Digital Transformation in Healthcare 2021 — Technology Trends and Benefits

According to reports, only 7% of healthcare and pharmaceutical companies have implemented digital strategies, while for others it is around 18%. However, the current trend is indicating that both companies have started to realize the impact of digital solutions on their businesses. This post will throw light on the digital advancements and solutions that could help these companies offer seamless and unparalleled patient care.

Why digital transformation for healthcare

With a huge volume of patients visiting every health center, it is extremely critical for these institutions to adopt digital strategies and solutions to provide thorough and faster patient care. Especially, dealing with a massive volume of patient data and records is often challenging (often performed manually) for most health-based companies, impacting patient care. The companies have to engage with seasoned digital transformation services invest in digital solutions to provide faster and better service to patients.

Here are some of the common benefits digitalization offers to the healthcare industry.

• Seamless doctor-patient coordination
• Automated administrative tasks
• Secure data
• Access to real-time health information
• Relation between multiple healthcare specialists
• Collaborative studies and research
• Ease of online appointments
• Improved patient management
• Faster reach to caretakers or nurses throughout medical crises
• Control of medications
• Reduced manual mistakes
• Supercharged hospital evaluations
• Better revenue direction
• Improved clinical conclusions

Let’s dive deep to find out the top trends that are (will) impacting the healthcare industry and their benefits in the sections below.

On-demand healthcare

Today’s patients don’t prefer waiting in hospitals for long hours for fever or headache but take it to digital platforms for seeking immediate help. What if they can accomplish a better healthcare solution using the smartphone? Sounds crazy right! Yes, this is the reason why on-demand healthcare services have started to explode like anything.

Benefits

• Convenience
• Reduced healthcare spending & hospitalization
• Efficient interaction with patients
• Reduced paperwork
• Supplemental work for doctors

Big data insights

With a massive volume of data like financial, clinical, R&D, administration and operational data, available in the healthcare sector, big data insights can power them with meaningful actions to improve the overall operational efficiency of the industry.

Benefits

• Advanced patient care
• Improved operational efficiency
• Discovering the best cure for diseases
• Personalized and integrated communication
• Enhanced access to critical information
• Proactive equipment maintenance

Medical wearable devices

The introduction of wearable technology has taken the medical industry by storm and next time when you look at your watch, in addition to time you can even track the calories burnt while you’re sleeping/running. Isn’t that a boon! The biggest advantage of using wearable tech in healthcare is helping patients with data to gain control over their health outcomes.

Benefits

• Encourages proactive healthcare
• Keeps patients engaged
• Performs multiple functions
• Benefits healthcare providers and staff
• Helps monitors vulnerable patients

Virtual reality for doctors training

VR & AR in healthcare has opened the door for plenty of new opportunities. These technologies offer viable solutions to some of the most critical challenges of the healthcare system and power users with a plethora of diverse opportunities in areas like general diagnostics and medical training. AR and VR are two technologies that can offer new dimensions to treatments for delivering better patient care.

Benefits

• Psychological relief & treatment
• Data visualization/body mapping/interactive patient information
• Advanced diagnostics/risk assessment
• VR surgery run-through
• AR surgery assistance
• Medical education/Training (simulation)
• Doctor consultation
• Emergency navigation
• Highly-effective pain management
• Studying cancer in 3D
• Aiding recovery from brain injuries
• Nurturing social skills for children with autism
• Reducing symptoms of depression
• Helping veterans with PTSD
• Treatment for phobias
• Early detection of Alzheimer’s disease
• Identifying the early signs of schizophrenia

AI/ML in healthcare

AI offers an array of advantages for healthcare over clinical decision-making techniques. Implementation of AI and ML in the industry can enable physicians, doctors, and patients with more precise and accurate data, allowing them to gain unprecedented insights into diagnostics, care processes, treatment variability, and patient outcomes.

Benefits

• Mind-mapping through brain-computer interfaces
• Developing next-gen radiology tools
• Expanding services across developing or underdeveloped regions
• Minimizing electronic health record use
• Preventing antibiotic resistance risks
• Precise analytics data for pathology images
• Empowering with intelligence for medical devices, machines
• Advancing immunotherapy for cancer treatments
• Transforming EHR into a potential risk predictor
• Health monitoring through wearables tech and personal devices
• Converting selfies into powerful diagnostic tools
• Enabling automated and accurate compliance
• Providing better decision making
• Predicting future diseases
• Preventing fraudulent billing

Robotics in healthcare

Robots help medical personnel perform routine tasks faster to help them focus on other pressing responsibilities. Such automation in healthcare makes medical procedures safer and less expensive for patients. The huge advantage of using robots in healthcare is to perform microsurgery, which humans find hard to handle.

