Digital Healthcare: The Current State and the Way Forward
- SolvEdge
- Oct 12, 2021
- 4 mins read
The past year has witnessed some extreme circumstances that changed the global healthcare landscape forever and steered Hospitals and Practices in taking innovative approaches to virtual care delivery, thereby shining a spotlight on digital health.
Digital Health: The Pre-Covid Scenario
The Digital healthcare industry, pre-covid was much different from the current state. Some of the key drivers were the affordability, inequitable healthcare access, uneven outcomes, increased need for healthcare services and ageing population amongst other factors. Considering that global healthcare leaders site digital innovations like Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) platforms, digital patient engagement solutions, care coordination software combined with next-gen technologies including Internet of Things (IoT), Big data, Artificial Intelligence strategies like Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) are essential for healthcare and play a significant role in accelerating their digital transformation journeys. 86% of them ranked this mission critical to success of the overall clinical, operational and financial performance.
Digital innovation can augment clinical, operational and financial excellence in many ways, some of which include faster access to services, early screening, detection & prevention, better health outcomes, greater patient engagement through remote care services, all of which are the critical needs of the hour in the current state of the healthcare ecosystem.
The Digital Future
Smart Care – Precision medicine, robotics, medical printing
Care Anywhere – Connected homes, virtual care, broader access
Empowered Care – Patient-centered, active decision making, data ownership
Intuitive Care – Powered by data-driven solutions
Remote patient monitoring – Augmented by real-time data for maximized efficiency
Key Considerations for Healthcare Managers
- Shift focus from managing inputs to delivering outputs
- Analyze resources and identify capabilities needed to succeed in future
- Create a culture of innovation
- Focus on patient experience
- Liberate data sources
- Invest in data processes and frameworks
- Establish interoperability between key stakeholders
Digital Health: What’s in Store for the Future?
The past year reemphasized the significance of virtual care, thereby bringing digital innovation, especially remote patient monitoring—powered by real-time tracking to the forefront. From mitigating the effects of COVID-19 to providing remote care to self-isolated patients, while still delivering essential care to patients not affected by COVID, we saw the evolution of telehealth solution from a convenient choice to an essential necessity.
As we look ahead, digital health will continue to play a transformative role in terms of enabling 360-degree view of critical data, delivering real-time actionable insights that facilitate timely interventions and care, and ultimately boosting the Patient Satisfaction Index (PSI).
Inpatient care is extensively integrated with digital components to drive operational efficiency, accelerate outcomes and enhance patient-physician experience. Patient management solutions will increasingly adopt intuitive digital strategies to promote collaborative, connected and cohesive care across the healthcare continuum. Telemedicine software will leverage the capabilities of predictive and prescriptive analytics to broaden the horizons of the virtual world of care.
Moving forward, it is essential that care pathways integrate a strategic blend of AI-powered intelligence, analytical data that drive actionable insights, IoT-enabled digital devices, and other combination of technologies to accelerate quality of care in the world of value-based care and population health.
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