Edge Computing in Healthcare: Experts Explain How IoT Will Change the Landscape

The global market for Internet of Things medical devices is expected to exceed $500 billion by 2025, which will likely cause a major paradigm shift in healthcare IT. That’s because most computing now happens in on-premises data centers or, increasingly, in the cloud.

But analyzing data from a distance poses a number of risks — including bandwidth congestion, network reliability and latency — that could negatively affect health outcomes when seconds count. To address these concerns, forward-thinking healthcare organizations are moving to adopt edge computing, in which data is analyzed and acted upon at the point of collection, or on a nearby system situated between the connected device and the cloud (a concept known as “fog computing”).

HealthTech asked three experts to discuss the transformative power of edge computing. Our roundtable consisted of Dr. Shafiq Rab, senior vice president and CIO at Rush University Medical Center, one of three U.S. health systems to achieve the highest level of analytics maturity as determined by HIMSS; Dr. David C. Klonoff, medical director of the Diabetes Research Institute at Mills-Peninsula Medical Center and author of a report on how edge and fog computing affect diabetes patients; and Weisong Shi, a professor of computer science at Wayne State University and a researcher in the field of edge computing and connected health.