From online prescriptions and medicine delivery to IoT-powered wearables, the healthcare sector continues to evolve rapidly. This wave of digital transformation in healthcare has redefined how professionals diagnose, treat, and track their patients.
At this point, organizations with clarity and strategic approach can streamline their operations, improve patient care and experience while also saving overall costs. A digitally-powered healthcare sector seems quite intriguing. Let’s explore its various aspects in detail to know how you can reap the benefits of this change.
What Is Digital Transformation In Healthcare?
Digital transformation in the healthcare industry is all about utilizing the latest tech to make healthcare more patient-centric. Practitioners, hospitals and other healthcare service providers can streamline operations, manage and collect patient data, get help with better prescriptions/treatments and simply become more accessible. Certainly, the scope of digital solutions in this industry isn’t limited to these.
The global digital health market is expected to be valued at US$ 586.59 Billion by 2030, growing at a 16.80% CAGR. Whether doctors or patients, everybody is already actively embracing this change.
AI-powered medical devices, online health records, telemedicine, appointment management, SaMD (Software as a Medical Device) are some of the best examples of digital transformation in healthcare.
How Does Digital Transformation Enhance HealthCare?
One of the greatest benefits of digital transformation is that it has made healthcare and assistance a lot more accessible. It continues to transform how healthcare organizations and practitioners manage administrative operations and patients receive treatments and care.
While the global lockdown period indicated the need for better and more accessible healthcare alternatives, digital solutions help dealing with a wider set of challenges. They help automating and streamlining tasks and services, improving efficiency and significantly reducing costs.
Here’s how digital transformation supports the goal of improving healthcare.
Keep a Check On Chronic Diseases
The healthcare systems worldwide are recently stressed about the rise in chronic diseases. Earlier, WHO reported that chronic/non-communicable diseases are causing 74% of all global deaths. As the population grows older, this number may increase.
Implementing digital solutions can help detecting, tracking, and treating such diseases more efficiently. Thus, keeping the healthcare systems sustainable. A timely action can prevent premature deaths and the onset of such illnesses among the aging population.
Facilitate Personalized Care
With rapidly expanding scope of information and technology and its accessibility, patients now expect better, convenient, and personalized care from healthcare organizations. As a result, there’s also a surge in patients who are willing to switch to digital solutions to seek medical assistance and care.
For example, according to a survey by McKinsey, the use of telehealth increased 38X from the COVID-19 baseline. Also, 40% of them said that they would continue to use such platforms in the future. Certainly, healthcare service providers need to come up with effective solutions to meet these expectations.
Dealing With Staff Shortages
Many surveys indicate a future deficit of skilled healthcare professionals. In different parts of the world, doctors and medical practitioners reportedly faced mental and physical burnout during and after the pandemic.
While the need for constant and convenient healthcare continues to grow, digital transformation in the healthcare industry can help preserve human resources. It will help reduce human involvement by automating tasks and workflows.
The Need to Reduce Overall Cost
Maintaining healthcare systems, infrastructure and also ensuring proper reimbursement is a challenge for healthcare institutions. Due to administrative complexities and other loopholes, the monetary investments often fail to transform into better outcomes. However, improving operational efficiency based on data-driven insights can welcome bigger gains.
Thus, if healthcare systems focus on careful and strategically planned digital transformation, the future can be brighter.
Quick Tips For Successful Digital Transformation In the Healthcare Industry
While there’s a need for addressing and implementing futuristic solutions at the earliest, making it a success requires careful planning and flawless implementation. To ensure positive results with your best effort, here are a few important tips for successful digital transformation for healthcare organizations like yours.
Set Clear Goals
Before setting off on the digital transformation journey, know what you’re trying to achieve and why you need to do it. Define an operating model that showcases the future state of technology, organization, and governance landscape. Clearly portray what the journey should look like. Find answers to what healthcare services of your organization improve customer experience and how you are going to enhance it with digital transformation.
