Remote patient monitoring seems a little creepy, and a little far-fetched. To treat symptoms, doctors and nurses have to actually see the symptoms, right? For now, right. But once a patient has been diagnosed, remote monitoring can kick in. Especially if a patient is out of the ICU, out of the hospital bed, and in a transition-to-home department or actually in their home, cameras, WiFi medical devices, and home-visits accrue data. That data needs to be seen. Thus, your HIT team comes in.
The problems that hospitals, outpatient surgery centers, and private practices have had switching from those classic charts to an EHR system are well-documented. So well documented, that many, many, smaller clinics are resisting the change to Electronic Health Records. With the recent wave of news stories and literature, citing that our world's health data is it's most insecure data, we expect 2015 to be another year of late adoption.
The medical equipment and devices that monitor patients every second of every day are slowly becoming less ancillary and more and more connected. With the rise of bluetooth, RF, WiFi, and cell technology, checking patient bedsides for information on the current state of their vitals will slowly die out. More and more often, we've found that information being checked right at a desk, or a floating nurse station.