Contents
1. Introduction
Over the last two decades, many hospitals and healthcare networks have adopted digital strategies in their various functional areas. The digital transformation witnessed numerous initiatives, such as installing electronic health record systems(EHR), building digital health and health apps, and implementing digital health solutions. Digital healthcare is transforming how people access healthcare services and communicate with providers. Digital transformation in healthcare is the main ingredient for enabling healthcare professionals to integrate a patient-focused approach into their practices. Digital health companies help healthcare providers streamline operations, understand patient needs, establish loyalty and trust, and offer a better patient experience.
The covid-19 pandemic gave rise to digital health technologies in the medical industry. The pandemic was an accelerator of many digital health trends, including improved patient health outcomes, rapidly evolving technologies, and clinical innovation for improved patient management. According to leading health systems, digital transformation in healthcare can help providers become consumer-friendly while delivering quality care and maintaining HIPAA compliance. Virtual health and care can be delivered at home with digital health innovation. Hospitals and health systems are now working toward adapting digital healthcare transformation. Digital transformation in the healthcare industry involves a well-defined approach toward digital technologies at its core. Additionally, data collection and sharing form integral components of digital health services.
Healthcare providers need to understand that keeping up with digital transformation in healthcare can be overwhelming. It is important to identify which technology is worth investing in for supporting successful digital health transformation. Digital transformation in healthcare avoids outdated business processes and manages daily operational processes with healthcare automation. Health tech digital can enhance patient-centricity by using electronic medical records. Digital transformation in healthcare allows remote patient monitoring with advanced technologies. The digitalization of healthcare utilizes big data and manages it accurately.
The US healthcare market is huge, and its digital health systems market is expected to increase from 86.4 billion in 2018 to 504.4 billion USD in 2025, at a CAGR of 29.6%. Digital healthcare innovation drastically transformed the medical industry.
2. Impacts of digital transformation in healthcare
Learn about the transition in healthcare due to the introduction of digital technology, from automation to improved practice management. Digital healthcare has benefitted patients and providers alike.
Digital healthcare services can contribute to transformation in the healthcare industry in these ways:
1. Telemedicine
Appointment scheduling can be hectic for patients and administrative staff, and patients may need to wait for ages to get an appointment or reach their doctors. Global digital health solutions are changing the interaction of patients with healthcare providers. Whether looking for a specialist, getting a virtual appointment, or communicating with doctors via video or voice call, telehealth is made available due to digital health tech solutions improving health access.
Telemedicine solutions evolution is one of the most popular digital transformations in the US healthcare market. Digital healthcare professionals can easily access patient data with telemedicine. Telehealth technology allows virtual appointments and enables patients to select providers. Digital medical services promote health access in remote or rural areas. Virtual appointments with digital health consultants facilitate patients to communicate easily with doctors. It also benefits patients facing mobility challenges who can use telehealth to interact with health professionals. Telehealth technology can also manage patients at a high risk of health conditions. Healthcare and digital transformation enable health professionals to remotely track the patient’s conditions and activities through IoT-based health sensors and wearable devices. Healthcare providers must ensure that telehealth and other best digital health apps comply with legislation in your targeted regions.
2. With Big Data in Healthcare
Big Data is an integral part of digital transformation in healthcare, changing how data is analyzed, leveraged, and managed. Digitalization in the medical field allows big data to avoid preventable diseases, enhance patient care, reduce treatment costs, and predict health risks. Healthcare professionals can collect a large amount of data and find the best digital health transformation strategies to utilize the data. Big Data in digital health and care can have positive and life-saving outcomes. Emerging digital technologies have simplified data collection and conversion into valuable insights to offer better care. Healthcare professionals can use data-driven insights to predict and solve an issue before it’s too late, thereby promoting digital transformation in healthcare.
3. Internet of Things in healthcare
Before the introduction of IoT, the communication between patients and providers was limited to in-person visits. Doctors or hospitals did not have any way to monitor patients’ health continuously and take action accordingly.
Digital transformation in healthcare introduced IoT-enabled devices that facilitate remote monitoring in the healthcare industry—this helps keep patients healthy and safe and allows physicians to offer better care. Since IoT improves the efficiency of patient-provider interactions with doctors, it results in better patient satisfaction and engagement. It also supports remote monitoring of patients’ health, prevents readmissions, and reduces the duration of stay in the hospital. IoT in digital medical transformation can also reduce healthcare costs and improve patient health outcomes. Thus, IoT is transforming the healthcare industry by changing how patients interact with their providers. Implementation of IoT in healthcare can benefit physicians, hospitals, patients, and insurance companies.
