11 Biggest Innovations in Health Care Technology in 2016

The referralMD Annual Healthcare Technology Report. 

2016 is shaping up to be one of the biggest years for healthcare technology ever, with innovations in medical devices, software, and changes in how healthcare is administered, both from a care and financial perspective.   With the North American health IT market is expected to reach $104 billion by 2020 at a CAGR of 13.5% during the forecast period of 2015 to 2020, according to a recent report by MarketsandMarkets. 

A majority of this growth is attributed to the growing adoption of various healthcare IT solutions by healthcare providers in order to meet the heightened regulatory requirements for patient care and safety, increasing need to curtail the soaring healthcare costs, and growing need to improve the quality of healthcare while maintaining the operational efficiency of healthcare organizations.

So what does that mean to you? The healthcare professional: Doctor, Dentist, Referral Coordinator, Nurse, PA, Front/Back office, Billing, Scheduling, Risk Manager, Marketing, and (…).  It means, (/crosses fingers) that your lives, and your patients will be getting better over the course of the next few years with some amazing technology.

With healthcare accounting for almost 1/5th of our GDP, we need to start making serious investments to improvements that can help all of our country and the world’s people together. 

Here are some of the top healthcare technologies of 2016 and beyond…

 

1.  The Star Trek Style Tricorder

To start off, Yes I am a Star Trek Nerd, loved almost every series, specially TNG (The Next Generation) and no not because I shave my head like Patrick Stewart.

 

Star Trek: The Next Generation
Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard

Star Trek has always inspired millions of people, including myself to reach beyond what we thought was possible and achieve the impossible.  And futuristic medical devices are no different.

Qualcomm has a contest, called XPrize, that was just extended till 2017 for 7 final teams developing the almighty Tricorder featured in the picture below from the popular Star Trek series. The winner receives $10 million to bring the device to reality. 

In the fictional Star Trek universe, a tricorder is a multifunction hand-held device used for sensor scanning, data analysis and recording data.

Three primary variants of the tricorder appear in Star Trek, issued by the fictional organization Starfleet.  The standard tricorder is a general-purpose device used primarily to scout unfamiliar areas, make detailed examination of living things, and record and review technical data. The medical tricorder is used by doctors to help diagnose diseases and collect bodily information about a patient. 

 

2.   Interoperability between Health Systems

Interoperability solutions for exchanging patient information across care settings is one particular technological development that will shape the future of healthcare organizations.

 

Value-based care and health information exchanges are an increasingly important part of the overall healthcare landscape, and the ability for all providers – from general practitioners and specialists to post-acute care organizations, etc. – will only grow as a critical component of care delivery in the future.

These types of solutions have only started being developed in the past few years by companies such as referralMD, that are changing how healthcare companies communicate by including post-acute care providers in critical interoperability workflows, as these providers are expected to be a big part of health care cost containment.

 

By including post-acute care in interoperability strategies, healthcare organizations can ensure that critical patient information across all care settings will be connected, providing a more detailed patient picture for more specific treatment plans and improved patient care.

The statistics are damning, hospitals lose $75+ million per year per 100 affiliated physicians due to referral leakage, a burden that can be reduced by proper referral network management that companies such as referralMD can help monitor.  Hospitals are just starting to get make changes in their budgets to include programs that can truly help patients receive better care, and save their staff’s time in the process.

Not only are hospitals affected but so are small-to-mid sized practices, with many having to juggle 100’s of specialty offices with different workflow requirements, without an electronic way to exchange information, the process breaks down, information is not accurate, and time is wasted.

 

3. Robotic Nurse Assistant

I have many of friends that are nurses that are injured every year from having to move or lift patients in bed or after an emergency from a fall.  The problem is very common and many of times there is not someone around that is strong enough to lift a patient immediately after one of these occurrences.

There are many variations from a full robot such as RIBA (Robot for Interactive Body Assistance) developed by RIKEN and Tokai Rubber Industries and assisted hardware such as HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) robot suits delivered by Cyberdyne.

