What is Healthcare IT? Explaining the Healthcare IT Field

The potential of information technology is most fully revealed in areas that operate with numerous conditions, variables and facts. These are exactly the areas that healthcare belongs to.

How healthcare software development agency can help medicine

The introduction of IT in healthcare began relatively recently, with the advent of the first medical information systems (MIS). The most demanded technology has been and still is the digitization of materials. Paper medical records, recipes, cardiograms, pictures — everything went into electronic form.

The information received had to be structured so that everyone who needed it could work with it. Databases and tools for managing these databases have appeared, an interface connecting the data operator (user) and his functions with the database.

The accumulation of a large amount of data and the ability to isolate and check the relationships between them, for example, between the nature of the disease and the drug prescription, made it possible to apply decision support systems in medicine. The same conditions determine the possibility of the development of expert systems, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Applied IT solutions in healthcare

In addition to the information component, IT is also about the speed of transfer of digital materials in any geographic location. This property is the basis for the use of telemedicine systems that are popular today: a complex of audiovisual technical means that allow you to organize reception in real time, even if the doctor and the patient are separated by long distances.

The development of technologies is largely determined by their cost. The more expensive a particular technical solution is, the narrower the range of its application. Therefore, when innovations enter the wide market, a real boom in their use begins, ux design services from DataArt are in demand lately.

Previously, personal monitoring of vital indicators of the human body, such as heart rate and blood pressure, was carried out only at the time of going to the doctor or independently with prolonged physical discomfort. Now the blood pressure monitor and heart rate monitor are built into almost every model of "smart" watches, and with the help of accompanying applications, you can track the dynamics of these indicators for the entire time of wearing the device and under different loads.

Of course, now such innovations are used mainly for personal control, but the day is not far off when all collected indicators will be automatically loaded into a personal cloud medical book, analyzed by smart system algorithms, detect abnormalities in the work of the heart and blood vessels, signal them — and that's it. And all this happens without direct human intervention.

However, something similar is already happening, but within the framework of medical institutions. This phenomenon is called the medical Internet of things. Monitoring sensors for various patient indicators collect and transmit information to central monitoring "nodes" without the participation of medical staff. At the same time, the sensors “understand” which dynamics of the state are negative, and can report it.

Information technology includes an instrumental-computer complex, modern diagnostic and laboratory equipment. VR / AR-technologies have found application in the educational process — on their basis, virtual "simulators" are created for students of surgical specialties. Undoubtedly, quality healthcare software development is very important.

Summing up, we can say that the healthcare community receives many benefits from the use of information technology, and this is only a part of them:

• improving the quality and speed of research;
• financial savings — reducing the cost of repeated research, consumables, more rational use of the existing material and technical base;
• saving labor costs of medical workers for non-core activities;
• creation of an active information field for exchange of experience and distance learning.