Once the big picture is clear, it becomes easier to become successful. The documents, processes, and management activities, everything should be connected and self-organizing.
Build Service-oriented Software/Applications
When you’ve defined your goals and priorities, the next important task is to come up with ideas for targeted services for customers and administrative users. You may need to reassess workflows, processes, and end-to-end activities that need to be automated, personalized, or virtualized using real-time insights.
Using agile development approaches, customer experience design, and data sciences will help you see better results. A reliable development partner like us will guide you with these decisions and executing plans.
Modernize Existing Digital Resources
Healthcare organizations/service providers like you should keep assessing and modernizing their IT infrastructure and digital resources. Complex and outdated legacy systems can restrict the seamlessness that you expect with digital transformation. Revamping your existing software and modernizing your IT foundations is key to ensure continuous and consistent results of digital transformation.
Strengthen Core Operations And Management Capabilities
When you’re expecting transformation on a greater level, it’s crucial to maintain and strengthen the core areas within your organization. This requires you to assess staffing requirements, specific skill sets, training and other employee requirements. Having the right team within the organization ensures optimum use of applications you’re planning to implement as a part of digital transformation.
Best Ways to Implement Digital Healthcare Solutions
There are different types of digital healthcare solutions that can be implemented across various verticals to improve efficiency, patient care, and experience. This is the ultimate goal of digital transformation in the healthcare industry after all. If you’ve ever been questioning how you can implement digital solutions to enhance your healthcare services and medical care, we’ve listed down some of the best ways to do so.
Patient Portals
This is one of the major use cases for digital healthcare solutions. Patient portals allow quick and convenient access to important data. These platforms can help patients and doctors:
- Review health records
- Check prescriptions
- Schedule/manage appointments
- Access health reports
- Share data easily
Patient portals remain the primary engagement tool for many healthcare systems. Implementing a competitive, reliable solution can take you a long way.
We built Residenciales to maintain health related information of Geriatrics staying at old age homes. To know more, view project case study →
Telemedicine And Virtual Visits
Virtual doctor visits and telemedicine apps have witnessed the most notable change especially after the pandemic. As per a survey, around 83% patients are willing to use telemedicine. Many organizations have started implementing digital transformation strategies where patients use virtual visits on a regular basis. Therefore, creating solutions that let patients make virtual doctor visits and get prescribed medicines online shall keep them engaged and meet their expectations of convenient care.
Healthcare Wearables
People are now actively looking for convenient ways to track their health and prevent diseases instead of visiting doctors. This tremendous growth in health conscious population has resulted in a spike in the popularity of healthcare wearables. Integrating innovating tech into these devices can bring in great results for patients and healthcare services providers.
These solutions are being widely used as fitness trackers, heart rate trackers, oximeters, etc. Implementing wearable technology in healthcare can help make real-time data and metrics more accessible along with a lot of other benefits.
Connected Ambulance
These solutions collect data from wearables, sensors, and HD cameras and share it with the healthcare teams while the patient is transported to the hospital. This proves to be a great assistance as doctors have all the vital information before the patient even reaches the hospital. This way, doctors can begin the treatment without wasting time and even guide the paramedics while the patient is on the way.
Disease History Analysis
There are various tools available to help doctors analyze a patient’s medical history and give better treatment recommendations. Such solutions make it possible and easier to offer personalized care and treatment plans to get the best results.
The above-mentioned solutions may be the best ways to digitalize healthcare in accordance with your services. However, there are many healthcare software/app ideas to enrich your organization and engage patients with the latest technologies.
Top 7 Trends For Digital Transformation in Healthcare
Technology and innovation has made a significant impact on the healthcare industry, revolutionizing healthcare practices to a great extent. Healthcare service providers who are focused on strengthening their startups and medical care facilities should be aware of the emerging tech and how to use it in the best way. Here are the high-rising technologies and trends for digital transformation in healthcare.
