Majority of the healthcare service providers and stepping up their game by focusing on digital transformation. With the opportunities digitalizing brings it also bring its challenges. Healthcare organization around the world are different across the globe and each of them has their own pace of adapting and growing. This will depend on political agenda, country government regulations, individual organization process & citizens of the country. Healthcare is moving towards a digital-first approach hence we are talking about trillions of bytes of information each day, which will increase in time. To provide personalized medicine keeping the government norms in check, healthcare provider needs to have a complaint flexible intuitive digital experience platform. Healthcare has to embrace the innovation to transform their service delivery.Challenges faced by the Healthcare providers
1. Patients are demanding better healthcare facilities at their convenience. They need better access to their healthcare information on their mobile devices. To make this possible the providers have to implement a cloud-based portal that enables the patients to access their health records and manage their appointments.Mobile apps for patients makes it easy for them to view their health records and appointment schedule. But makes it challenging to the IT department to manage (multiple device & security).They will need to deploy the digital services to patients faster and securely.
2. Security is the major challenge that provider’s face. They need to comply the healthcare regulations that each country has (USA has HIPPA). In UK, NHS (National Health Services) in 2017 has planned to go paperless. The government assures that there is no risk but we all know security is always a concern if proper measures are not taken. Added to this, IoT & AI will make the cyber security life a nightmare. And by 2020 you will see a huge growth is a Mobile health (mHealth) and wireless healthcare. It has been predict that by 2019 over 40 percent healthcare organization will use IoT biosensors. There are a lot of predictions regarding digitizing the healthcare but it’s very clear that cyber security professionals will be needed during this evolution.
3. Operational challenges will be another concern that the healthcare provider needs to overcome. There will be a cultural change involved along with the adaptive resistance by the healthcare staff. While developing the digital experience platform for a particular healthcare provider (assuming all the healthcare provider will have varied business process. New innovations bring in its own challenge of service delivery complexity. And real-time update needs a competitive and flexible IT infrastructure.
Digital Transformation making its way into the Healthcare Industry?Digital transformation will enable healthcare providers to improve healthcare services, patient experience & healthcare staff productivity. Digital transformation opens more opportunity for self-management and empowering patients to have healthcare on their own terms. Now, its what patients can do with the technology rather than what technology can do for them.
Improved analytics & reports
EMRs (Electronic Medical Records) was introduced in 2009 and transformed the healthcare industry. And it was crucial to be compliant with government regulation and healthcare providers had to keep every patient’s medical record secure and confidential. At the moment, healthcare providers are using analytics to monitor location, mapping & scheduling. Bigdata will play a very important rule here. Healthcare industry will gather the data from the traditional sources and combine it with the new sources which will result in very insightful information. This will make the hospital staff efficient, simplify inventory management and make workflows more efficient. Digital transformation will provide incomparable access to analytics that will drive the change.
Improving Patient Experience
More people are receiving regular healthcare now and to manage millions of patients is challenging. The healthcare providers need to have a scalable business process/model to cope up with the demands. These digital transformation platform needs to be designed to enable healthcare providers to mitigate risk, implement new strategies and flexible enough to fit into their current business environment.
The generation that we have now, it’s different and more tech-savvy. They are not willing to spend time on traditional processes & paperwork. They want real-time update and access to information. They prefer convenience and they will be very quick in letting the world that they did not get the requested information through social media. Hence hampering the brand. To cope up with the demand health care providers need to have aplatform that provides a 360-degree view of the patient in real time and the also provide the patient with an omni-channel experience.
Health care providers have started implemented FDA approved medical devices connected to the Internet of Things. They are using it to track and monitor patients who are advised to stay at home due to long-term medications.
AI forefront of the patient and clinician experience
Contextual intelligence and deep learning algorithms have raised the bar for interactions in the healthcare industry. We must remember the relationship between the healthcare provider and the patient will never go away. AI’s primary objective is to make that relationship stronger. With AI, the technology becomes simpler, smarter and with intuitive user interface makes it more usable for the patients and improves their experience. The smart systems will know the medical history and the lifestyle behavior of the patient and utilize that information to provide a personalized experience. For the hospital staffs, AI will become their partner, helping them support diagnoses and then improve the staff efficiency and enable them to provide personalized treatment or diagnoses to the patient.Speech recognitional has made the capture of doctor-patient interactions and updating the data on EMR behind the scene automatically. Patients and healthcare providers expectations are changing with the technology hence creating a healthcare transformation. However, they still have to comply with the regulations put forth by the government or regulation authorities. With healthcare transformation, data must be very secure. The technology partner needs to ensure that their technology is secure and the data is protected in every environment.