4. Virtual Reality
Healthcare is getting used to technology, and providers realize the applications and challenges of VR.
Virtual reality is a healthcare technology that incorporates the computer-generated simulation of a 3-D image allowing a person to hear, see, and interact with special equipment. It creates a simulated environment having users experience virtual reality with a display screen and headset. The medical sector is rapidly integrating virtual reality to improve patient care delivery. It helps patients with chronic conditions, including cancer patients. Virtual reality can be therapeutic and manage anxiety or help patients unable to move around much relax. Virtual reality can be used to create relaxing environments for patients, resulting in a better patient experience. Patients also appreciate virtual reality settings while they are being treated. From clinics to medical rooms, virtual reality is expanding.
As per research by GlobeNewsWire, the healthcare virtual reality market will reach $7 billion by 2026.
3. How Digital Transformation in healthcare can improve practice management
Practice management with manual processing can be quite challenging, but not anymore. Here, we have explained how digital technology can enable providers to enhance care performance efficiency.
Many healthcare organizations are implementing digital transformation in healthcare with the latest technologies to create better patient experiences and stay ahead of the competition. Digital transformation in health care involves employing healthcare analytics to improve clinical decision support-making. For instance, advanced computational science can deliver precision medicine, where therapies and interventions are customized as per each individual’s genetic profile.
However, digital transformation in healthcare offers many advantages apart from clinical decision-making. Digital transformation in healthcare is crucial for optimizing hospitals’ operational decision-making, improving care quality, and simplifying health access to patients.
Here are four areas where hospitals can utilize digital transformation to improve practice management: patient flow, staffing, scheduling, and supply chain management.
A. Patient Flow
Hospitals can greatly benefit from data-driven operational decision-support systems that offer valuable insights to aid in making informed decisions in all phases of the treatment. For example, suppose a provider is unsure about the ward where the patient should be admitted. In that case, a decision-support algorithm can suggest better recommendations based on the predicted benefit of ICU admission for that patient.
Research utilizing patient-level operational data from more than 190,000 hospitalizations across 15 US hospitals indicates that when patients having a clinical need for admission to the ICU are admitted to another part of the hospital instead, it could result in longer hospital stays and higher readmission rates. Besides these recommendations, digital health algorithms can also be used to automate operational tasks.
B. Staffing
Digital technologies in healthcare can also help with staffing supply and improve management. For instance, healthcare administrators can use health analytics to improve this process instead of relying on phone calls, text messages, and spreadsheets for staffing decisions.
For instance, algorithms in digital health can reduce high nurse-turnover rates. According to research findings, nursing turnover in one of the largest home health agencies in the United States indicated that employer-driven inconsistency in workers’ schedules increases workers’ likelihood of quitting. Analytics with digital health can also optimize team staffing, and hospitals can utilize technology to work together effectively with team members.
C. Scheduling
While many hospitals have integrated electronic patient records, the scheduling of various resources remains a manual operation. This includes scheduling surgical procedures in operating rooms, scans in radiology suites, etc. Digital technologies can address these challenges and introduce better predicting resource needs. Additionally, digital transformation in healthcare can seamlessly incorporate last-minute changes and cancelations by optimizing schedules based on the latest research.
Digital health can provide a better idea about the expected duration, which is a function of patient characteristics and clinical needs, along with several operational factors. For instance, researchers may find that surgical procedure times increase based on larger team sizes, more workloads, and the sequence of operations. Algorithms with digital health are better equipped than humans to record the effects of such operational factors in making predictions.
D. Supply Chain Management
Hospitals in the US spent an average of $11.9 million on medical and surgical supplies in 2018. Digital health in transformation can reduce process costs by 50% and increase revenue by 20%. Digital healthcare automation data collection, ordering supplies, supply chain management, and inventory management, making them cost-effective.
Digital healthcare promotes information centralization that can be achieved with a digitized supply-chain-management system. To integrate this type of digital transformation in healthcare, hospitals should focus on appropriate data collection and interaction with their information technology systems.
4. Digital transformation in healthcare: Trends in 2022
This section consists of a comprehensive list of digital health tools likely to trend in 2022. Each of them has been explained separately to understand the readers better.
