| |August 201919meet the unique needs of individ-ual patients. These covers all lev-els of diagnosis, monitoring and services including exercise advice and/or dietary inputs. The doctor can study an IoT stream coming from devices accessed via a portal to study the health of the patient. This data stream also helps in de-riving the efficacy of drugs and dosage being administered while providing information on the side effects, if any. Dosage AdherenceA study by the World Health Or-ganization found that as much as 50 percent of medicines are not taken as directed by patients. Non-adherence to the prescribed drug dosage is dangerous and could result in loss of life, reduce treatment impact and losses to the industry as a whole. It could also place a financial strain on gov-ernment healthcare streams. By means of a unique sensor embed-ded bottles that could inform pa-tients, doctors or family members in case a patient has taken excess dosage or less than the prescribed dosage, adherence to medication can be monitored. Patient Safety and PrivacyRemote health management en-ables patients to stay in their homes during the period of ob-servation/treatment. Tele-health provides alerts and informs doc-tors if any parameter of impor-tance goes above or below the pre-scribed threshold. Doctors can be consulted through teleconference or even tele-presence bots. Data sets stored on the cloud enable his-torical patient data to be accessed by a physician to better diagnose a medical condition. Evidence-based decision mak-ing can be enabled by creating a pool of patient information. Which might include offline re-cords as well as consultation in-formation, genome records and clinical research data. This will go a long way in contextualizing healthcare services. For improv-ing patient privacy, the relation-ship between IoT and pharma needs to be strengthened. With this, IoT-enabled treatment strat-egies, patient interaction and data management models can be evolved. These are but a few in-stances of IoT playing a signifi-cant role in transforming tradi-tional healthcare practices. With the deployment of more smart de-vices, there is a huge opportunity waiting to be tapped. Through im-proved pre-emptive diagnosis and enhanced patient experience, IoT opens doors for newer health-care models to be operationalized. This will reduce costs and im-prove the availability of better healthcare options for the masses. REMOTE HEALTH MANAGEMENT ENABLES PATIENTS TO STAY IN THEIR HOMES DURING THE PERIOD OF OBSERVATION/TREATMENTRishi Mohan Bhatnagar
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