Driving data driven healthcare: Data is at the centre of medtech's future

Ryan Jones, co-founder of specialist data recruitment platform OnlyDataJobs, examines the ways in which data is leading the medical industry’s digital transformation.

The global spend on IoT applications in healthcare is forecast to grow to $260.75 billion by 2027, at a CAGR of 19.8%. Supporting the wellbeing of 8 billion people worldwide creates a flood of data that forms the lifeblood of IoT. What industry needs is the data experts to turn that information into medical breakthrough.

The COVID-19 pandemic stretched healthcare systems to breaking point, but it also brought the importance of analysing live data to the fore. Re-engineering the way data is collected, stored, processed, modelled, displayed, understood, and acted upon is top of medical industry leaders’ agenda.

Beyond data analysis, applications of other digital transformation components, such as AI and machine learning, are also becoming vital in the smarter management of operations, allocation of resources, cross-team collaboration, and improvement of services for better delivery of care.

The data deluge

Delivering healthcare isn’t one-size-fits-all — whether that’s how care is delivered, the medication that’s prescribed or the equipment used in treatment. IBM once estimated that, over an average lifetime, each person generates the equivalent of 300 million books of personal and health-related data that can unlock the secrets to our personal health and wellbeing.

Having access to, and more importantly being able to extract value from, that data remains challenging across the healthcare chain. Hospitals and doctors’ surgeries face a daily deluge of patient data and increased demands for data entry but are not yet equipped with effective tools to analyse that data to help improve their patients’ health.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers invest immensely in drug delivery, with increased hype around creating personalised treatments that suit an individual’s needs. Medical device manufacturers, particularly those designing complex, automated prosthetics, face similar challenges. Elsewhere, medical insurance companies find it difficult to accurately predict risks of individual patients, hindering the adoption of care models that truly account for their case.

Getting personal

We know having access to data can and will impact how medical professionals deliver healthcare, but how exactly will it make a difference?

One example is how individual patients are treated for diseases that affect large portions of the population, like heart disease. There are around 7.6 million people living with a heart or circulatory disease in the UK, according to the British Heart Foundation, and the condition can manifest in numerous different ways. Having one, or even several overarching treatments isn’t going to help many patients and it can be difficult to decipher why one patient does well on a treatment while another fairs poorly.

That is, without data analytics. Using advanced analytics to examine data from a network of global patients, a data expert can begin to identify patterns in subpopulations that respond to treatment in certain ways. This can provide a pathway towards a more targeted treatment approach. If a patient arrives at a facility needing care, their symptoms and personal heath data can be compared to other, similar patients and their treatment matched accordingly. The richer the data set, the better the chance of delivering treatment that caters more specifically to their needs.

Developments in computer engineering and data science have also dramatically changed the abilities of prosthetics. For those with lower body amputations, one of the biggest hurdles is learning how to walk comfortably with their device. Walking with a struggling gait or unevenly distributed weight can lead to muscle and nerve damage, and so users need a device that’s tailored to their body.

Prosthetic manufactures can rely on data experts to analyse walk patterns captured via wearables, so they can adjust the prosthetic accordingly for a smoother and more comfortable wear. Data can also be used to help program prosthetic hands, helping them to distinguish objects being held and adjust their grip accordingly.

Call in the experts

Every area of healthcare generates data, and lots of it. But that information is of no use if it’s not analysed properly, and its value is communicated across the chain. Having access to data experts, therefore, is becoming of increasing importance to the medical field. It’s a whole other science it must come to grips with.

Finding those experts, however, isn’t always easy. A 2021 report from the UK government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) revealed that, in a survey of 1,045 businesses, nearly half were recruiting for data roles and a similar number were struggling to find candidates to fill the role.

For healthcare professionals, combatting those shortages is crucial. Back in 2019, the NHS published its own report that forecast that, by 2030, 90 per cent of all NHS jobs will require some element of digital skills. Getting more data professionals into the industry is a case of when, not if.

Upskilling the workforce will be an essential step, and organisations must ensure they’re investing time so all workers can grasp the rudiments of digital skills. But to facilitate a data-driven healthcare environment, attention must be paid to data experts. Hiring the right experts that can drive a data strategy, whether that’s data scientists, engineers, analysts, or researchers, will ultimately help filter data-based ways of thinking through to the rest of the business.

When hiring a data expert, healthcare hiring managers will want to look out for all the expected green flags — that they’re versed in the relevant programming languages and Cloud solutions, and that they have relevant experience. They’ll also want to look out for soft skills too, and the ability to communicate data insights to medical professionals using language they understand.

The healthcare sector is gearing up for a data boom, with many organisations already waking up to the value data can bring. Having access to and understanding datasets will impact the pace of innovation and, most importantly, the wellbeing of patients. Healthcare businesses mustn’t neglect their data personnel — having the right experts to drive a data-driven workforce is an essential first step.