The major goal in the healthcare industry is to improve patient care and reduce costs of those services. As more advances in medicine and health, IT comes to market, the Internet of Things also known as IoT brings some exciting solutions to improve care. People in the healthcare industry are also calling it IMoT or Internet Medical of Things but we will stick with IoT to keep it simple.

To provide some context for the IoT, WSJ tech writer Walt Mossberg gives a pretty good synopsis:

The broad idea behind these buzzwords is that a whole constellation of inanimate objects is being designed with built-in wireless connectivity so that they can be monitored, controlled and linked over the Internet via a mobile app.

Some of this you have already seen come to market in your home. Thermostats and lights that you can adjust with an app on your phone. Now, these devices are being introduced in healthcare.

Back in 2012, Dr. John Barrett had the vision to apply IoT to healthcare and shared his vision in this TED talk.

Fast-forward to today, here are some highlighted benefits of IoT:

• Monitor patient care: including patient wearables to monitor vitals.
• Monitor medical assets: including supply chain management to improve inventory and ordering.
• Maintain vital equipment: including medical monitoring devices that can transmit system diagnostic information, service details, etc.
• Track equipment usage: providing management a better understanding of the actual usage of hospital beds, cleaning stations, etc.

As more and more devices start transmitting data, that data gets stored and it starts creating big data. Large amounts of data. Managing and handling big data creates unique challenges and obstacles. Healthcare data has many regulatory security requirements, such as HIPPA, ePHI, etc. That is where Agape can help. We provide expertise in data governance, data strategy, data analysis, and data architectures that can help you leverage data and transform policy or strategies into solutions that support improved patient care and reduction of costs. We are familiar with emerging technologies that are compliant with existing regulations that also leverage HIPPA and FedRAMP compliant cloud solutions and platforms that are critical to protecting and leveraging this information.