The business of saving lives and caring for the ill and injured is constantly evolving due to the constant influx of emergent healthcare technologies. From the emergency room and the doctor's clinic to call centers and insurance offices, medical technology is making healthcare safer, cheaper and more efficient all around. Just the past week alone was filled with new developments in the industry, which we will take a look at here.
Online training courses allow hospital staff and other caregivers to test themselves on how well they are prepared for providing healthcare without any risk of harming someone due to inexperience, and the Institute for Professional Care released 14 new training courses this week. These topics include everything from understanding the respiratory and musculoskeletal system to ethics training like how to work with families or prevent sexual harassment. These courses will help ensure the proper training of new caregivers without pulling other staff members away from their jobs to proctor tests.
In other news WellCare, a national healthcare provider that offers members a variety of services, recently named Kelly Munson the regional President for Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. According to the company, “During her eight years with WellCare, Kelly has demonstrated the ability to build strong relationships with internal and external stakeholder s... Kelly's strategic and proactive approach will be invaluable as we continue to integrate our acquisition of Windsor Health Group and build our business in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee.”
Mobile healthcare is also on the rise, and it allows patients to monitor their own health through smartphone apps and communicate that information to doctors through email, text messaging and even video chats. One new app, developed by Tel Aviv startup MobileOCT, allows users to detect cervical cancer with their smartphone. A traditional colposcope used to detect cervical cancer can cost as much as $14,000, but this smartphone attachment retails for only about $400. The app magnifies images for women who want to check if they have cervical cancer, then directly uploads that image to physicians for further analysis.
In fact,
remote patient monitoring is becoming a huge subdivision of the medical industry, with the European market alone expected to reach 19.4 billion Euro in revenue by the end of the year 2018. Remote patient monitoring is popular because it is a money-saving industry. By detecting problems at home and immediately relaying the information through the Internet, professionals are better able to distribute preventative medical procedures, which eliminate some of the more expensive issues before they even start.