 

 

RIBA is the first robot that can lift up or set down a real human from or to a bed or wheelchair. RIBA does this using its very strong human-like arms and by novel tactile guidance methods using high-accuracy tactile sensors. RIBA was developed by integrating RIKEN’s control, sensor, and information processing and TRI’s material and structural design technologies.

 A company by the name of HAL is a robotics device that allows a care worker to life a patient with more stability and strength and helps prevent injuries to our nurses.

 

4. Artificial Retinas

The United States typically defines someone as legally blind when the person’s central vision has degraded to 20/200, or the person has lost peripheral vision so that he sees less than 20 degrees outside of central vision. Normal vision is 20/20, and people can usually see up to 90 degrees with their peripheral vision. An estimated 1.1 million people in the United States are considered legally blind.

This has led to companies like Nano-Retina to develop a sophisticated and elegant solution intended to restore the sight of people who lost their vision due to retinal degenerative diseases. The miniature Nano Retina device, the NR600 Implant, replaces the functionality of the damaged photoreceptor cells and creates the electrical stimulation required to activate the remaining healthy retinal cells. NR600 consists of two components; a miniature implantable chip and a set of eyeglasses worn by the patient.

 

Very interesting technology for those that are always sitting in front of the computer like myself, hopefully it will not be needed by me, but it’s great that companies are advancing for those that suffer this debilitating illness.

 

5. Advances in Prosthetics

War is in our DNA, and with conflict, there is injuries to our Military including loss of limbs and traumatic brain injury. DARPA is looking to change that by enabling wounded service members with amputations to neurally control state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs. The goal is to assist them in returning to active duty and to improve their quality of life. Program developments may impact the broad community of patients with medical amputations, spinal cord injuries and neurological diseases.

The challenges lie with creating an interface that is directly compatible with our own nervous system and making the connection fast enough to interpret our movement intent without latency.

I have been following Les’s story (an amputee) for a while and featured it in last years 2015 version of this article, see video below and wanted to showcase it again as organizations such as Johns Hopkins are making great strides in the movement to help the world live an easier life.

 

5. Remote Patient Monitoring

Monitoring programs can collect a wide range of health data from the point of care, such as vital signs, weight, blood pressure, blood sugar, blood oxygen levels, heart rate, and electrocardiograms.

This data is then transmitted to health professionals in facilities such as monitoring centers in primary care settings, hospitals and intensive care units, skilled nursing facilities, and centralized off-site case management programs.  Health professionals monitor these patients remotely and act on the information received as part of the treatment plan.

Monitoring programs are tools to help achieve the “triple aim” of health care, by improving patient outcomes and access to care, and to make health care systems more cost effective.

For example:

• In this 2014 study, a six-month feasibility study was conducted on eight patients with a history of Acute Exacerbation of CODP (AECOPD).  Each patient was given a mobile phone to record major symptoms, such as dyspnoea, sputum color and sputum volume; minor symptoms such as cough and wheezing; and vital signs. During the trial, the rate of hospital admissions were significantly lower and there were fewer ED presentations and GP visits compared to a six-month matched period in the preceding year. Such results showed “the potential of home monitoring for [analyzing] respiratory symptoms for early intervention AECOPD.”
• Similar to our previous Star Trek device, a company in Israel, Tyto Care, has developed a portal device that helps monitor all sorts of health parameters to let doctors diagnose patients remotely.   Allowing your doctor to perform their job with accurate metrics about you or your child’s illness without having to resort to a in person visit.  The Tyto device is currently going through the FDA clearance process, hopefully one day offering people the option of staying at home rather than visiting the clinic in most simple health situation.

“We are coming together at a pivotal time in the mobile healthcare industry. As health reform demands more focus on delivering quality outcomes and reducing costs, providers are turning to technology like remote monitoring to diagnose and treat more patients in ways that use time, money and human resources efficiently and effectively. Our shared vision is to become a worldwide leading remote monitoring company,” said Jon Otterstatter, President and Chief Global Strategy Officer of Preventice Inc.