Here’s a quick look at digital transformation in healthcare in 2022:
I.Increased on-demand healthcare
When you mention ‘on-demand care,’ it implies patients want care services at their convenience. The healthcare industry is entering digital innovation, and more patients are now looking for on-demand healthcare because of their busy schedules. Digital healthcare with mobile health apps is becoming common due to their ease of use. Recent statistics indicate that over 50% of web browsing worldwide occurs through mobile devices. The main agenda of mobile digital health is to reach maximum target customers, which is not surprising since 77% of US residents use a smartphone. Over four billion people worldwide use the Internet, and patients can realize the benefits of digital transformation in healthcare.
According to DMN3, As per statistical findings, consumers are access medical information for the following reasons:
- 47% of research doctors
- 38% research hospital and medical facilities
- 77% book medical appointments
- On-demand healthcare is also driven by the economic growth and applications that link doctors directly with medical facilities for short-term work. These digital health applications are simplifying the provision of on-demand healthcare to patients. Doctors also benefit from on-demand healthcare services to address patient needs better and integrate digital transformation in healthcare.
II. The role of big data in healthcare
Big data acquires information about a healthcare business using social media, eCommerce, online transactions, etc. Big data can play a crucial role in digital transformation in healthcare by offering several benefits:
- Minimum medication errors – by conducting patient record analysis, digital health software can identify inconsistencies between a patient’s health and drug prescriptions, thereby alerting health professionals and patients about a potential risk of a medication error.
- Facilitating Preventive Care – a large volume of people enter the emergency rooms, accounting for 28% of the visits. Big data analysis in digital health can help identify these people and create preventive plans to save them from returning.
- Accurate Staffing – Big data supports predictive analysis that can help hospitals and clinics understand the future admission rates, which helps allocate the proper staff to deal with patients. This also saves money and reduces emergency room wait times during events when a facility is understaffed.
Considering these benefits of digital transformation in healthcare, medical and pharmaceutical companies must invest in organizing their data. This needs an analytics expert who can manage the data to identify areas of weakness and help organizations understand the market better. Your digital healthcare marketing and sales teams will find it easier to identify your ideal consumer with a better knowledge of the market. A major portion of this is to compile demographic information on your target users and the platforms where you can reach them.
III. Treating patients with virtual reality
Virtual Reality (VR) will remain an integral component of digital transformation in healthcare. It will consist of many applications that would transform the way patients are treated. For instance, consider pain management where doctors were handing our opioid prescriptions. Another example is giving oxytocin and Vicodin for migraines and pain. As a result, America faces a severe drug crisis with an economic burden of $78.5 billion a year. Millions of people struggle with chronic pain, around 50 million US adults in 2016 as per CDC. VR is a safer and more efficient alternative to prescription medicines for such cases. VR in digital healthcare can treat pain and anxiety, post-traumatic disorder, and stroke.
Other applications of VR include doctors and residents utilizing VR simulations to plan complicated skills. VR in digital health can also motivate children with autism to exercise and help them learn to navigate the world.
Virtual and augmented reality in the global healthcare market will reach $5.1. billion by 2025. Healthcare organizations must consider investing in this rapidly growing digital technology. VR has become a significant communication channel that allows you to understand the user better and virtually engages them with products or services.
IV. The rise in wearable medical devices
Digital health companies acquiring their health data from medical devices, including wearable technology, will be another trend in digital technology in 2022. Earlier, most patients were content with a physical examination annually and checking with doctors only when something went wrong. However, in today’s age of digital technology, patients are focusing more on disease prevention and maintenance and demanding information about their health status. This has resulted in healthcare technology companies investing more in wearable technology devices to offer self-monitoring and improve the health of high-risk patients.
As per a recent report, the wearable device market is estimated to cross over $27 million by 2023.
Some of the most common of this digital health include:
- Heart rate sensors
- Exercise trackers
- Sweat meters for people with diabetes to monitor blood sugar levels
- Oximeters measure the oxygen carried in the blood, and it serves useful for patients having respiratory illnesses, such as COPD or asthma.
V. Predictive healthcare
Big data in digital health can provide medical companies with predictive analysis about admission rates and help them arrange staff in their facilities. Another factor facilitating the digital transformation in healthcare is a prediction of health risks and conditions for the future. Health informatics with big data is extremely useful for digital transformation in healthcare. For instance, you can hire analysts to look up search engines for common searches about health concerns. The analyst can develop a predictive model to anticipate the next big health scare and how to prepare for that event. On a smaller scale, predictive analysis can help healthcare institutions to determine when to hire temporary staff for impending outbreaks of colds and flu that can cause worker shortages.
