic stuff and if commoditized, can create wonders in the patient care. Niranjan Kumar Ramakrishnan, CIO of Sir Gangaram Hospital in New Delhi is hoping that this innovation will come cheap some day and then they can roll out a full blown plan for the doctors. “We planned to pilot it with some doctors and were ready to see if that works. Technology was great and could have been very useful but piloting itself was so costly that we had to drop the idea,” says Niranjan.

“This could be a big innovation for Google but to use it in real life and at a mass scale, we need to justify the cost and at this stage it is prohibitive. We are happy with some frugal innovations to build up for the bigger one. Hopefully some day we will be able to roll out Google Glass for doctors and they can use it for the patient rounds without having to carry or ask for bulky files,” he says.

Some unverified estimates suggest that nearly US$ 750 billion is wasted in healthcare costs alone in a year. This is all due to the administrative overheads and burden on the hospitals. If IoT or sensors based hospital equipment are mainstreamed, it will certainly help cut this waste, and will lead to better proactive monitoring and better care.

While there is no doubt that similar to how IoT and M2M can revolutionize the manufacturing sector, it can do wonders in health enterprises too. According to a new report from MarketResearch.com, the healthcare Internet of Things market segment is poised to hit $117 billion by 2020.

A Verizon report published recently says that Organizations will introduce more than 13 million health and fitness tracking devices into the workplace by 2018. The report mentioned that IoT-enabled wearable devices can also play an important role in preventive medicine. By encouraging the population to lead a more healthy lifestyle, the incidence of obesity and other conditions that can be a factor in many serious health conditions can be reduced. Wearables can also help general practitioners to make sure that patients are sticking to activity plans.

But to make that happen is a matter full of complexity and integrating it together with all sorts of disparate systems in the healthcare ecosystem is even bigger a challenge than what we anticipate.

I am sure there are more CIOs than mentioned here who are working on various IoT-based innovations in their enterprises but the issues will be more or less similar mentioned here.

Do you have any better story to share? I am keen to listen.