The digital transformation in healthcare was already underway when the pandemic accelerated adoption by way of necessity in many cases. Now, as healthcare organisations are realising the benefits of offering virtual care and accessibility, the market for remote patient monitoring (RPM), decentralised clinical trials (DCTs), telemedicine and more are on the rise. The global IoT healthcare market is expected to grow to $534 billion by 2025 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.9 percent.
KORE recently partnered with Kaleido Intelligence to share data collected from a global survey of more than 750 enterprises to understand the opportunities and challenges in IoT adoption broken down by top industries.
One of the goals of the survey, Serving the Enterprise, was to identify some of the key challenges within IoT industries. For healthcare, the following are the top three challenges for cellular adopters:
The primary issue cellular IoT adopters face with their current IoT connectivity solutions is that consistent service quality across international markets is lacking with 49 percent of Serving the Enterprise survey respondents claiming this as a challenge.
This has much to do with the fragmented ecosystem associated with IoT. Looking at solutions globally, device manufacturers are going to differ, the number of Mobile Network Operators run in the dozens depending on the country in consideration, and cloud service providers will differ, as well. Regulatory compliance, shipping, device provisioning, and other considerations add to the complexity, especially with connected health deployments.
With multiple connectivity providers comes multiple service-level agreements (SLAs), different agreements with roaming providers, different billing and support systems, and more. The way support is managed, or the way connectivity performance is delivered varies from country to country. The complexity of this can vary from country to country – just in the European Union alone, traveling across borders can throw a wrench in service quality. From a globalisation standpoint, the complexity multiplies exponentially and can be extremely prohibitive.
An IoT infrastructure is complex and comprised of many components. Those components need to communicate and work optimally for the solution to work. When hundreds or thousands of devices that are in motion need to communicate with the user interface, the backend system, and the connectivity management platform (CMP), it raises significant complexity. IoT should simply be about results derived from data-backed analytics, but the complexity of getting to that point can be burdensome. Many IoT adopters are only interested in the analytics results, as they should be, yet get bogged down in technical challenges which can ultimately detract from the success and the return on investment. The strong indicator of 47 percent of respondents stating this as a top issue shows that this is certainly something to be mindful of.
Organisations would like to be able to manage their fleets of devices, but not many tools on the market make it user-friendly to do so. Again, the sheer breadth of devices that are utilised in connected health solutions makes it important, yet challenging, to manage SIMs and to configure new devices. Managing SIMs and being able to self-service deploy new devices helps manage costs and reduces lead time in deploying new devices and scaling. With 47 percent of respondents claiming this as a challenge, it is pertinent to meet this need head on with a provider who can manage this complexity.
IoT comes with a unique set of challenges and complexities, which is why it’s KORE’s mission to simplify those complexities so any organisation wanting to achieve success with IoT can do so. From robust connectivity to pre-configured solutions specifically for healthcare – all under the umbrella of FDA and ISO certification – KORE is an expert IoT provider.
Want to learn more about the survey? Check out this webinar featuring the results.
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