Benefits

• Shorter hospitalization
• Reduced pain and discomfort
• Faster recovery time and return to routine
• Micro incisions, resulting in reduced risk of infection
• Reduced blood loss and transfusions
• Minimal scarring
• Greater visualization
• Enhanced dexterity
• Greater precision

Telemedicine

Telemedicines are a wonderful alternative for patients to overcome the distance between patient and provider, access to reliable transportation, fragmentation of care due to gaps in time barriers between appointments, and lack of healthcare provider. A recent survey indicates that 90% had already started developing or implementing a telemedicine program.

Benefits

• Increases access to care
• Improves patient care quality
• Reduces healthcare costs
• Improves patient engagement/satisfaction
• Enhances healthcare service provider satisfaction
• More convenient
• Extended access to specialist and referring physicians

Internet of medical things

Internet of Things (IoT) has started to impact the Healthcare Industry through smart connected-devices, systems, and things that are used by billions of users to leverage data and help them make more timely, specific, and contextualized decisions. IoT in the Healthcare industry has opened doors for many opportunities. According to a market forecast, The IoT Healthcare Market is worth $158.07 billion with 50 billion connected devices by 2020.

Benefits

• Lower costs
• Better patient experience
• Improved drug management
• Reduced errors and waste
• Improved treatment outcomes
• Real-time reporting and monitoring
• End-to-end connectivity and affordability
• Organized data and analysis
• Tracking and alerts
• Remote medical assistance
• Research

Cloud computing

Cloud computing offers a myriad of benefits to healthcare through its elastic and virtually unlimited scalability, high availability and accessibility of data at an affordable budget.

A BCC Research report published in January 2018 estimates that global spending by all healthcare stakeholders on cloud computing will reach $35 billion by 2022, at a double-digit cumulative annual growth rate of 11.6% over the 2017–2022 period.

Benefits

• High data availability, robust backup and disaster recovery capabilities
• Effective data security, protecting from unauthorized access and breaches.
• Proven compliance with regulatory frameworks
• Collaboration
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
• Data Storage
• Scalability
• Cost
• Security
• Greater reach, especially during times of disaster
• Better storage — lower cost
• Better use of big data to treat patients
• Improved medical research
• Remote patient care

Chatbots

The shortage of skilled staff has impacted delivering a better outcome for patients, and manual processes in this sector have compounded the challenges.

Healthcare industry leaders are turning to a wide range of technology solutions, and of them, a widely adopted are medical chatbots. If you are the healthcare organization’s leader, you would definitely love to implement medical chatbots for simplifying your healthcare challenges and improving patient care.

Benefits

• Provide answers to the FAQs of customers
• Schedule appointments and consultations from anywhere
• Track patients’ care to minimize unwanted appointments and admissions
• Notify patients with prescription refills and care guidelines through alerts and notifications
• Streamline admission, discharge, and transfer requests
• Alert teams during patient emergencies
• Store and update patients’ medical history and records
• Allow the exchange of data from currently disparate health systems
• Automate data entry to reduce man-made errors and duplicate entries

Data science and predictive analytics

Predictive analytics (PA) uses technology and statistical methods to analyze massive amounts of information to predict outcomes for individual patients. The information may be data from past treatment outcomes and the latest medical research published in top journals/databases.

Benefits

• Increases the accuracy of diagnoses
• Helps with preventive medicine
• Provides physicians with answers for every patient
• Provides staff and hospitals with predictions related to insurance product costs
• Allows researchers to develop prediction models for overtime accuracy
• Select the right hospital and clinic sites
• Optimize staffing levels and improve business operations
• Identify which households are most likely to respond to marketing messages
• Optimize new and existing business markets
• Support long term strategic planning initiative

From the above discussion, it is evident that digital solutions play a critical part in the evolution of healthcare and pharma companies. As more companies have started to invest in the digital strategy and solutions, finding the right partner for their unique needs becomes important. Looking for a partner? We can help!