Across several industries, digital transformation has impacted consumer convenience and experience. It is driving significant innovation and development in the healthcare industry. If you work in the healthcare sector, you’ll be happy to know that digital transformation in healthcare has a huge potential to save expenses while streamlining operational processes and improving the patient experience overall. The drive for value-based care is pushing a significant shift toward digital transformation in the healthcare sector.
In this post, we’ll go over why digital healthcare is essential, the benefits of digital transformation in healthcare, and what emerging digital trends to expect in healthcare.
Digital Transformation in Healthcare Industry
Digital transformation in healthcare entails utilizing cutting-edge technologies, methodologies, and processes to provide long-term value to patients, healthcare professionals, and healthcare organizations. In the healthcare industry, “digital transformation” refers to how a company uses digital solutions to improve the patient experience, streamline operations, and make on-demand patient care more accessible and affordable.
The increasing adoption of connected health technologies and the convergence of digital media, health technologies, and mobile devices are among the main factors propelling the digital transformation in the healthcare industry.
Digital innovation in healthcare is represented by technological advancements like electronic health records (EHRs), online scheduling, telemedicine, SaMD (Software as a Medical Device), and AI-powered medical devices. Such technologies change how patients interact with healthcare experts, how their information is distributed across suppliers, and how decisions regarding their treatment plans are made.
Digital transformation in healthcare has numerous benefits for patients and health organizations. With these advancements, physicians and hospitals can improve their workflow, obtain more accurate patient data and health metrics, and develop more effective treatments in less time. All of these factors can have a positive impact on the outcome.
After you’ve learned about the most popular and up-to-date technologies and trends, it’s time to take a quick look at the benefits they can bring to healthcare organizations and their patients.
Benefits Of Digital Transformation in Healthcare for Organizations
Organizations in healthcare will benefit significantly from the digitalization of healthcare. These include:
- Enhanced workflow: Digital transformation solutions can streamline access to patient health information, replace paper records with digital ones, and reduce the time required for patient examinations.
- Lower costs: Automating processes through digital transformation enables healthcare organizations to provide services at a lower cost and eliminate unnecessary spending on conventional healthcare services.
- Better customer interaction: Through video calls and chats, an organization’s digital transformation journey can enable better and more efficient online patient interaction.
- Secure database for patient records: Digital transformation in healthcare enables the creation of a secure database for encrypting, storing, and accessing the private medical records of patients and allowing them to be shared on demand with healthcare professionals, laboratories, and specialist doctors.
- Increased business continuity: Digitalized healthcare portals enable doctors to provide remote care and patients to receive on-demand assistance. It ensures long-term patient continuity and, as a result, increased business.
Benefits of Digital Transformation in Healthcare for Patients
Digital innovation in healthcare provides significant benefits to patients through digital healthcare solutions. Let’s take a look at them.
- Improved personalized healthcare services: Digitalized healthcare makes quick access to doctors and healthcare services possible. You can have a personalized session with your doctor while you’re on the go and receive an accurate health diagnosis.
- Simple access to personal healthcare information: Patients can quickly access and manage their health information online and thoroughly analyze their health metrics. This data is also easily shared across a variety of devices and platforms.
- Better interaction with doctors: Patients can receive professional healthcare services online through video calls, chats, treatment strategies, and receiving concise prescriptions through the healthcare portal or email due to digital innovation in healthcare.
- Easier appointment scheduling: With digital transformation in healthcare, patients can schedule doctor’s appointments at the most convenient time and date with just a few clicks.
- Real-time monitoring of health metrics: The utilization of advanced technologies such as health wearables enables patients to track critical health metrics such as heart rate, body temperature, blood volume pulse, and sleep patterns in real-time to evaluate their health status.
Trends that Contribute to Digital Transformation in Healthcare Industry
Digital technologies are already transforming the practice of medicine and are the future of the healthcare industry. Therefore, medical businesses need to review their business plans and include the innovative approaches and cutting-edge solutions provided by the healthcare industry’s transformation solution.
Let’s glance at some of the trends in digital transformation in healthcare that you should be aware of if you work in the industry.
Telehealth
Telehealth is revolutionizing how patients communicate with healthcare professionals. Some of the significant technologies under telehealth are telemedicine, mobile health apps, video conferencing, remote patient monitoring, and more. Telehealth can also be combined with IoT devices and wearables to manage high-risk patients more effectively by tracking their activity data.
