Auxo Medical News

Some trends come and go — and some stick around indefinitely.

Virtual reality within the healthcare space is not going anywhere, anytime soon.

Over 240 hospitals in the U.S. are using virtual reality to assist various health-related procedures, and support patients in helping understand their treatment options. The virtual reality market in healthcare is projected to reach $6.9 Billion by 2026.

Understanding the Role of Virtual Reality in Healthcare

The terms ‘augmented reality’ and ‘virtual reality’ are sometimes confused.

According to Healthcare Weekly, Virtual reality creates an immersive experience by providing the user with images of 3D-environments. “As part of this virtual experience, the user can sometimes change or alter the appearance of the environment. As for augmented reality, this simply adds graphics or sound to a real-life environment and augmented reality glasses are then used to bring the experience to life.”

How consumers shop in 2019 has fundamentally altered how healthcare is provided, including stepping up the patient experience. They expect to experience top notch service in a brick and mortar retail store, and they expect the same “5-star” service inside the walls of a hospital or medical office.

Prominent healthcare systems are leading the way in this effort. Here are the top four predictions on what we can expect to see over the next year when it comes to the patient experience.

1. Streamlining with Technology

Leading hospitals will utilize technology to produce more cost-effective programs, such as an EMR-integrated customer relationship management (CRM) platform where insights are assembled and saved for future reference. This data will include documentation from patients’ previous visits, to predictors of potential future health concerns.

Healthcare of yesterday included going to the nearest facility, trusting your care provider without question, and following the protocol/advice that was given.

Healthcare of today includes going to a provider who has the best reputation on HealthGrades.com, and on your neighborhood’s Facebook community page, doing your own research in advance of an appointment as well as following the appointment, and seeing what other alternative approaches are available in addition to the advice that was given by the provider.

Our healthcare landscape has become more and more competitive, since patients and their loved ones are no longer riding shotgun, but rather are now sitting in the driver’s seat…steering their own healthcare experience.

Over the past year, we have witnessed several advances in the realm of telemedicine. From adjustments in the state / federal policies and reimbursements to providers implementing telehealth in their practices to the actual definition of telehealth changing.

The intersection of consumer purchasing transactions has evolved across multiple areas in our lives — how products are acquired, how we communicate with each other, and how we foster connections — the weaving of the tangible and digital is here to stay.

Telehealth has been defined as the delivery and facilitation of health and health-related services including medical care, provider and patient education, health information services, self-care via telecommunications and digital communication technologies.

Technology that is utilized to store, share, or synthesize health data can be referred to as “health information technology” or healthIT. This wide classification includes practice management systems to online patient portals. Telehealth technology includes both software and hardware.

Over the next several years, Big Data is estimated to increase faster in healthcare than in other sectors, such as manufacturing, financial services or media. The Healthcare sector’s need to manage patient care and innovate medicines simultaneously pushes for newer technologies to be adopted in the industry. According to an International Data Corporation (IDC) report, this puts healthcare organizations in a challenging position to manage exceptionally large data assets.

It is projected that healthcare data will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 36% through 2025.