Room for Innovation in Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is a huge buzz word in the world of healthcare at the moment. With the pandemic, we had to scramble to find a digital way to do many things in order to stay safe. So in a lot of ways, healthcare has been skyrocketed into the future, but there is still room for improvement. For some organizations, being rushed to find a digital solution has left certain areas unsupported. This rush also means that not all organizations have adopted the same practices that patients have grown to love and are now trying to catch up. So while we have made huge progress in the world of digital transformation, there is still much to do.

In order to get a grasp on what there still needs to be done or areas that can be improved, we reached out to our Healthcare IT Today Community to get their input. The following is what they had to say on digital innovations in digital transformation.

Angie Franks, CEO at ABOUT Healthcare

In a post-COVID era, the demand for care has increased exponentially, placing an unprecedented strain on medical resources and exposing the implications of the independent, transactional care delivery model. As technology innovation continues to drive digital transformation, providers will need to implement controls that proactively guide patients to the optimal care setting rather than just dealing with them when they arrive at a facility. When the boundaries to care are no longer limited to a specific hospital or health system, healthcare becomes more ubiquitous, and providers can ensure prompt access to care at every stage of the patient journey. And compressing the time to care promotes optimal patient outcomes, which is the ultimate objective.

Matt Donahue, CTO at CloudWave

Digital transformation is a trend that’s already in progress and already having impact. Telehealth has benefited the most from the advancement of clinical decision support tools for symptomology but it will only improve. AI will help us make better clinical decisions in all areas including population health. However, digital transformation is not without risk. Everything we digitize from apps or workflows increases our cyber security attack space or introduces another attack vector. If we don’t pursue digital transformation in a deliberate or careful manner, we will find ourselves running over a cliff ledge.

Brandon Clark, Chief Strategy Officers at Equality Health

Far too often, “digital transformation” is characterized as new technology that will supplant or overhaul a broken healthcare system. What this notion fails to acknowledge is the “non digital” innovation that drives improved health outcomes — integrated clinical teams, whole-person care models, and addressing the social determinants of health, among others. Digital innovation is most transformative when it is thoughtfully deployed to enable, accelerate and amplify the impact of the people at the heart of our healthcare system.

Dr. Jeff Bullard, Chief Medical Officer & Chief Product Strategy Officer at Stellus Rx

Digital transformation must mean more than digital evolution. Making the traditional healthcare model more digitally accessible and convenient isn’t enough. Here’s our chance to evaluate the healthcare experience at-large and build it around the needs and the goals of patients and providers. We can improve outcomes for all, but only if we build solutions that nurture the element of healthcare that’s often been most conspicuously missing: personalized attention in the moments that matter.

Vince King, Chief Commercial Officer at TailorMed

Healthcare affordability has traditionally been a challenge solved one patient at a time; however, digital technologies are revolutionizing affordability. Instead of looking at patients on a case-by-case basis, data and analytics now allow providers, pharmacies, and other healthcare organizations to proactively examine patient populations at scale. Implementing financial navigation technology can identify patients who have previously been overlooked. This digital transformation helps patients afford the care they need and deserve, while improving healthcare organizations’ financial performance and reducing the administrative burden for staff. We are seeing a growing number of healthcare entities relying on technology workflows to proactively scale affordability.

Eric Walk, Chief Medical Officer at PathAI

When people become patients, why don’t we have the same access to our healthcare information as we have in all other aspects of our lives? The digital transformation of healthcare is about patients making the most informed decisions through seamless access to diagnostic information, therapy options, and health data. AI and clinical decision support innovations are helping doctors and their patients crystalize data into knowledge, empowering each one to champion their own healthcare journey.

Rob Cohen, CEO at Bamboo Health

Digital transformation in healthcare has allowed patient data to boom; however, fragmentation among physical health, behavioral health and social care remains, with data overload adding friction to an overwhelmed provider workforce. We must shift from simply sharing as much raw data as possible to providing specific, actionable insights to inform care. More streamlined intelligence can drive improvements in health outcomes and reductions in cost, as well as relieve administrative burdens.

