Healthcare IoT Solutions: Higher Efficiency at Reduced Costs

Healthcare IoT solutions are one of the top tech trends of the decade. Various researchers predict up to 25.9% CAGR for this industry in the next few years, which naturally attracts investors and startups. However, IoT solutions face specific challenges, and the high cost of implementation is one of them.

Despite the high sticker-price, these costs are absolutely justified if the IoT implementation solves a genuine problem. According to Deloitte’s report on medtech, potential savings from deploying IoT in healthcare could be as much as $63 billion globally. 

The effect can look even more impressive in a close-up: due to IoT solutions implemented by Medtronic HIS, the Maastricht University Medical Centre realized $2.5 million in savings in one year; a 90% reduction in patient admission time, and a 43% reduction in staff overtime. 

While the benefits can be impressive, how can we make it more affordable to implement healthcare IoT solutions?

Step 1. Start smartly

If you are a stakeholder at a healthcare IoT startup, you have probably pondered over the ‘build vs. buy’ dilemma. Regardless of what you decide in the end, it’s always a good idea to first validate your concept with a cost-efficient MVP. 

Try readily-available options before developing your hardware from scratch. Even if they don’t entirely meet your needs and ideas, this will help draw important preliminary conclusions and possibly save lots of time and money in the long-run. 

Another way to keep costs down is by utilizing as many out-of-the-box components as possible. As an option, you can try to construct a so-called piecemeal MVP—a functioning model of your product made of existing tools and services patched together to emulate the experience for your customer. Partnering with companies that have complementary products or services can be a great means to bring your product to life. 

Of course, everything depends on the kind of product you are building. Glucose monitoring wearables have completely different atrributes to robotics surgery solutions. But in most cases, cost-effective MVPs are a great way to start your venture. 

Step 2. Build efficiently

Hardware design can be immensely expensive. Naturally, costs depend on the number of devices, their functionality, sensors, battery life, and physical packaging. But a determinant factor of the cost is the design and prototyping stage. For example, iterations with different chip selections can take more time and money than imagined. 

One way to reduce the cost of iterations is by using a digital device simulator. This kind of software enables low-cost test driving of a virtual model of an IoT solution. Configuration changes can be made on the fly to see the data capture and connectivity of emulated physical devices. That will leave you with a pre-certified product much less prone to failure—at a much lower cost. 

A popular solution for IoT projects is prototyping with microcontrollers or microprocessor boards. These can also be used continually after you reach product-market fit and start building an increasingly customized product. There are many successful products built on these tiny (and cost-effective) computers: from health monitoring devices like HealthyPi and PatientCare to electronic medical record systems like Open EMR and GNU Health. 

When it comes to software, it’s important to select the most suitable tech stack to save time and money on development. For example, speedy prototyping is most often performed on Python. Using cloud technologies is another practice that a modern IoT solution can’t be imagined without. Cloud platforms allow for the scaling up or down of resources on a needs-basis at any given time, which makes operating and scaling a product much easier.

There are also plenty of existing IoT platforms that constitute a wide spectrum of what may be required for your product: there are device, analytics, cloud, and connectivity platforms. On top of that, complex enterprise solutions combine several services in one and can be your single partner in bringing your product to life. 

Leveraging commercially-available IoT platforms will cut your development costs and reduce time to market. Yet, there are many companies that insist on building a custom product independently from scratch. And here’s when we once again touch on the eternal ‘buy or build’ dilemma. 

If the prices of IoT platforms have thrown you off balance, counting the budget for the long-run might help. The thing is, it’s next to impossible to build your own IoT solution for less than it costs to use a pre-existing commercial one. Doing it in-house will take several years and you’re risking being far behind the industry by the time it’s complete. 

The solution? Buy non-value-added infrastructure (and don’t reinvent the wheel). What you should build is intelligence—the value of your business, and what differentiates you from the rest of the market.

Step 3. Plan for the future

Estimating long-term aggregated costs is critical to protect your budget from running into the red. As expenses evolve rapidly after the proof-of-concept stage, make sure to clearly understand the cost of the project in production and at scale. Many healthcare IoT startups launch and fail because of underestimating the costs of cloud services, vendors and technicians, as well as maintaining compliance. 

The market has already offered money-saving solutions like IoTOps, teams for the operational management of IoT devices, as well as automation and management of tasks from centralized platforms. These eliminate manual processes, contribute to faster issue resolution and decision-making, and, of course, cut costs. 

Apart from cost estimation, it’s important to plan the product architecture for scalability. There are teams who simply underestimate the speed of the process and consequently have to build around their prototype, with associated costs potentially cutting into profit margins. 

Summing up

Implementing an IoT solution in healthcare is still very expensive: an MVP version can cost around $50,000. While implementation costs can be daunting, planning for the long-term and efficient utilization of existing commercial solutions during prototyping and production can bring both costs and development scope down.

Even though medical IoT has challenges and limitations, the industry as a whole will continue to overcome these, enabling the technology to flourish. There is no denying that IoT trends have already made a huge impact on healthcare outcomes, and will only grow further in scope at an ever-accelerating rate.