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2015 Healthcare Trends

Could surgeons come to rely on cellphones to help monitor patients in the operating theater, or on Facebook for a second consultation?

Thu Dec 04 2014By Medical Dealer Magazine

 

2015 Healthcare Trends

 

Could surgeons come to rely on cellphones to help monitor patients in the operating theater, or on Facebook for a second consultation? Would it be faster to take a trip to Europe to get access to a life-saving technology that could take years to arrive in the United States? Will cost pressures force hospitals to bring more repairs in-house than they had previously been prepared to manage?

Some of those concepts seem too far off to ponder, but a year is a lifetime in the technology field. So on the cusp of 2015, we talked with a trio of experts in the medical device field to solicit their projections for the next 365 days.

Dr. Paul Wetter, chairman of the Society of Laparoendoscopic Surgeons, believes that the biggest technological advancements in the healthcare device industry for 2015 will undoubtedly occur at the intersection of mobile computing power and medicine.

Wetter, who said he has been “tracking the things related to these technologies for a number of years,” predicts a “tsunami of change” in the field of programs “that interact with that supercomputer in your pocket, your phone.”

Although robotics-assisted surgery is known as an expensive technology — sometimes prohibitively so — Wetter believes that additional advances in the field can help offload the computing power required to support such high-end techniques.

“Just about everything in our lives today has been robot-assisted,” he said. “There are computers in our refrigerators, in our cars, just about every place else. Those same things are coming into the surgical field. Even though it’s an expensive technology … prices are going to come down, technologies are going to evolve.”

Hospitals have so much invested in their existing equipment infrastructure, Wetter said, that it will only make sense for them to harness the power of those systems in the future build-outs of their inventory.

“As they see some of these devices come online, they’ll see them as being more useful,” he said. “Why would someone build an expensive computing thing to run a piece of equipment in the operating room when you have more computing power in your cellphone? They’ll bring a lot more benefit to their programs as those technologies come up more.”

If such a scenario seems too far-fetched to conceive, Wetter points out that the processing power in a cell phone is greater than that used by NASA to put a man on the moon. He calls distributed cellphone computing power “probably one of the least known things in most areas of medicine that’s going to have the most impact and be the most disruptive.”

“Just like you look at Yelp to tell you what’s a good restaurant, or you use Uber to get a ride, there are hundreds of devices that are going to allow us to link a cellphone to things we would have monitored in an ICU 10 years ago,” Wetter said. “Just like computers were to the music industry and Yelp was to restaurants, this is going to be very, very disruptive.”

Wetter also believes that maintenance, which “has been a big problem because it requires an entire team” to manage, will become easier as technology advances; from the development of preventive maintenance apps to other technologies that could notify maintenance crews to come and fix the problem. After all, he said, “I have a fire alarm system and a smoke alarm system for my house accessible on my cellphone.”

 

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