5. Challenges of digital health transformation
Digital transformation in healthcare does not seem like an option anymore, but that does not mean the journey is easy. We have enlisted all the possible roadblocks you may face while integrating digital technology.
Digital transformation in healthcare can lead to improved patient experience, reduced clinician burnout, better health outcomes, and lower costs. Some of the challenges with digital health technologies include healthcare interoperability, data security, privacy, and challenging misinformation. A digital transformation is inevitable for every healthcare provider, given the digital age, but it is better to be prepared for the challenges that you may face:
1. Resistance to Change
According to a study by the Altimeter Group, 79% of people responded by opting for improved agility for adapting to change quickly as the main initiative for their digital transformation efforts. When healthcare organizations are looking to integrate digital transformation in healthcare, they must create an infrastructure driven by their leaders to help navigate the entire team.
2. Determining Business Needs
To create the best business case for a digital transformation, healthcare leaders must conduct surveys and interviews with stakeholders across departments. They also need to analyze the vendors available in the market, select the solutions that would be most beneficial, and develop a business case presentation that will attract more decision-makers.
3. Issues related to Budget
It is no surprise that digital transformation in healthcare comes at a price, but it is important to learn its value from the initial phase. Healthcare leaders need to carefully assess how they will generate revenue from their digital health networks. If you plan things, you can find that adopting a digital strategy offers good scale, revenue, and profit.
4. Missing Data
Health data sets the foundation of healthcare businesses, and digital health plays a major role. Around 69% of leaders are troubled by a lack of data on ROI for digital transformation in healthcare. Big data has become an integral part of healthcare. In such times, key performance indicators need to picture customers or an organization’s growth properly.
5. The Technology Stack is Siloed
Healthcare organizations cannot operate smoothly with a siloed technology stack, affecting the user experience and the insight and communication between internal departments. Digital transformation in healthcare is a combination of ensuring that the basic healthcare technologies are arranged.
6. More Is Possible for Health Interoperability
Digital transformation in healthcare has witnessed a shift from a paper-based system to an electronic medical record. Advancements in cloud computing healthcare have made practice management easier. Digital health has introduced critical automation, and other digital health innovations have simplified chronic care management, predictive analyses, and remote patient monitoring.
Interoperability is a major challenge in healthcare, despite digital transformation in healthcare. As per a 2020 Pew Charitable Trusts survey, 81% of adults experienced increased access to health information for providers and patients. However, the necessary standards for healthcare interoperability are yet to be implemented. Also, data misrepresentations, missing information, and data errors can result in poor data quality, affecting interoperability. Another concern of digital transformations in healthcare is the reliable functioning of all technology components. For example, a network failure can cause device errors, and a security vulnerability can cause access failures.
7. Cybersecurity could be a threat
Cybersecurity is a major concern in digital healthcare systems. Cyberattacks can specifically target sensitive and highly valuable personal health information. Malicious attacks can disrupt care, causing harm to patients and adverse medical events. Data privacy is connected with cybersecurity concerns. With the incorporation of multiple devices and applications in digital interventions, personally identifiable information may be compromised. Digital interventions need to ensure the authenticity of research and rely on reliable channels for data exchange. Digital information in healthcare is also prone to malware and phishing attacks.
6. The Do’s and Don’ts of digital healthcare
These Dos and Don’ts will help you succeed in implementing digital technology in healthcare and enable you to avoid any mistakes.
Digital transformation in healthcare brought a shift to technology and cloud-based service models. Digital healthcare can increase clinic efficiencies, improve patient care, and support value-based reimbursement models. However, organizations can struggle and become frustrated when digital healthcare transformation does not go as planned. Digital transformation in healthcare is bound to happen with changes in reimbursement models, compliance regulations, and patient expectations.
