Biomedical Monitoring Technologies and Future Healthcare Systems

Abstract

Healthcare Systems (HCSs) throughout the world undergo important changes driven by aging populations and advances in biomedical technologies. At the same time, in the current economic climate, many Western countries are struggling to reduce public spending on all kinds of services, including healthcare. With this tension between tightening budgets and skyrocketing costs, many countries are seeking to identify ways of using Information Technology (IT) and Monitoring Technologies (MTs) to improve the efficiencies of HCSs while not reducing, or possibly even improving, the quality of healthcare and their delivery. Many experiments have been in progress since the 1990s. This paper has conducted a review evaluating such HCSs in terms of advantages and drawbacks. The objective of this review is to provide some illustrative publications and works and examples of Health Information Technology (HIT) systems to finally determine the place of biomedical MTs in the future HCS. We present the healthcare delivery system (HCDS) organization with roles of the different stakeholders, state initiatives in healthcare information delivery systems and the new relation between the hospital and the home though a new equilibrium. We mentioned the increasing role of telemedicine (TM), telecare (TLC) and telemonitoring (TLM) and expectations for monitoring the elderly. These expectations lead to preventive approaches based on monitoring technologies and pervasive healthcare (PH) which made healthcare improvements and cost reductions possible. Finally, we show the challenges and opportunities of the hospital versus home healthcare delivery.