Contributed by Augie Gonzalez, Director of Product Marketing, DataCore Software
Orlando sparkles with magic, day and night, but it’s not all fantasy. This year’s #HIMSS17 Health IT Conference showcased real solutions that would have seemed like magic just a few years ago. Tens of thousands of health IT professionals came together just around the corner from Mickey’s place from Feb 19–23, and a lot of the excitement involved applying the Internet of Things (IoT) to enhance patient outcomes.
At this massive conference of 42,000 people, there were two topics that sparked my curiosity:
1. The clinical complexities of screening potential carriers of the mosquito-borne Zika virus (especially close to home for those of us living in tropical climates)
2. The Intelligent Health Pavilion that immersed visitors in a variety of scenarios we routinely experience, and showed how IoT can change them
The Intelligent Health Pavilion immersed visitors in scenarios including a walk-through tour featuring Home-based Technology for Coordinated Care, highlighted via a day in the life of a chronically ill patient and his professional and volunteer caregivers employing remote diagnostic monitoring tools and cloud-based patient care systems.
This high-tech closed-loop system prompts the patient to take medications, determines how much liquids and solids they consume, records daily vital statistics, and confirms the arrival and departure of technicians responsible for more sophisticated in-home procedures. The extensive use of miniature sensors integrated into the house ensures continuous tracking and remote observation without the discomfort of being shuttled to and from medical facilities – trips that often aggravate an individual’s physical and mental state, and cause numerous scheduling problems for those watching over him or her.
Another kiosk (pictured above) brings into sharp focus how mobility, telemedicine, and remote asset management can come together. Now an accident victim can travels from car crash to trauma center in an ambulance seamlessly connected to the nurses and doctors awaiting his arrival, EMTs get step-by-step coaching as they stabilize and apply lifesaving medicines en route and the hand off to hospital staff occurs quickly, since all know what they are up against.
Meanwhile, in the background, all the drugs, bandages, syringes, X-Rays and related medical supplies consumed throughout the process are automatically recorded on the patient’s account for later billing, and past medical records are retrieved to determine potential allergies or pre-existing conditions – it’s a very clear example of IoT in action.
Now multiply all of those inputs, occurring in real-time across the hundreds of patients being attended to in any midsize or larger medical center, and you can get a sense for the data acquisition and data storage challenges they bring to healthcare IT teams. That’s why high-performance I/O systems, capable of processing huge amounts of data extremely quickly, have become central to healthcare institutions. That’s also why at HIMSS 2017, Lenovo Health displayed the fastest software-defined storage system on the planet, the Lenovo Storage DX8200D Powered by DataCore appliance.
Whether or not you’re in healthcare IT DX8200D can be a fast, easy path to introduce the benefits of software-defined storage. Learn more here, and read how others have used DataCore technology to support critical healthcare applications and technology.