To make sure you get it right, here’s a list of some do’s and don’ts-
a. Don’t: Expect that the goal is only to digitize paperwork
Healthcare organizations may not realize that digital transformation is more than replacing paperwork with digitization. You need to understand that integrating digital technology into practice management can change how your healthcare staff functions and the quality-of-care delivery. If you do not focus on anything else other than automating manual operations, then your staff will likely become frustrated.
b. Do: Look for the scope of cultural change
Digital transformation in healthcare can instil a cultural transformation. You may need some additional services for managing population health better. These can include telehealth solutions for making healthcare more convenient and efficient, remote monitoring for chronic care management, and analytics dashboards for achieving population health goals.
c. Don’t: Underestimate what Cloud can do
Cloud-based digital healthcare can provide reliable, high-performance, always-updated, and secure access to your critical clinical systems. Digital health tech can enable staff and providers to use technology for improving care delivery and maintaining clinic performance remotely. Cloud-based digital technology systems can also help with enhanced predictive analytics to understand health risks and optimize revenue.
d. Do: Plan about data security first
Security forms the basis for trust between provider and patient, so it’s a critical foundation for any technology discussion. It is becoming essential as the healthcare industry continues to be vulnerable to cyber threats.
As you research cloud technology, look carefully into the security foundation of your cloud provider. Cloud for healthcare offers HITRUST certification based on NIST and over 40 other global security standards and comprises more than 400 controls and implementation requirements. This makes it easier to integrate HIPAA compliance and ensures the highest security and protection for personal health information and data. Ensure that your cloud provider provides a fully managed network operations and security operations center for safeguarding patients and your overall care business.
e. Don’t: Categorize technology and patient needs as separate silos
Healthcare providers may view IT and patient care as different concerns, but digital transformation in healthcare can significantly affect care delivery and patient outcomes. Before you categorize them, consider patient needs and provider and staff workflows. Then understand how technology can integrate into those workflows to enhance performance efficiency and patient satisfaction.
f. Do: Integrate technology with quality of care
Value-based patient care is a fundamental change to traditionally delivered care. Digital health technology can greatly improve the ability to capture and report data. The delivery of health information systems can be challenging. Digital transformation in healthcare addresses this and delivers the underlying technology to obtain data, and it can significantly improve data analytics and patient interactions.
g. Don’t: Miss out on patient-centricity
The care services can have positive outcomes provided patients feel actively engaged and involved. Utilize digital technology for personalization and effective patient engagement. You can explore other ways of communicating with patients apart from portals. Identifying which digital healthcare technology is more popular among your patients is important and using it instead.
h. Do: Implement digital technologies to engage patients
You need to increase patient knowledge and understanding to become actively engaged. Patient engagement with digital health can deliver financial benefits because it reduces no-shows, increases provider revenue, and improves the provider-patient relationship. Digital transformation in healthcare can help you collect, organize, and analyze patient data, such as demographics, psychographics, social media activity, behavioral patterns, and clinical history.
i. Don’t: Be restricted with remote care
Healthcare providers implement suboptimal solutions to get through remote patient monitoring. It is important to learn that telehealth is more than video calls, and a positive outcome is learning that remote work and interaction can be more successful than you realize.
j. Do: Go beyond telemedicine
Digital transformation in healthcare supports various telehealth and remote monitoring services, including videoconferencing, store-and-forward imaging, research, remote patient monitoring, and patient education. This is an opportunity for providers to consider incorporating what they learned during the pandemic and act on it with well-planned digital transformation initiatives that respond to patients’ new expectations for convenient, quality telehealth services.
7. How to accelerate digital health solutions
This section aims to guide you on ways to let you reap the benefits of digital healthcare in no time. These tips will enable you to benefit the most from digital health tech.
Embracing digital health transformation in healthcare can help you stay ahead in the market and flourish. Digital technology is a must-have in this world of technological evolution. The advantages offered by digital health include advanced technology, personalized healthcare, on-demand care, and streamlined daily operations. Healthcare organizations need to strive to accelerate digital health and integrate advanced innovations. These steps can help you achieve this goal:
i. Standardize Data Collection and Make Data Accessible
It is important to utilize healthcare technology to collect clinical data and store them securely. Standardizing data collected and how they are recorded can support integrated care delivery and collaborative care. Making data accessible to the public can help improve patient participation. However, for implementing the efforts, you need to address time and budget concerns. You need to adopt ways of overcoming fragmented electronic health records.
ii. Utilize the best practices of technology Development
Once concerns about data accessibility, privacy, and security have been addressed, you need to develop a digital health strategy for speeding up the transformation and preparing staff for the incoming changes. Digital transformation in healthcare can require huge investments in technology and the hiring of digitally savvy staff, requiring more funding and strategies for healthcare-driven businesses.