On-Demand Healthcare Services
Healthcare mobile apps are ascending into a new era as most patients turn to their smartphones to seek on-demand healthcare services. These solutions are not just user-centric. They also enhance the way of management and operations for doctors, physicians and hospitals by allowing them to connect with their patients easily.
Use Of Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality has been playing an intrinsic part in the modern healthcare ecosystems. It is being used to treat chronic pain, PTSD, stroke, etc. especially in countries that struggle with the perils of drug crisis. From healthcare providers to pharma everyone is utilizing VR for devising strategies, better treatment and care.
Medical IoT
Medical IoT is rapidly developing despite its complexities. The North American medical IoT market is expected to account for the largest share of the global market in 2023. From simple tracking solutions to complicated automations, medical IoT is being used extensively. It’s a pillar for smart hospitals that are keen on improving efficiency, providing patient-centric care and achieving clinical excellence.
Big Data
The healthcare sector is all set to leverage the benefits of big data to bring in rapid growth. By converting unstructured and structured data into meaningful insights, Big Data offers various benefits to healthcare organizations. These include: making less medication errors, analyzing staffing requirements, and facilitating strategic planning.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can revolutionize the healthcare industry and services by enhancing diagnosis accuracy, offering effective treatment strategies, and improving patient outcomes. It is being widely used for diagnostic tools, drug-discovery tools, and personalized medicines applications.
Telehealth
Offering benefits like video conferencing, remote patient monitoring, virtual appointments, etc., telehealth is changing the way patients and doctors interact. Telehealth solutions can be clubbed with wearables and IoTs to track patient activity and manage any risks.
Voice Technology
With the surge in use of voice search features by people for most of the things they want to do, the healthcare industry isn’t going to be an exception. There are organizations implementing voice-search enabled EHR Systems to support administrative tasks and clinical intelligence. According to a survey, 65.9% of healthcare voice search use cases involve local search; finding a doctor, physical therapist, hospital, clinic, urgent care center, etc.
Utilizing these technologies and trends will ensure that you meet patients’ expectations of convenient healthcare and yield the best results. However there are some potential challenges you must be aware of. Let’s discuss them briefly in the next section.
Challenges To The Digital Transformation In Healthcare
Healthcare service providers are rapidly making an effort for digital transformation. However, there are various potential challenges that often slow down this pace or block progress. According to a survey by Deloitte, 60% of healthcare organizations are only midway through their digital transformation. Thus, it’s necessary to have a plan ready to combat the roadblocks on your digital transformation journey.
Here are the most common challenges when digitally transforming healthcare.
Data Privacy
While the industry rapidly progresses towards electronic health records software and digital systems, the risk of data breaches and cybersecurity thefts remains prevalent. It would be crucial to take necessary data security measures to keep a check on cybersecurity and data breaches. This is an important factor when trying to win over the trust of your patients.
Distributed Workforce
With the merging telemedicine trends and its increasing adoption among patients and healthcare service providers, the healthcare domain has become dynamic and distributed. Implementing new health strategies cause the risk of improper worker authentication and unauthorized access. Therefore, it’s important to have a proper architecture to connect healthcare providers with the patients.
Resistance to Change
There are times when healthcare professionals are reluctant to embrace change and adopt new technologies. It’s important to accept innovation and effective management strategies to improve the overall scenario of healthcare services.
Embark On Your Healthcare Digital Transformation Journey With Us
Digital transformation in healthcare comes with various perks and even challenges. However, with a reliable healthcare software development partner you can make it successfully to the other end.
Narola Infotech is a team of 350+ experienced professionals and skilled developers who can guide you through analysis, planning, and execution of robust digital solutions to take your healthcare services to better realms. During the past 18 years, we have served 1500+ clients from across 50+ countries.
From healthcare, fintech, to real estate and other industries we provide you with competent services and niche expertise that is visible in our work. Trust us with your project? Share your details in the contact form below and relax while we revert back (it won’t take more than 24 hours).