 

6. Anti-Aging Drugs

The dream, or the nightmare, depending on  how you take it, is living forever, or at least in the foreseeable future to 120+ years old.   2016 will be the year of a new anti-aging drug test that will enter trials which could see diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s consigned to distant memory.

Scientists now believe that it is possible to actually stop people growing old as quickly and help them live in good health well into their 110s and 120s.

Although it might seem like science fiction, researchers have already proven that the diabetes drug metformin extends the life of animals, and the Food and Drug Administration in the US has now given the go ahead for a trial to see if the same effects can be replicated in humans.

“This would be the most important medical intervention in the modern era, an ability to slow ageing”Dr Jay Olshansky, University of Illinois Chicago

If successful it will mean that a person in their 70s would be as biologically healthy as a 50-year-old. It could usher in a new era of ‘geroscience’ where doctors would no longer fight individual conditions like cancer, diabetes and dementia, but instead treat the underlying mechanism – ageing.

The new clinical trial called Targeting Aging with Metformin, or TAME, is scheduled to begin in the US next winter. Scientists from a range of institutions are currently raising funds and recruiting 3,000 70 to 80 year olds who have, or are risk of, cancer, heart disease and dementia. They are hoping to show that drug slows the ageing process and stops disease.

Outlining the new study on the National Geographic documentary Breakthrough: The Age of Ageing, Dr Jay Olshansky, of the University of Illinois Chicago, said: “If we can slow ageing in humans, even by just a little bit it would be monumental. People could be older, and feel young.

“Enough advancements in ageing science have been made to lead us to believe it’s plausible, it’s possible, it’s been done for other species and there is every reason to believe it could be done in us.

“This would be the most important medical intervention in the modern era, an ability to slow ageing.”

 

7. Tooth Regeneration

Hey Kids, here is some candy!  All kidding aside, this could be an amazing advancement if the technology holds true in the coming years.

Colorful fish found in Africa may hold the secret to growing lost teeth. In a collaborative study between the Georgia Institute of Technology and King’s College London, researchers looked at the cichlid fishes of Lake Malawi in Africa, who lose teeth just to have a new one slide into place. Their study, published in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, identifies the genes responsible for growing new teeth and may lead to the secret to “tooth regeneration” in humans.

“The exciting aspect of this research for understanding human tooth development and regeneration is being able to identify genes and genetic pathways that naturally direct continuous tooth and taste bud development in fish, and study these in mammals,” said the study’s co-author Paul Sharpe, a research professor from King’s College, in a press release. “The more we understand the basic biology of natural processes, the more we can utilize this for developing the next generation of clinical therapeutics: in this case how to generate biological replacement teeth.”

Another study from a Harvard team successfully used low-powered lasers to activate stem cells and stimulate the growth of teeth in rats and human dental tissue in a lab. The results were published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine.  Stem cells are no ordinary cells. They have the extraordinary ability to multiply and transform into many different types of cells in the body. They repair tissues by dividing continually either as a new stem cell or as a cell with a more specialized job, such as a red blood cell, a skin cell, or a muscle cell.

Dentures and dental implants may soon become a thing of the past. Stem cell research is making it possible to regrow your missing teeth!
This is a much-needed medical advancement, especially considering that by age 74—26% of adults have lost all of their permanent teeth.

 

8. Lightbulbs that Disinfect and Kill Bacteria

Hospitals are known to be potentially dangerous place with lot’s of people with different elements and diseases.  One company, Indigo-Clean has developed a technology using visible light that continuously disinfect the environment and bolsters your current infection prevention efforts.

How it works

1. The 405nm emitted from Indigo-Clean reflects off of walls and surfaces, penetrating harmful micro-organisms
2. The light targets naturally occurring molecules called porphyrins that exist inside bacteria. The light is absorbed and the excited molecules produce Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) inside the cell
3. 405nm creates a chemical reaction inside the cell, similar to the effects of bleach
4. The Reactive Oxygen Species inactivates the bacteria, preventing it from re-populating the space

 

Read the last 3 top healthcare technology updates of 2016 on referralMD's website here. 

Here’s to a great year for healthcare technology!