M2M Helps Patients Live Healthy Lives

There’s a growing trend of US healthcare IT spend in support of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications as noted by industry analyst firm Gartner (image below).

“The opportunity is staggering year over year, due to connected machines creating such creative and fascinating business cases,” said Brian Zmikly, Director, Healthcare Mobility and M2M, Verizon.

The scenarios are endless but, as an example, let’s look at a patient using a wireless medical device to monitor his/her heart. The near real-time communication between a patient (and their monitoring device) a clinical system and his/her healthcare provider, can give the patient access to timely care should his/her condition warrant it.

Prior to M2M technology, a patient would need to go through the manual task of taking his/her heart rate, writing the information down and at a later point, provide the handwritten records to his/her healthcare provider so it can then be studied. M2M takes the archaic manual process out of data collection and automates it. It allows for continuum of care from the healthcare setting to the patient’s home to practically anywhere in near real-time.

“M2M helps patients manage their health by extending care beyond the four walls of a doctor’s office,” Zmikly said. “Patients can remotely monitor their conditions and take contextual action based on accurate and near real-time information.”

A report from IDC found that the top four areas for which healthcare organizations intend to use M2M include:

• The ability to identify patients/members in need of care management (cited by 66% of respondents)
• Clinical outcomes (identified by 64%)
• Performance measurement and management (identified by 64%)
• Clinical decision-making at the point of care (identified by 57%)

This all steers in the direction of healthcare providers delivering better, more responsible, care to patients through the use of M2M and data analytics, rather than leaving things to chance.