Healthcare tech professionals see ROI on monitoring devices – 451 Research

Tools that monitor patients, equipment and supply chains via Internet of Things products have proven popular among healthcare professionals looking to make the biggest return on their organization's technology investments, according to a survey conducted by 451 Research, a unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence.

The Voice of the Enterprise survey, which was fielded in June and July 2020, questioned 135 healthcare operational technology professionals about how they use medical IoT and their plans for future investment.

IoT includes devices that can collect information and share it with other networks or devices. The most popular application of this technology was to monitor patients, used by 39% of survey respondents, with about 19% saying they expect to implement in-patient monitoring tools in the next two years.

"Monitoring increases patient safety; it simply makes sense for hospitals to centrally monitor patients so that potentially critical conditions can be caught sooner," 451's senior research analyst, Brian O'Rourke, said in the March 1 report.

Examples include PeraHealth Inc.'s Rothman Index range of software and EarlySense Ltd.'s hospital products, which can monitor patients' vital signs and alert clinicians ahead of potential adverse events.

Monitoring medical equipment assets ranked as the second-most popular reason for having implemented IoT technology, with 35.6% of respondents noting that they had made this investment and 22.3% planning to invest over the next two years. Asset monitoring includes maintaining medical equipment, like MRI scanners and X-ray machines, as well as optimizing the use of medical devices.

Additionally, 18.5% of respondents said they plan to implement more outpatient remote monitoring or telehealth technologies in their organization. During the pandemic, remote patient monitoring tools have become crucial for monitoring low-risk individuals at home and freeing up hospital bed space. An October 2020 survey by 451 Research showed that many consumers who own connected medical devices use them to monitor blood pressure and other vital signs.

The vast majority of respondents across the board had reaped benefits from implementing healthcare IoT technologies. In fact, 98.1% saw a positive or very positive return on investment, or ROI, for inpatient monitoring technologies, while 97.2% saw a similar return for their supply chain monitoring and management IoT.

Providers of these technologies include Medsphere Systems Corp. and CenTrak Inc., which offer services to help hospitals keep track of supply and inventory, and Invio Inc., which delivers remote monitoring solutions for clinical trials.

Technologies for population monitoring for clinical trials, medical equipment asset monitoring and location-based services such as wayfinding had the highest "very positive" responses at 54.2%, 45.8% and 45.8%, respectively.

"Overall, more than 95% of respondents indicated that they have implemented at least one healthcare IoT use case, and the positive responses to ROI in those use cases indicate that IoT is already a key element of healthcare spending and will likely become more so," O'Rourke wrote.

451 Research is part of S&P Global Market Intelligence.