1. Introduction to Live Streaming in Healthcare
Now, the performance of existing healthcare activities can be greatly boosted by adopting the mature and high-performance live streaming Singapore technologies and promoting healthcare live streaming application development, extending these straightforward methods to significantly enhance and empower other useful health and wellness training, disease awareness, and prevention tutorials. All new tricks in a field (whether it be animal training, brain surgery, or new foods) should have their debut on the web. This technology distributes most of the value-added and useful information at almost zero marginal cost, limiting the high price of information. It is one of the fastest developing and most promising services available on the web today.
Popular applications for live stream service today include everything from celebrity live streaming, beauty salons, museum tours, weddings, birth, funerals, and charity auctions to North Korea tours. With such a diverse set of applications in so many fields, we can imagine even more applications for live streaming. Industries always seek more efficient, cost-effective, high value-added solutions. This research on boosting patient care efficiency and cost effectiveness is a start, presenting a pioneering, practical prototype that offers a low-cost and simple method to deliver valuable healthcare tutorials related to training, disease awareness, and prevention.
Live streaming is a revolutionary technology that can provide companies with a channel to communicate with millions of potential customers in real time at incredibly low cost. According to Livestream.com, live streaming audiences are growing extremely rapidly, from 28% adoption on the Internet in 2013 to 53% in 2016. As live streaming technologies and techniques mature, they have spread from social media and video games to new domains. Many forecasters expect live streaming services’ revenue to grow rapidly, driven by revenues from live video media ads, subscriptions, and access to exclusive content.
1.1. Definition and Evolution of Live Streaming
Live streaming refers to the act of delivering or receiving real-time media by providing typically low-in-latency data over the internet. In the current digital era where people want information in real time, live streaming has emerged powerfully due to innovative ideas and technologies. Live streaming content has become popular, allowing live audiences to enjoy the fun of being in the event with live streaming presenters, allowing for a personal connection between the fans and celebrities or other internet celebrities, and interaction beyond the screen. It is also now more common for gamers to live stream directly to the streaming community. Live streaming has gained great popularity and is used to develop social network apps such as Google Hangouts, Instagram, YouTube, WeChat, Twitch, Facebook, Twitter, and Periscope.
2. Benefits of Live Streaming in the Healthcare Industry
Title: 1. Introduction Live streaming is an emerging innovation used in different fields and industries for reporting and interaction with on-the-ground workers. In the moment inverse of the traditional live television, live video can be repeatedly viewed as an image. Authors have investigated its use and featured many advantages of live streaming in other areas relating to health and the law. Arguing that live streaming will serve the healthcare industry and then assess the anticipated effect it will provide, this document moves the conversation forward. Professionals and specialists will be able to practice their craft remotely. In many hospitals, the first few employed robot-assisted gall bladder removals were not done by a doctor physically in the operating room, instead, live streaming, the first few treatments were published to the brand’s renown to a small expert group.
Better Patient Outcomes: Patients and professionals have a better understanding of conditions, outcomes, and the pros and cons of treatments when information could be matched and access was convenient. Increased Access and Reach: Live streaming allows professionals to keep field workers accountable. Quicker Evaluation and Treatment: Patients from non-traditional settings like homes or factories can be viewed without undue delay. Elevate Training and Professionalism: Training of students and professionals in the industry is improved. Agencies can also use live streaming to keep track of the progress of trainees in key areas, simulations, and real-time scenarios. Build a Cohesive Professional Community: Peer advice and second opinions are only moments away. Pros can collaborate more effectively across areas and regions, improving outcomes.
2.1. Enhanced Patient Engagement
Transparent practices, clear aims, purpose, and objectives can help to arrest any notions that health providers are stepping into unethical territory. In general, people feel more comfortable sharing information, asking questions, and receiving information when they feel more in control and are receiving open and honest information. At the end of the day, patient-first consideration guides all health-related assistance processes, day-out care strategies, first-line resolution formulation, etc., in the healthcare service businesses.
Enhanced Patient Engagement: A positive experience for patients is important. Relevant, engaging, easy to understand content and rich experiences are key to attracting and retaining viewers on platforms. Organizations can consider how they can go beyond a one-way TV style broadcast to include Q&A sessions, certain polls, and games, etc., to promote health and wellness in ways that are aware and consented by patients. In contexts of mobile streaming platforms or horizontal secondary objectives of engagement and experiencing entertainment, the need to both attract and retain are much higher. In short, how users view the daily content, how the live streaming instantly reacts, interacts, and guides patients healthily, safely, and carefully will directly affect society’s positive feedback and confidence.
3. Use Cases of Live Streaming in Singapore
Live video streaming has been adopted in Singapore in many areas such as education, politics, and religious activities. This paper explores the potential use cases of live streaming in the healthcare industry in Singapore. Live streaming allows interested individuals who are unable to physically attend an event or activity to participate, thus providing an opportunity to reach a global audience. There are different types of use cases for live streaming with a great variety of applications. These use cases are shown in the following diagram: (i) patient live streaming, (ii) specialist consultation live streaming, (iii) educational live streaming, (iv) administrative live streaming, and (v) special events and activities live streaming. The use cases will provide benefits for different stakeholders if the technology is implemented successfully. At the same time, the users might face conceptual, technical, and legal challenges in the adoption and utilization of live streaming. This paper makes two significant contributions. First, the paper fills the gap in existing literature by discussing how live streaming can be utilized in the healthcare industry in Singapore, in areas other than web-based consultation or online education. Second, the paper presents the challenges of live streaming in healthcare activities and special events.