iii. Partner with an outsourcing team
This can introduce speed and flexibility to the digital transformation process. Its iterative and incremental model allows incorporating new additions and changes even in the developmental stages. Consider third-party integration when bridging the gap between healthcare and digital transformation. This will help you predict increased patient demand and arrange staff availability. You need to determine inconsistencies in inpatient medical records, such as prescriptions that can be challenging for a patient with a complex health history. Healthcare providers need to support the development of the latest technologies for better clinical decision-making.
iv. Offer Digital Services to your User
With digital transformation in health making immense progress and significant impacts across the care continuum, patients expect a high level of digital service delivery in healthcare. A recent survey revealed that patients are willing to use digital technology in healthcare, and they expect their care needs to be addressed in real-time.
Leaders from the healthcare industry must make the most of digital health technologies to deliver more personalized care and establish a trustworthy relationship with patients.
8. Improving patient outcomes with digital transformation
This section highlights ways of incorporating digital technology for enhancing patient health management and patient health outcomes.
Healthcare institutions are extremely important for population health management, and this was evident during and after the covid-19 pandemic. To keep up with the rapid transformation since the pandemic, healthcare organizations are not left with much choice but integrate innovative technology. Manual operations are no longer in trend, and they would simplify growth and expansion. The healthcare sector needs to transform with digital technologies for dealing with the drawbacks of manual systems.
1. Healthcare providers
Physicians, nurses, and other providers traditionally managed patient
health through a series of manual processes. This would create tonnes of paperwork, often leading to errors and confusion. Digital health has replaced documentation with electronic health records (EHRs). EHRs simplify data collection, storage, and exchange across different systems and providers. They can be easily accessed from any smart device, safeguarding data privacy and HIPAA compliance. Digital health technologies enable streamlining of healthcare processes that support accurate healthcare data management. This is backed by healthcare automation, which further simplifies big data handling.
2. Pharma industry
The covid-19 pandemic also had an impact on the pharma industry. Pharma companies had to come up with new medications and health monitoring equipment. In such times, digital technology helped smoothen the transition. Pharma companies can now easily streamline their distribution and provide users with reminders. It helps them to manage better the supply chain, manufacturing, marketing, sales and improve customer satisfaction. Patient bills and prescriptions can be stored automatically and accessed online. Pharma companies need to identify the scope for accelerating their growth with digital transformation.
3. Medical device manufacturers
Digital health is no longer a choice, and in such times, medical device companies need to shift from manual sales processes to streamlined, automated ones. Medical device companies must realize the benefits of digitization in their business and growth. An integrated CRM solution, for instance, can enhance secure outsourcing and collection of data. Medical device manufacturers can utilize digital document solutions to streamline field quotes, proposals, and contracts without compromising HIPAA compliance.
4. Consumer behavior
While integrating digital technology, providers need to focus on the customer behavior and response they are expecting. This requires developing interventions combining behavioral science. Health informatics with behavioral science can promote accurate diagnoses and decision-making.
5. Consumer value
Digital health solutions must provide authentic value to the users, the main objective when developing a strategy. Integrating digital health solutions with daily activities and health routines is advisable. Digital healthcare must focus attention on user value to bring positive health outcomes, and it must enable providers to use tools that would emphasize user value.
9. Digital transformation use cases
Here, we have highlighted the different use cases of digital transformation in healthcare to give you an idea of the wide applications of digital health.
A. Virtual care
One of the most significant transitions due to digital health is incorporating virtual healthcare services. These enable patients to seek advice from doctors through a video chat and avoid traveling for in-person visits. Since the pandemic, these virtual visits increased, where doctors were seen interacting with 50-175 times more patients. Virtual health services such as telehealth and mHealth are trending globally, thereby simplifying health access to a large extent. Nowadays, even patients prefer telehealth because it is convenient and saves time. According to a survey by Brigham Health hospital network, 74% of people felt that virtual visits could improve their relationship with healthcare providers.
Doctors can monitor patient health and even manage mental health conditions virtually. With virtual clinics spreading everywhere, patients no longer need to waste time getting an appointment or waiting for doctors to be looked at. This enables physicians to deliver care to more patients daily, contributing to increased ROI generation. Healthcare providers can enhance their communication with patients and improve the patient experience. Physicians can predict health risks early on and manage population health better.
