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Today, the world of healthcare and life sciences technology is undergoing a seismic shift. AI is playing an important role in drug discovery and enhancing operation efficiency, rapidly transforming every aspect of patient care delivery and diagnosis. The future holds exciting prospects for revolutionizing how we approach healthcare solutions. This guide explores the exciting present and future of healthcare and life sciences technology solutions, uncovering the key areas where technology is taking up the industry by storm.

What are 5 Emerging Technologies in Healthcare and Lifesciences Consulting ?

• Wearables and IoMT Devices
• Telehealth 
• Big Data and Analytics 
• Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Cloud Computing

A Sneak Peek into the Future of Healthcare Technology Solutions and Lifesciences Consulting Services 

Healthcare providers are now expected to offer improved consumerization, better automation, and enhanced consolidation to meet the evolving needs of its patients, doctors, and staff. Consumers now demand convenience, ease of access, and fast responses at their fingertips. As a result, numerous healthcare systems have started to invest heavily in improving their patient experiences (PX). Here are the healthcare technology trends anticipated to facilitate enhanced digital healthcare delivery: 

1. Wearables and IoMT Devices:

Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR) are being used for immersive and high-quality care, particularly in digital therapeutics consulting to combat conditions like depression, cancer, autism, and visual impairments. They also aid in medical training, procedure simulations, patient awareness, and anxiety reduction. 

2. Telehealth:

Telehealth connects patients and healthcare providers, offering on-demand healthcare without the need for physical visits to clinics or hospitals.  

3. Big Data and Analytics:

Advances in Big Data and Analytics are driving the evolution of evidence-based medicine by capturing and analyzing data to help patients adjust treatments and alert physicians in emergencies.  

4. Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI):

AI and Data Science are redefining healthcare by enhancing the quality of care, improving patient outcomes, and reducing costs for hospitals and insurance companies. AI provides deeper insights for physicians, aiding in ancestry and family history analysis, risk detection, accurate diagnostics, and disease detection.

5. Cloud Computing:

Cloud computing enables healthcare organizations to store and manage vast amounts of data securely and efficiently. It supports integration and interconnection of data from multiple sources, making it a single source of truth.  

Similarly, the Lifesciences consulting services industry is also constantly advancing. Companies offer these consultation services to other companies within the life sciences industry, including pharmaceuticals, biotech, medical devices, and healthcare IT. They act as advisors and partners, helping them outperform, innovate, and navigate through the complex and dynamic landscape of healthcare. Lifesciences consulting services are now also leveraging data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to become more patient-centric. From optimizing clinical trials to enhancing supply chain management, the services are being tailored to become more efficient to drive precise outcomes. 

Digital Therapeutics and It’s Importance

Digital therapeutics or DTx is a patient-centered trend that delivers evidence-based care via software. It uses mobile apps, wearables, virtual reality, etc., to offer personalized treatment plans and real-time patient monitoring, empowering them to take control of their health. This healthcare technology was created for clinicians and patients. Due to the FDA green lighting multiple DTx treatments and pharma companies have strategically invested in this growing market. The accelerated investment in and adoption of health-related apps aimed to expand access when said access was difficult. The global digital therapeutics market in 2020 was valued at $3,537.29 million. It is predicted to reach $23,569.38 million by 2030, displaying a CAGR of 20.6 percent from 2021. 

How are Digital Therapeutics Solutions Providing Benefits for Both Patients and Healthcare Providers?

• Improved Patient Engagement: Interactive DTx programs can enhance patient compliance and adherence to treatment plans, leading to better outcomes and improved quality of life.
• Remote Monitoring: DTx allows for continuous monitoring of patient health, facilitating early intervention and preventive measures.
• Cost-Effectiveness: It can be a cost-effective alternative to traditional treatment methods by reducing hospital stays and resource utilization. 
  Chronic Disease Management: DTx help patients manage chronic diseases by providing evidence-based support that's tailored to their condition. It can also help prevent chronic disorders by educating patients about harmful lifestyles.
• Oncology Care: DTx help support patients during chemotherapy and reduce unnecessary hospital visits. 

Patient-Centric Customization with Data Engineering 

Data engineering plays a vital role in patient-centric healthcare solutions. By collection, integrating, and assessing data from numerous sources like electronic health records (EHRs), genomic information, and patient-generated data from wearables, data engineering allows for personalized treatment plans tailored to each patient’s unique needs. This approach improves patient outcomes and enhances the overall experience by placing the patient at the heart of care delivery. 

Along with this, advanced chatbots powered by AI algorithms are enabling more intuitive and efficient patient engagement. They learn from every interaction, providing personalized responses and assisting clinicians in delivering timely care. This partnership between digital assistants and healthcare professionals promotes sustainable healthcare systems and enhances the overall patient experience. 

What are 3 key benefits of data engineering in healthcare?

• Predictive Analytics: Health risks can be predicted through analyzing data thereby allowing early intervention and preventive care for people at risk.
• Precision Medicine: Personalized treatments that are based on an individual’s unique combination of genes and medical history can improve patient outcomes significantly.
• Real-World Data Analysis: Analyzing real-world data on drug efficacy in heterogeneous populations ensures safety and optimizes treatment plans for wider groups of patients. 

