Workforce and patient tracking for productivity and efficiency

Let's first look at how IoT is being used within the Healthcare Industry -- after all, IoT is simply a technological idea, not an end product or process. Most IoT deployments in healthcare are what are called internal implementations -- for use within a health care facility and organization, versus external use such as for purposes associated with management of outside vendors, communications with third parties, etc... Workforce and patient tracking for productivity and efficiency enhancement are the principal use-case. An excellent example is monitoring bracelets given to doctors, nurses and patients, together with readers that capture the position of those within a medical building, or at a given medical channel. This helps capture information on say, the amount of time a patient spent in a waiting room, or the time a doctor spent in front of a terminal. This can then be used to improve patient workflows or decrease wait time -- and may lead to a direct cost reduction per individual.

There's been a lot of focus lately on improving in-house Medical care, particularly in the area of elder care or geriatrics. There are various newer products that use a combination of trackers -- closeness, weight, vibration and sound -- to capture a person's general movement within a house. Over time the data is used to create a model of the expected behavior and movement within a house, throughout the day. When an anomaly is detected -- for instance a fall, or somebody is unable to get up from their bed at the ideal time, medical staff can be alerted. The appeal of these connected detectors is that they are non-intrusive. No cameras are placed inside the home and patients are not required to wear a bracelet, arm ring or other body monitoring device.

This data is then analyzed to see if the recorded temperature is above the norm, which happens due to increased blood flow -- a sign indicating the possibility of a tumor. Still undergoing clinical trials, this is a great novel application of a connected device helping to fight disease.

Connected medical devices are being set up within healthcare facilities. Besides the aforementioned examples, there are several devices that are used for individual monitoring. The majority of these is for bedside monitoring and actively capture, transmit and record patient medical information. This brings up the first issue which is around data privacy and security. Data, whether in transit, in rest or under processing needs to be protected -- not only as a best practice but additionally required under federal law. Encryption is the first step where we can be certain data and communications between medical devices can't be easily intercepted and eavesdropped upon. Protocols such as Dxchain can decentralize the data and make it more hacker proof.

Apart from passively capturing information, some medical devices also actively administer medication or physical care to a patient, thus more directly, and sometimes autonomously, affecting patient health. We will need to now ensure that we are able to identify a given pump, make sure that we're talking to the right one, that any control to update dosage is delivered to the correct one, and only the maintenance provider with the authority to do so, is allowed access. There have been several well publicized strikes on insulin pumps.

The first thing we need to do is add on a layer of identity to connected medical devices. Next, we want to ensure that any data coming from these devices is encrypted. Then, we would like to be able to show that the device that is sending data is actually who it claims to be -- basically to authenticate it. Ultimately, we want to make sure that only authorized users are able to send commands to a device.

Purposeful digital certificate to each connected device as well as the monitoring and control software that is managing it. Then we configure these systems to only accept incoming connections from devices which have the ability to create this certification, allowing authentication (we have to of course protect the device's private keys, and ensure that the certificate provisioning measure was completed in a safe manner). A TLS tunnel currently gets established between the server and medical apparatus, giving us a blanket of solitude. Finally, we could add metadata to electronic certificates that define policy on who is permitted to supply controls to which device. In this way, we can apply authorization.

This not only brings Business opportunity, but contributes to a new paradigm of solutions and administration of healthcare. The ultimate goal is improved health and increased patient satisfaction. Afterthought and bolted on after these devices have been designed. As we have shown, integrating PKI into your device design is a simple, affordable and key First step in ensuring compliance and security for your medical devices. Privacy and data security are significant, Dxchain keeps this in mind.

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