Emerging Trends and Technologies

Probably the single greatest justification for Wireless-Fidelity system adoption in healthcare was in support of clinician access to the electronic medical record (EMR) system. Today's medical students and young physicians have grown up in the social media universe, and they expect to use social media as part of their medical practices. The largest obstacle for adoption of tablets for computerized provider order entry has been due to the major EMR vendors' ability to port their applications designed for desktops to other form factors while maintaining the same usability. Moving beyond policy management is the growing interest in Software Defined Networking (SDN). The concept behind SDN is to allow centralized control of network traffic to provide end-to-end services at an application layer. The field of mobile health continues to shape the evolution of patient care. The use cases range from smaller portable medical devices to sophisticated medical applications, and an ever-increasing market for home health.