3.1. Live Consultations and Telemedicine
Singaporean doctors can make use of the service when they are doing locum work overseas and need to provide consultations for their existing patients. A few KHRS doctors saw this as an opportunity for them to expand their service offerings abroad, including to migrant workers and residents from countries that lacked quality healthcare. This technology also assists other doctors within the group during urgent cases outside of their usual working hours. The KHRS mobile application interfaces are straightforward and intuitive. It enables doctors to easily view their appointment list, case history, and medical images associated with each virtual consultation. Before the video consultation begins, the doctor can access a dedicated waiting room, and e-medical certificates can be issued after the video consultation. When necessary, after an e-prescription has been issued, medications can be delivered to a location specified by patients. Referral letters and medical report copy requests can also be facilitated at a patient’s additional request in the KHRS mobile application. A request for a specialist evaluation from the video consultation can also be sent to the doctor after the consultation. For all these enhanced conveniences, patients pay a convenience fee on top of the consultation fees listed on the website. The current service without a physical tie is offered at discounted rates to different groups of patients.
Singapore’s public healthcare institutions have been making use of telemedicine technology—the use of telecommunication technology to improve patients’ health outcomes—enabled video consultations for some time. KHRS is among the private healthcare providers currently offered. It enables patients to make appointments in a few steps, including selecting a doctor and clinic, and the most convenient date and time for the consultation, before receiving a confirmation of the booking. Instructions to guide the patients on the teleconsultation process and appointments are conveniently communicated via SMS, email, and the mobile application once the appointment is confirmed. Approximately an hour before their teleconsultation, patients receive a link via email, short message service (SMS) or within the app to launch the teleconsultation. This service is more than just about saving time and effort for a visit to the hospital or branch. It also helps to ease congestion at these healthcare facilities and enable patients to seek timely medical advice from specialists regardless of geographical barriers.
Use case 1: Live Consultations and Telemedicine
4. Challenges and Future Directions
Our research indicates that adding live streaming as a service delivery channel creates a complementary density in diabetes management communications. From our research data analysis, we identified four key technologies where live streaming enables the utility of healthcare systems. These orient users in managing appointments and processes, testing blood sugar levels, receiving medication reminders from healthcare professionals, and categorizing health-related information. This means that the live streaming service can gain value by practically applying video technology to promote the value of the solution and interact with it. Our analysis was grounded in well-established consumer technology motivation theories, the Technology Application Model, Constellations of Technology Application, and unified theory of acceptance and use of technology to historical conceptual methods in technology informatics.
This research was conducted to promote how digital media influences the density of healthcare interactions. Our primary target is to perform a detailed examination of how live streaming functions in the Singapore healthcare industry and to investigate what factors result in the actual application or non-application of healthcare live streaming. We achieved our objective through field research involving a total of seven interviews at six healthcare centers. These healthcare centers represented varied settings in Singapore, including different departments in a general hospital, a community hospital, and a non-profit chiropractic clinic.
4.1. Privacy and Security Concerns
There is a conflicting relationship between patients’ entitlement to feel they can act in full autonomy to be able to access and discuss their EHR, but at the same time to know that the healthcare practitioner will treat their information with confidentiality and give proper professional advice. The conflict derives from the nature of contracts existing in healthcare, as these patient rights seriously affect the patient relationship in terms of professional ethics, giving access in real-time to information that has not yet been completed with the healthcare professional involved, who may feel “forced” to show the diagnostic results without having prepared a clear intervention strategy or being unsure about the diagnosis itself. In addition, a debate is emerging around the relationship of trust between a patient and a healthcare professional faced with the decision to express or not to their potential privacy expectations.
The rapid emergence of telemedicine presented new challenges on the front of privacy and security. It has caused the release of outdated and inadequate standards related to the design, implementation, and use of information systems and has also drawn increased attention of lawmakers to the privacy and security of electronic health records and their transmission. The delivery of e-care presents several ethical contradictions that have to be addressed coherently by the healthcare system, namely: Information Asymmetry, Privacy concerns, Consent, Professionalism from healthcare practitioners, Security threats in cloud computing. Online services for the Exchange of Health Records are a necessity in healthcare and have already been put in place by public authorities for remote access of e.g. Titles, pay and other health-related information.
5. Conclusion and Implications for the Healthcare Sector
We hope this chapter serves as a useful guide to help readers further understand the potential impact and strategize the use of live streaming in the healthcare setting. As technology continues to evolve at an exponential pace and society adjusts to the new reality coping with the global pandemic, healthcare services’ delivery model may shift towards more cost-effective implementation. This healthcare sector’s technical drift promises possibilities of more precise diagnoses, treatment and patient outcomes through adoption of live streaming in the complex healthcare conditions of the new normal and beyond. In conclusion, we believe this technology will assist in making healthcare cases more affordable when integrated across many use cases in the healthcare sector, complementing services and producing value for stakeholders in the sector long after the threat of the pandemic is over.
Healthcare institutions in Singapore should explore the potential of live streaming through the examples presented in this chapter, as well as expand the spectrum of live streaming called live-to-live or L2L for deeper patient engagement. It is time for healthcare institutions to ride the live streaming wave in the new normal and the future of healthcare delivery, and fully utilize it as one of the many communication and engagement tools in their arsenal in the coming decade. With the global pandemic’s severe impact on the business of healthcare, players in the sector should seize new opportunities and reimagine the future of healthcare, and capitalize fully on the use of live streaming to enhance the patient experience and deliver value-based care.
