Promising Advances in Medical Technology
Promising Advances in Medical Technology
As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a tremendous impact on the medical device industry.
Many technologies that were previously stuck in development 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 that we’ve seen over the past few years.
Examples of promising Medical Technologies
The medical device and biotech worlds have usually been ripe for innovation and change.
Physicians, engineers, and hospital administrators are always on the lookout for technology that can improve patient outcomes.
Though there are many areas within the healthcare industry that 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 up to the plate to develop and manufacture tests that would enable 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 for use in detecting 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 that would enable healthcare providers to monitor their patients’ 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.
In fact, 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, there are experiments that researchers are running right now that may give us a glimpse into how AI could shape the healthcare landscape in 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 are providing tremendous benefits to patients.
As we mentioned before, AI is being used to improve diagnosis and provide more personalized medicine.
Improvements in sensor and interconnect technology 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.
Additional Resources
This blog post was intended to provide an introduction into the advances that are impacting medicine.
Innovations within the medical device space happen every day.
To learn more about the future of medical devices, download our free ebook.