Digital transformation of the healthcare sector

The digital revolution that society as a whole is undergoing finds no exception in the healthcare sector.

What is known as MedTech (which could be translated as healthcare technology) can help in different ways, either by predicting diagnoses or optimizing treatments. These advances, as well as those that can be made to improve services, are destined to increase people's quality of life.

Telemedicine, which had its beginnings as far back as the 1930s, is defined by the WHO as "the provision of health care services at a distance", a quality that "has the potential to improve clinical management and expand the coverage of services".

An organization that has a guide on telemedicine that "provides a comprehensive overview of key planning, implementation and maintenance processes to inform a calculated investment plan and support countries at different stages of their telemedicine journey."

One example of how technology helps in the advancement of the healthcare sector is the fight against breast cancer, a disease that has a specific day to raise awareness of how important early detection is, specifically on October 19.

Examples of advantages of the use of technology in the healthcare sector

The benefits for the healthcare sector that the use of technological advances can bring cover different perspectives, from the purely medical to the managerial.

Let's take a look at some of these advantages:

• Time savings in treatments, diagnoses or accessibility.
• Artificial Intelligence can help, through data analysis, to speed up the study and analysis of different treatments, as well as medications. We will see an example later.
• Optimization of research, which can lead to the prediction of hypothetical diseases, as well as the advancement of more appropriate treatments.
• Speed and accuracy in both diagnoses and treatments, which increases the chances of success and analysis of the results of these.
• Use of applications through which patient monitoring can be carried out remotely, collecting different data.

Technology solutions for the healthcare sector

Being technology an enabler for the challenges presented by the healthcare sector, Telefónica Tech offers technological solutions to ensure the good use of hospital resources, whether they are digital or physical assets.

Processes that can, thanks to technology, become more efficient and autonomous to simplify management, increase security or make team coordination or operational efficiency more agile.

For example, the localization of people - whether patients or healthcare personnel - and IoT (Internet of Things) assets, together with the sensorization of high-value material, can help to optimize the planning and management of operational or care processes.

AI against cognitive impairment

Telefónica Tech has a solution for detecting cognitive impairment with Artificial Intelligence to predict at the time the state of mental health of each patient analyzed.

A solution that with an accuracy of 93% helps healthcare personnel in the detection and monitoring of neurological and mental illnesses in early stages through speech analysis, identifying vocal biomarkers.

For this early detection of cognitive impairment through speech analysis, an AI platform that in just one minute allows algorithms to detect possible memory problems, helps to understand how knowledge is stored and/or retrieved.

This solution has advantages for patients, for healthcare staff and for hospital managers:

• Patients see their satisfaction increase as errors in diagnoses are reduced and treatments are improved just as waiting times are reduced.
• Healthcare personnel see how the resources available to them for their professional performance are more accurate, improving diagnosis by 10% and early detection by up to 20%.
• Likewise, hospital managers see how they can reduce their costs and increase the detection services offered.

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