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Medical infrastructures are getting more and more complex, creating a demand for health care IT monitoring solutions than ensure perfect functioning of the devices, and their connection to the classical IT. We cover everything there is available on the markets for Health Care IT monitoring solutions, best practices, tools and vendors.
Vulnerabilities recently found in software used by medical equipment could lead to failures in hospital control systems. The warning came from researchers at Forescout Research Labs who identified problems in the Nucleus TCP/IP stack, which handles the basic communication in networks and is widely used, for example, in anesthesia machines, ventilators, patient monitors, and other healthcare devices. The vulnerabilities allow remote code execution or denial of service attacks. Three of the 13 breaches are considered critical, with Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores of 9.8 and 8.8. This ranking analyses the key characteristics of a vulnerability and produces a numerical score that reflects its severity (between 0 and 10).
The global digital health market is experiencing a boom: with spectacular growth, it could reach $660 billion by 2025. Investors have poured an unprecedented amount of money into the sector in 2020, a year of record funding for startups in the area. Among the 399 healthcare executives heard in a recent Accenture study, 81% said the pace of their organizations' digital transformation is accelerating. One segment that has been growing strongly is digital therapeutics (DTx), defined Digital Therapeutics Alliance as a "new category of medicine," characterized by delivering medical interventions directly to patients using wearable devices, sensors, and evidence-based software to treat, manage and prevent a broad spectrum of diseases and disorders.
In a market that reached USD 24.7 billion of investments in 2020, no less than 90,000 new digital health apps were launched, covering the most varied functions, from monitoring, diagnosis, drug injection control, and even clinical trial tracking.
Annual healthcare spending has risen to nearly US$8 trillion globally by 2020, and is projected to continue growing at 5% or more per year until 2023. In Europe, it already passes 10% of GDP and in the US 17%, according to a study by Dealroom, in partnership with Inkef Capital and MTIP. The higher incidence of chronic diseases, the increase in the average age of the population, the problems related to obesity and smoking and the increasing costs with the development of new drugs have weighed more on the pockets of consumers and governments, driving the upward trend.
The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly accelerated the practice of telemedicine worldwide. In countries where medical associations were fighting to bar remote patient care based on the dangers of incomplete clinical diagnosis, the need for social distance and the fear attending clinics and hospitals were the last straw to bring down that barrier. This movement has quickly consolidated some basic technological tools, such as electronic medicine and exams prescriptions – validated by digital certificates and a wide connection with pharmaceutical and laboratory systems –, and the remote collection of physiological data, by means of several types of devices, including fitness wearables.
The future looks bright for the use of IoT in Healthcare. The global portable and remote patient monitoring market alone is expected to reach $43 billion by 2027. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated this scenario. According to IDC, by the end of this year, seven of the top ten wrist wearables companies will have launched algorithms capable of early detection of potential signs of infectious diseases. Although the healthcare sector has taken longer to adopt Internet of Things technologies than other industries, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is now at the heart of the digital healthcare ecosystem.
