EDGE in the Healthcare Nutrition Industry
By LF Edge Community members Utpal Mangla (Industry EDGE Cloud – IBM Cloud Platform); Atul Gupta (Lead Data Architect – IBM); and Luca Marchi (Industry EDGE and Distribute Cloud – IBM Cloud Platform)
Diet and Nutrition plays a vital role in healthcare and often it is still left behind by medical practitioners, doctors, nurses, and alternative medical care professionals. Whether patient is recovering from regular sickness, injuries, surgeries, or chronic illness – all of them need special care for diet and nutrition provided to the patients. The need is to provide enough nutrition at pre-determined frequencies for faster recovery and making sure the normalcy returns for the most patients in moderate time and at optimal expense. But the diet and nutrition guidance provided is either very generic or not monitored and adjusted as per patients’ vitals and recovery progression.
These traditional mechanisms of feeding the health, diet, nutrition tracking data to medical practitioners is one-way mechanism and siloed decision making is based on this disparate data and not tied up for common benefits of the patients.
With the ongoing digital transformation of the healthcare, there is organic growth of edge devices in the hands of patients, healthcare staff such as fit-bit, cellphones, nutrition scales, smart kitchen, and bed-care devices, etc. The questions are – Where do we take it from here? What do we do with this explosion of edge data? Are we creating another set of data-silos?
Edge computing has the solutions for most of these problems and it can provide connectivity to use this data effectively and efficiently. This can converge all the data silos from traditional devices, healthcare facilities, human diet, and nutrition data into common repository such as ‘Data producers at Edge’, which can feed the data into cloud computing environments. The specialized healthcare cloud computing environments are now available, but they lack the data ingestion components.
The ‘Data producers at Edge’ ingest the healthcare data into cloud computing environments from the Edge devices, healthcare facilities, et al completing the full cycle of data usage. This complete data cycle can now start benefiting patients, their families and as much gain efficiency for healthcare staff and facilities. Hospitals and alternative health professionals can start treating patients remotely using this new paraphernalia of devices, solutions, and inter-connectivity.
These Data producers have rich data about patients’ daily health, vitals, physical vicinities, living conditions, walk-score, mobility, and assistance provided, etc. The net impact of using this data in combined and constructive way can not only open new horizons for healthcare but can start a new journey with Edge transformation which is yet to be realized. There is a potential of new industry disruptor in this area by leveraging benefits of Edge, Cloud computing, IoT devices, Patient Literacy, et al. The combination is self-serviced components and interconnectivity which can expand and scale on demand, as needed and provide solutions to areas of high demand and growth. It is now known that many healthcare areas can only be scaled and gain service efficiency by technology solutions and not by putting more healthcare facilities and professionals. Also, the traditional diet and nutrition methods have always played effective role in patient recovery, which can yield accurate, efficient, and robust healthcare solutions if used in conjunction with Edge and IoT advancements.
This full cyclic approach will tie together the Diet and Nutrition aspects to other healthcare areas, components, and capabilities. The basics of patient’s recovery progression can ultimately start to play its role in more connected manner and predictive care can replace the reactive care approach.
The Edge data can be used to generate patient analytics and align it to diet and nutrition data to come up with new predictive care capabilities. The health care staff can adjust, re-calibrate the exercises based on existing and proposed diet and nutrition for the patients. This can even extend into improving the supply-chain of the products and services needed for the healthcare industry.
The diet and nutrition data, combined with sophisticated cloud compute can yield better and improved predictive care for the patients and move to new era in Healthcare Digital Edge Transformation.
