Are You Ready for IoT in Healthcare?

Are you worried about how to leverage IoT in your healthcare organization? Do you know what IoT even is?

You may or may not know what it is, but no doubt IoT is part of your life. Here’s the wikipedia definition of IoT or Internet of Things:

The Internet of things (IoT) is the network of physical devices, vehicles, home appliances and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and connectivity which enables these objects to connect and exchange data. Each thing is uniquely identifiable through its embedded computing system but is able to inter-operate within the existing Internet infrastructure.

It’s easy to see how much IoT is impacting our lives. Is there any reason to think that IoT won’t make its way into our healthcare lives as well?

David Chou recently shared an example IoT ecosystem that’s being built along with a number of the players in the space:

To me, this graphic illustrates two important truths about the future of IoT.

First, IoT is happening in a really big way with some really enormous companies driving it forward. Plus, the infrastructure to make it a reality is being built out and it’s going to impact all of our lives even more than it does today.

Second, IoT is a complex beast and so don’t be surprised if it takes healthcare a little while to fully embrace everything that’s possible with IoT. Healthcare is so risk averse that it will wade into the IoT waters very slowly. IoT won’t be disrupting healthcare tomorrow, but it will disrupt healthcare in new and interesting ways.

What do you think of the potential for IoT in healthcare? Do you see any companies bucking the above two observations? Where are you starting to see IoT get implemented today?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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