For instance, as per Oregon Health and Science University, telehealth helped around 45% of their patients save more than $6 million in travel costs instead of traditional care. In addition, doctors and patients can consult virtually during a telehealth consultation without paying additional charges.
On-Demand Healthcare
People have become more mobile in the last decade, pushing many businesses to enter the on-demand economy. Due to consumer demand for on-demand healthcare and the ease of smartphones, the area of healthcare mobile app development is entering the digital innovation age.
After constantly staying around the 50% mark since the beginning of 2017, mobile devices (excluding tablets) contributed over 55% of all website traffic globally in the second quarter of 2022. In 2020, mobile devices will permanently surpass the 50% mark. To meet this need, Nomad Health Company recently launched an on-demand healthcare platform that enables physicians to connect with various healthcare organizations for short-term projects.
Wearables and IoT devices
Wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT) are digital devices worn or implanted on the body to collect, transmit, and process data. Examples include fitness trackers, smartwatches, heart rate monitors, insulin pumps, and smart inhalers. They provide real-time data that can be used by healthcare providers for patient monitoring and analysis, leading to improved health outcomes and patient engagement.
Wearables and IoT devices are contributing to the digital transformation in healthcare by increasing the accessibility and affordability of healthcare, reducing the need for in-person visits, and improving patient outcomes through personalized and proactive care.
Big Data Analytics
Big Data analytics extracts insights and knowledge from large and complex data sets generated in healthcare using advanced analytical and statistical techniques. It includes patient data from electronic health records, genomic data, clinical trial data, and more. By analyzing this data, healthcare organizations can improve clinical decision-making, reduce medical errors, and enhance patient outcomes. Big data analytics can benefit population health management, personalized medicine, and drug development.
Additionally, it enables healthcare organizations to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs by identifying inefficiencies and waste in processes and systems. Big Data analytics is a key driver of digital transformation in healthcare because it enables organizations to transform data into actionable insights, resulting in better patient outcomes and increased efficiency.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies use algorithms and statistical models to enable computers to perform tasks that require human intelligence, such as recognizing patterns and making predictions and decisions. In healthcare, AI and ML analyze large and complex data sets, identify insights and knowledge, and automate repetitive tasks. Some applications of AI and ML in healthcare include disease diagnosis, treatment planning, and drug development.
By integrating AI and ML into healthcare processes, providers can enhance patient care and improve health outcomes while reducing costs. For example, AI-powered diagnostic tools can assist in the early detection of diseases, enabling providers to initiate treatment earlier and more effectively. ML algorithms can also analyze patient data to predict health outcomes and identify patients at high risk for certain conditions. AI and ML are contributing to the digital transformation in healthcare by improving the speed of decision-making, enabling more personalized and proactive care, and reducing the burden of repetitive tasks on healthcare providers.
Patient Portals
Patient portals are another prominent trend of digital transformation in healthcare. These online services let patients view their medical records, make appointments, communicate with doctors, and do other things. Patient portals are popular for several reasons, but one of the main ones is that they promote convenience and transparency.
In a survey, patient portals were regarded as one of the essential technologies for interacting with patients by more than 80% of healthcare professionals and organizations. Patients can use patient portals to not only view their medical history, prescriptions, doctor visit notes, and test results online, but they can also share this information with multiple healthcare providers.
Cloud Computing
In healthcare, cloud computing enables organizations to store and access vast amounts of patient data, EHRs, and other sensitive information securely and efficiently. By leveraging cloud technology, healthcare organizations can reduce the need for expensive on-premise IT infrastructure, improve collaboration among healthcare providers, and enhance disaster recovery and business continuity.
Cloud computing also facilitates the developing and deployment of innovative healthcare technologies, such as telemedicine, AI, and mHealth. It is a critical enabler of digital transformation in healthcare since it enables healthcare organizations to access the latest technological advancements quickly and easily, leading to improved patient outcomes and increased efficiency.
Conclusion
Healthcare systems recognize the value of transformation solutions in improving health care and increasing customer satisfaction. Using digital transformation in healthcare creates new opportunities to transform the industry in the coming years and shape a modern, more effective, and automated healthcare system.
When pursuing digital transformation in healthcare, you must consider factors beyond the technology required to drive innovation. Furthermore, digital transformation has revolutionize patient care and allow healthcare organizations and professionals to spend less time on administrative work.
