5 reasons why innovation in health care is important

Innovation in healthcare is becoming a key trend in many emerging market countries as well as developed markets. It makes sense too: it’s a quick and easy way to access medical information, provide education for patients and give doctors the opportunity to collaborate on challenging medical cases.

A panel at the MENA ICT conference in Jordan, which describes itself as the premier tech event in the region, explained that in the last few years health care innovation has grown in five key areas.

“There has been great adoption which has great demand for cutting edge technology to be developed in the field,” says Ashraf Arafeh, general manager at Cisco Systems, Jordan and Palestine.

According to the panel, which also consisted of Electronic Health Solutions CEO Rami Adwan and Practice Fusion’s senior health policy advisor Lauren Fifield, it has never been more important to innovate in this sector due to the plethora of illness that are proving fatal today. The panel highlight five key areas where electronic health has been useful and continues to prove useful today.

Online diagnosis

Medical practitioners who work in the e-health space or use e-health related applications are able to become more efficient to their patients by being able leverage the opportunities presented by technology. This means that patients who are unable to get to a doctor immediately can still receive access to medical care.

Notifications

This aspect of ehealth is currently implemented by many mobile health solutions that provide patients with notifications about upcoming doctors’ appointments and updates to doctors about patients’ medical progress and next steps. Notifications give patients a better handle on their health and help doctors manage their patients better.

Access to records

Being able to access patient medical records remotely and from different devices allows doctors to be more efficient and helps with patient diagnosis.

“We have a very hands on on approach with the doctors that use our service. Electronic records are very important and whenever a doctor registers on our platform we are on the phone asking them to use the tools provided,” says Fifield.

Practice Fusion is also leveraging the power of gamification to get doctors to use more tech forward ways to practice medicine to ensure their patient get the best care available.

“The more tools they use, the more points they collect and we are constantly pushing them to use more tools,” she adds.

Doctor collaboration

Electronic health platforms present great opportunities for doctors to collaborate on difficult cases, says Adwan. “We have seen interesting numbers and stats in a number of these areas. One of the key areas for ehealth is collaboration.”

Doctor collaboration platforms gives doctors from all over the world the ability to provide their expertise on a particular case without the patient having to see too many experts.

Content

It has become more important than ever to provide patients with basic information. In the age of Google, where random information is a click away, getting the right information in people’s hands is necessary.

“There is a need for preventive health care, people just don’t have the right information,” says Fifield.

Chiming in to the discussion, medical doctor Zeid Abughosh argues that media content needs to be patent-centric relating to patient health and issues raised by patients.

“Reminders for both patient and doctors help when managing care and it also help doctors collaborate,” he says.

Abughosh says that Google cannot provide patients with the right information simply because the search queries are based on mathematics and not meaning.

“A doctor is trained to recognise illness through at least seven to 15 years of study. Google is translating key words not meaning. Optimising doesn’t work for medical terms has it does for other things.”

The doctor says that the beauty of medicine is its simplicity and ehealth solutions help enhance that.