Transforming Healthcare Through AI 

Artificial Intelligence (AI), an insightful cognition Global AI in the healthcare market was valued at USD 6.7 billion in 2020 and is anticipated to expand at a CAGR of 41.8 per cent from 2021 to 2028. It continues to bring human judgment and scientific data closer, creating waves of change in the industry.  AI has become a critical component in diagnosis, treatment, care delivery, and cost, making it easier to find meaning in large pools of patient data at a rapid pace. It is particularly adept at combing through and identifying patterns in unknown factors. Undoubtedly, this has helped play a pivotal role in clinical decision support as it delivers data to providers to aid in diagnosing, treatment planning, and population health management.

Through the use of sophisticated algorithms, AI in Life Sciences is leading to the discovery of new drugs, diagnoses in cancer and radiology inference, identifying likely candidates for clinical trials, and enhancing drug formulations to maximize efficacy. Researchers can analyze large datasets using big data to discover underlying patterns or relationships, leading to more focused and efficient therapies. AI-powered telehealth platforms offer 24/7 access to healthcare professionals through virtual consultations, showcasing the potential for AI to enhance patient care. These advancements enable clinicians to provide more personalized treatment plans and improve health outcomes. 

How is drug discovery and medical research revolutionizing with artificial intelligence (AI) and big data?

• For mental health treatments: AI can help capture every interaction and generate a baseline for clinical notes. It can provide data-driven insights about the session, patient progress, and guidance for future interactions. It saves time and allows care providers to focus on the patients. 
• In radiotherapy treatment planning: AI can recognize complex patterns within medical data and efficiently offer quantitative assessments of clinical conditions. These emerging technologies are steadily gaining momentum and will soon take over the healthcare industry. Meaning healthcare industry providers will need to accelerate adoption and find the right technology partners to bring this better future into our present. 
• Efficiency in Drug Discovery: This technology can identify potential drug candidates from massive molecular structure datasets with greater efficiency and accuracy.
• Optimized Clinical Trial Design: AI can optimize clinical trial design to select the right patient population, reduce trial duration, and lead to faster drug development timelines.
• Enhanced Drug Safety Monitoring: Data from multiple sources can be analyzed by AI to detect early signs of possible adverse effects of drugs thereby ensuring that patients are not adversely affected.
• Genomic Analysis Advancements: Big data analytics will unlock insights from complex genomic data that would enable personalized medicine and targeted therapies. 

The future of drug development and screening will encounter even more improvements as AI and big data continue to progress over the next few years. 

Challenges Ahead 

While virtual visits are increasingly popular, there's still a gap to close when making them as effective as in-person consultations. AI holds promise in addressing this challenge by enhancing virtual care experiences. Through natural language processing (NLP) and conversational AI, virtual assistants can provide more personalized and effective interactions, improving the overall patient experience (PX). 

Strong data governance is key to balancing healthcare innovation with patient privacy. Secure interconnected ecosystems require clear patient consent and robust security protocols. Apart from data security, several other challenges lie ahead: 

• Regulatory Hurdles: There is a clear need for regulatory norms for AI and big data to go along with the evolution of technology. More weight should be given on these guidelines, and collaborations should be established between the regulators and the health care industry.
• Interoperability Issues: Fragmented healthcare systems and incompatible data formats are friction points for data-driven healthcare solutions. Data exchange is seamless if standard data formats and interoperability solutions are implemented.
• Equipment:  Life-saving drugs and devices rely on well-maintained equipment. Lack of planned maintenance schedules leads to costly breakdowns and disrupts production timelines.
• Outdated communication shackles progress:  Clinical trials are vital for testing new drugs. But relying on slow methods like email for communication between researchers and patients creates delays in data collection.  
• Soaring expenses squeeze margins:  The cost of bringing a drug to market has skyrocketed. Fragmented processes filled with manual tasks and outdated systems contribute to operational inefficiencies.  
• Delays put lives at risk:  Streamlined clinical trials are crucial for faster drug development, disjointed processes create bottlenecks that slow down the path to market, potentially delaying the delivery of life-saving treatments during pandemics and other critical situations.

Actively monitoring and analyzing emerging trends in healthcare technology is vital to staying ahead of the curve. Ignoring these advancements can leave providers vulnerable to disruption and hinder their ability to compete in the global market.  

How Can We Help?

Cybage has been at the forefront of building the best-in-class technology solutions for the Healthcare industry. Our proven expertise in Care Delivery, Wellness Management, and Life Sciences has enabled the world’s leading healthcare organizations to create safe care platforms and services. Our solutions are targeted towards Clinical Workflow, Clinical Trials, Digital Healthcare Solution, Population Health, and Interoperability. We have built several synchronous telehealth platforms that assist Live Video Conferencing, VOIP calling and Online messaging; created guideline based apps to help physicians share précised decisions with patients and secured several cloud based platforms for risk mitigation. 

Enrich your PX and experience the transformative power of healthcare and life sciences technology with Cybage, a 20+ year partner in the industry with expertise and product engineering skills.  

Conclusion

The future of healthcare and life sciences is undoubtedly exciting, driven by advancements in technology and innovation. From digital therapeutics to AI-powered drug discovery, the possibilities are endless. Cybage is committed to helping our clients harness the power of technology to transform the way healthcare is delivered and experienced. Contact us today to learn more about how we can support your digital transformation journey. Together, let's build a healthier tomorrow.