B. Patient Portals
Patient portals are another popular use case of digital transformation in healthcare. They are platforms through which patients can access their health records, schedule appointments, message their doctors, and pay bills. As per a survey of health systems, 82% of individuals consider patient portals the main driver of improving patient engagement.
It helps doctors establish transparent real-time communication with patients/ Patients can conveniently access their test results, care histories, and doctor visit notes. They can also easily share this data with multiple providers, thus saving time. Patient portals are great for patients and providers and reduce the burden on administrative staff.
C. Data Aggregation
While patient portals help gather patient data and safely store them in one place, many health centers also focus on aggregating back-end data. Healthcare organizations receive large volumes of data every day, from various sources, including:
- Patient-provided communication
- Internal electronic health records
- External electronic health records
- Lab results
- Imaging
- Insurance claims
- Data from medical devices
- Pharmacy data
Considering these different data sources, it can be easy to miss patient medical history data. Data aggregation supports fast, informed health decision-making, and doctors can rest assured that essential details are not missed. Better patient care and reduced costs are driving factors for data aggregation. All patient data can be brought together at a single source, reducing paperwork and saving plenty of time.
10. COVID-19 Contact Tracing
Digital health apps are coming up post-COVID for contract tracing. These apps help track people infected with COVID-19, provide the latest updates, and issue guidelines for self-quarantine.
I. Automation
Increasing the implementation of healthcare automation technologies is beneficial for the drug manufacturing area, especially the product safety field. An efficient digital health software enables smart imaging and analysis, which results in accurate diagnosis of health conditions. Implementing algorithms in lab analyses fast-tracks and simplifies the process. Automation in healthcare has immense potential for minimizing anthropogenic errors. Important processes, such as patient follow-ups and discharge can also be regulated with automation in healthcare. Physicians can monitor whether or not patients are following their care plans by monitoring through automation. They can access patients’ daily routine to intervene early on and prevent aggravation of any risks. Additionally, automation can enable to address large groups of patients and their needs with ease. Patients no longer have long waiting times, and providers have fewer no-shows due to automated appointment reminders.
II. Internet of Things (IoT)
Digital technology devices in healthcare can simplify data collection and exchange, which are crucial in treatment. IoT helps providers by collecting patient health data with devices that monitor sleep, vitals and track drug efficiency. These devices offer real-time remote patient monitoring that physician can track. IoT plays a huge role in addressing health monitoring challenges, improving accuracy and speed.
III. Big data
The healthcare industry generates huge amounts of data daily, including innovations, medications, and research. This is referred to as big data, an integral component of modern healthcare, and it is one of the main ingredients of digital transformation in healthcare. Big data enables to management of patient profiles better and overcomes restrictions in understanding diseases, and it helps to improve the accuracy of medical research and enhances the efficiency of diagnoses.
Conclusion
Healthcare practices worldwide are increasingly adopting digital technology to stay ahead of the competition. Digital healthcare offers several advantages, such as healthcare automation and improved patient-provider communication. However, while implementing digital technology in healthcare is no longer an option, it is important to be aware of the challenges that one might face on this journey.
Digital transformation in healthcare is an ongoing process, with new trends and innovations emerging now and then. While integrating digital technology, it is important to understand what patients want and how you can utilize the tools for their benefit. Digital transformation in healthcare can help you deliver better patient care and address their requirements. Patients can experience a transition from being passive recipients of care services to using mobile health apps to receive hassle-free real-time health access. The adoption of digital health practices can enable providers to deliver high-quality care and achieve better patient outcomes.
OSP can create unique digital health solutions to help healthcare practices streamline their operations and improve performance efficiency. Our expert team of software developers and engineers can develop digital health technologies to address your pain points. We can enable healthcare organizations to empower patients and deliver high-quality care while simultaneously increasing the ROI generation. OSP can enable you to integrate digital health tech systems for achieving health goals successfully. Our latest innovations can help you stay ahead of the competition and increase patient satisfaction. We understand the challenges you may face while implementing digital healthcare, and OSP can help you overcome these roadblocks through our custom-tailored digital health software solutions.
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About Author
Written by Riken Shah linkedin
Riken's work motto is to help healthcare providers use technological advancements to make healthcare easily accessible to all stakeholders, from providers to patients. Under his leadership and guidance, OSP Labs has successfully developed over 600 customized software solutions for 200+ healthcare clients across continents.