Promising Advances in Medical Technology
Promising Advances in Medical Technology
As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, the COVID-19 pandemic has tremendously impacted the medical device industry.
Many previously stuck-in-development technologies have been accelerated and brought to the market to solve critical problems.
In this post, we’ll discuss some of the advances in medical technology we’ve seen over the past few years.
Recommended: Intelligent Medical Devices: An Overview
Examples of promising Medical Technologies
The medical device and biotech worlds are usually ripe for innovation and change.
Physicians, engineers, and hospital administrators always look for technology to improve patient outcomes.
Though many areas within the healthcare industry are experiencing massive change, we’re going to highlight three areas where advances in medical technology appear very promising: disease diagnosis, patient monitoring, and personalized medicine.
Disease Diagnosis
During the COVID-19 pandemic, “diagnosis” became a trending topic.
Many medical device organizations stepped to the plate to develop and manufacture tests, enabling the world to “flatten the curve” and get ahead of the virus.
But even before the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the diagnostic industry, many companies and researchers were working on ways to rapidly—and accurately—diagnose patients.
In 2017, for example, the FDA authorized a popular at-home DNA test to detect the genetic risk of 10 different diseases.
What’s more, researchers in Korea recently announced the results of a promising study that utilized artificial intelligence (“AI”) to detect prostate cancer in urine.
Patient Monitoring
As we noted in our blog post about remote patient monitoring systems, the COVID-19 pandemic spurred growth in the patient monitoring market.
With hospital ICUs reaching capacity and the fear that the virus would spread to healthy patients within healthcare facilities, there was a concerted push to develop technology enabling healthcare providers to monitor their patient’s health beyond the hospital walls.
Everything from blood glucose levels to critical cardiovascular vitals can now be collected and monitored by a healthcare provider who may be miles away.
One recent study estimates that nearly 30 million people in the United States will use remote patient monitoring technology in 2021 alone.
Personalized Medicine
As talk of AI infiltrates our daily lives, one question we’ve received is: How will AI impact the medical device industry?
Though it’s impossible to tell the future, researchers are running experiments right now that may give us a glimpse into how AI could shape the healthcare landscape in the coming years.
In our blog post about AI in medical devices, we discussed how a recent study showed that AI can potentially help diagnose cancer faster and less invasively.
But the power of AI doesn’t stop at diagnosis.
Researchers recently used AI to identify personalized treatment for over 1,000 patients based on their genetic makeup.
As the healthcare market adopts AI, we will likely see medicine become more and more personalized.
Benefits of Technology in Medicine
Advances in AI, data collection, and data analysis provide tremendous patient benefits.
As mentioned, AI is used to improve diagnosis and provide personalized medicine.
Sensor and interconnect technology improvements have also enabled healthcare providers to collect patient data more accurately and less invasively.
As the information technology and healthcare sectors continue to merge, we hope to see patient outcomes improve even more.