Short answer, YES!!!

For a more detailed viewpoint – What, Why, How, read on…

Telemedicine, robotic surgeries, and electronic health records are just a few examples of the sweeping digital transformations in the healthcare industry. These have made it possible for doctors to see patients remotely, conduct specialized surgeries, effectively track patients, personnel, and medical assets, and so much more. Not only is the industry becoming increasingly reliant on technology, but today’s tech-savvy patients and caregivers expect nothing less.

From improved health outcomes, patient engagement, medication adherence to automating the monitoring of people and medical equipment, there is a large pool of opportunities that technologies like the Internet of Things offer to the healthcare industry. Prominent among these are tracking solutions.

So, what are IoT tracking solutions?

Our increasing ability to store, share and analyze health information is directly linked to next-gen tracking solutions like sensors, RFID tags, Indoor RTLS (Real Time Location Systems), BLE trackers, NB-IoT trackers, 4G trackers, IoT Gateways, etc. These are designed for hospitals, manufacturers, patients, and caregivers to enhance processes involving patient safety and control of consumables. Next-gen tracking devices and solutions enable the creation of transparent tracking flows for assets that impact patient safety and hospital efficiency on the whole.

Why Track and Trace Solutions for the Healthcare Industry

The benefits of RTLS have long been considered in clinical settings to seek better ways to manage staff, patients, supplies, equipment, and facilities. Some hospitals started implementing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) or Bluetooth Low Energy technologies as far back as 2014 for better visibility into asset utilization and generating actionable insights to improve resource availability.

IoT has the potential to transform healthcare – enabling more efficient distribution of limited resources, providing remote patients with better access to care, and achieving better outcomes by promoting well-being and preventive care. Its proven and potential capabilities have escalated the demand for IoT-connected devices for patient and supplies monitoring, which is expected to grow significantly in the coming years.

According to a Grand Review Research report, the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies led the global track and trace solutions market with the largest revenue share of over 28% in 2020.

Currently, over 60% of healthcare organizations globally are leveraging IoT solutions in some ways to improve their operations and quality of healthcare provided. These help in striking the right inventory balance, monitor the movements of patients and medical equipment, and manage overall daily utilization. However, these capabilities have to upped big time and adopted on a larger scale before we can get the real value.

Furthermore, Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the serious gaps in the existing healthcare systems and an urgent need for better and more connected healthcare infrastructure. Even though global pandemics are not the only instances when basic supplies, critical patient care, and life-saving equipment are in high demand. However, times like these reiterate the importance of traceability and standardization to effectively monitor people, supply chains, and assets in the healthcare industry.

How Tracking Solutions Add Value to the Healthcare Ecosystem

Listed below are the key growth drivers of the healthcare tracking solutions market.

• Provides actionable insights that help increase healthcare systems’ agility and visibility into their capacity and consequent planning, especially in times of crisis
• Provides a constant ‘line of sight’ into critical patient care processes, supplies, and equipment
• Creates a transparent hospital management system, and also improves patient safety during clinical procedures
• Empowers preventive medicine by providing healthcare centers with tools for data gathering, processing, and incorporating it into health-related insights for timely first response
• Improves assets sourcing, availability, and utilization by helping hospitals, clinics, labs, etc. do inventory control, and ensure efficient use of surgical equipment and other medical supplies
• Track supply chains in real-time and trace the location of inventory and equipment at all times
• Enables continuous transparency, packaging and logistics management, product ID verification, hassle-free product movement within the distribution channels
• Fueled by the rising deployment by pharmaceutical and medical devices companies to monitor supply chains in a bid to curb spurious medical supplies market
• Prevents product tampering, theft, and counterfeiting of high-demand and high-value medical devices, supplies, and consumables
• Provide transparency and accountability related to safe handling of medications, medical devices, and basic supplies
• Lower infrastructure costs and quick returns with reduced interferences while eliminating redundancies such as multiple paths
• Adds value to the production chain, increasing efficiency. A huge plus for the manufacturers of healthcare products
• Provides informative dashboards, allowing real-time monitoring and generation of historical data for decision making by the hospital administration
• Enables predictive maintenance by allowing health organizations to track the health and performance of expensive medical equipment to preempt problems before they occur, avoiding unnecessary or costly downtime.
• Like smart wearables, connected medical devices can collect and transmit medical information directly to the doctor for Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) in the real-time

Bottomline

There is no denying the power of innovation in healthcare. New ideas and technologies are transforming the experience for patients and providers. With disruptive inventions heralding unprecedented capabilities sweeping the healthcare ecosystem, the question isn’t whether we should collectively embrace and adopt next-gen technologies like tracking solutions. The more pertinent question here is, can we afford not to?

The Amantya Advantage

Healthcare has never been more accessible, dynamic, or inventive. It has also never been under more pressure from global pandemics, stretched resources, and rising costs. That’s where we come in. Our expertise lies in building intelligent tracking devices, data analytics, and application development to provide tracking solutions and services that enable healthcare professionals and organizations to become more efficient and drive better patient and business outcomes.

Amantya has deep experience in custom healthcare software and offers a wide range of services, including patient and medical asset tracking, and software development. We do hardware and software designing for sensors and other IoT peripherals (across various IoT technologies). We work through the entire IoT implementation chain, from sensors, connectivity, gateways, and backend cloud solutions to deliver end-to-end solutions deploying NB-IoT, CAT-M, and Cellular-IoT. We leverage IoT to help organizations in the healthcare sector move from traditional products to those with embedded intelligence. Our range of IoT trackers includes LE Tracker, 4G Tracker, NB-IoT Tracker, Indoor Real-time Asset Tracking solution, etc.

Want to explore ways in which technology can help improve your patient care and supply chain’s track and trace capabilities or planning and sourcing capabilities of your healthcare system? Get in touch, and we will be happy to assist you. Write to us at connect@amantyatech.com