The digital healthcare space is redefining life as we know it

Today the digital healthcare field is growing day by day and spreading its wings. There are endless opportunities in this field and there are many platforms available that are improving the overall quality of care for patients, reducing readmission rates and saving costs to companies and consumers alike.

Today various health technologies are leveraging artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to help with early diagnostics detection, improving treatment plans and managing chronic conditions at scale. Here’s a few examples of some of the most revolutionary healthcare trends you should be aware of in 2019.

Artificial intelligence at its best

According to Digital Authority Partners, artificial intelligence can be used to reduce the risk of the preventable medical diseases in three manners.  AI can analyze massive amounts of data and make accurate predictions tied to early disease detection and management. AI can also be used to find the people who have a high risk of developing a life altering conditions. And third, AI helps create tailored and personalized treatment plans  based on various factors like age, gender, race and more.

How blockchain is changing healthcare

Blockchain is one of the most exciting emerging technologies in the healthcare space. As we all know, blockchain is a distributed ledger system which allows for instant reconciliation between different online transactions. But whereas bitcoin ‘spoiled’ blockchain’s reputation by making it synonymous with currency, the underlying technology has various implications for the healthcare space.

Blockchain in healthcare is not about money. It’s about the exchange of data, in a secure and safe way. In medicine, various data points affect patient’s outcomes. Some examples include: personal body data, food & water intake, vital signs, drug intake and more. The bottomline is that many of these data points can be automatically measured and recorded and safely transmitted to the right people – even outside the network – for processing.

A simple example: lab collected drug analysis can be transmitted via blockchain, securely, to both doctors and patients alike. That’s a great example of how blockchain is already helping healthcare.

Another excellent example is a startup called Hu-manity. There are millions of patients in the world living with dangerous and sometimes rare conditions. These diseases are being investigated by hundreds if not thousands of researchers and academics who are trying to either find cures or medicine to treat these conditions. What Hu-manity does is simple: they’ve created a central exchange platform where patients can sign up with specific conditions and researchers can get in touch with them to sell their medical data. Medical data is incredibly powerful. Because data drives insights and decisions tied to drug composition, intake and long-term performance. In the past, drug discovery companies would use communication agencies to find the patients fitting their profiles. With Hu-manity, patients and drug companies can find each other online and can transact with each other on top of a blockchain healthcare solution. The concept is stunning in its simplicity and long term need! So for example, people with high blood pressure can sign up and share all their medical data with researchers and get paid for it all at the same time, making Simon Stertzer, the father of modern cardiology incredibly optimistic about the future of emerging technologies for the medical field.