Chris Evanguelidi, Director of the Enterprise Healthcare Market at Redpoint Global

To be able to fully uncover what digital transformation means it is interesting to start with what it used to mean. Looking back a decade ago, digital transformation was often used interchangeably to indicate technological innovation, often with the goal of improving therapeutic research and development, clinical and operational processes. It was more of a ‘back-office’ optimization. However, when we think about digital transformation today, it is much more holistic and externally focused. It empowers people, improves access to care and enhances patient experience to achieve better health and business outcomes. That is where we see digital transformation having a major impact on healthcare. Digital transformation that consumers are seeing in other verticals, like retail and banking, inform the requirements they are demanding of today’s payers and providers such as their expectation for relevant communications that span the entire healthcare journey.

Consumerism is one of the strongest driving forces of digital transformation and healthcare organizations are adopting different tools to enable patients to take a more active role in the care process. We see healthcare gravitating around the digital front door not only as the potential single-entry point and solution for streamlining the patient journey but also as a unified platform for data sharing and communication between patients, providers and payers. When answering the question, we should also look at the adoption.

We’ve come far but there is still a long way ahead of the digital front door. With proactive and personalized outreach from healthcare providers and payers we could accelerate the transformation process further. While digital front doors have given patients virtual options for care, many of these solutions were stood up quickly during COVID and not fully integrated as part of the healthcare ecosystem. Moving forward it will be critical to find ways to keep reforming these tools, deepening integration and enabling seamless interactions to keep pace with the expectations of the modern healthcare consumer.

Tathagata Dasgupta, Founder and President at 4D Path

Digitization is transforming pathology services by increasing efficiency and advancing the promise of precision medicine. In oncology, image-based computer-aided diagnostic solutions could enable a faster, more accurate, more efficient approach to personalized cancer diagnoses. Such diagnoses could ultimately provide biomarker profiling and prognostication information to accelerate and democratize precision medicine. To unlock such possibilities, a science-driven, biologically explainable solution is needed that is easy to integrate in the current standard of care and simple to validate.

Scott King, Chief Technology Officer at Vibe Health by eVideon

Digital transformation is as much about modernizing the care environment as it is about improving the way healthcare consumers search for and find care. It requires us to train ourselves to not think about systems in isolation, but to always be asking how systems can work together to produce a better net effect. We must think outside the EMR, so to speak, and ask ourselves what else is possible now that we have this tool with robust data and workflows, what else can we do to transform the experience around us for our patients and our staff.

Amanda Bury, Chief Commercial Officer at Infermedica

Recent investments in digital health have created new opportunities for consumer-centric experiences. However, the next horizon in digital transformation, led by AI-powered tools, will unlock a completely reimagined patient experience. These interactions, guided by clinically-validated digital front doors, will make it easier for consumers to be in control of their healthcare decisions and to be directed to appropriate medical services. Success will be measured through improved clinical outcomes, increased operational efficiency, and reduced cost burden on the health system.

Andrew Rickman, Chair and CEO at Rockley Photonics

Continuous and real-time health monitoring from a wearable device is the next evolution for digital health. I believe that bringing laboratory diagnostics to a wrist-worn device that provides non-invasive and continuous measurement of multiple biomarkers, will transform patient monitoring and healthcare. With the increasing desire for people to take a more proactive role in managing their health and wellness, there is a rapidly growing need for meaningful and actionable insights to help people make better-informed decisions. I believe this need can be satisfied by wearable devices with advanced biosensing technology that continuously monitors multiple biomarkers, including core body temperature, body hydration, blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen, alcohol, glucose, and lactate.

Alan Stein, Chief Commercial Officer at HealthEdge

Through digital transformation, health plans are entering the consumer market in new ways and engaging them early; proactively reaching them rather than waiting until they become unhealthy. Consumers demand interaction and personalized experiences from their health insurance plans for the first time, a stark contrast to what used to be. I hope I never interact with my health plan. Ultimately, the backbone of this transformation for health plans is crystalizing the data they use to interact with consumers and meet the new needs of our digital world to ultimately provide better clinical outcomes.

Lars Schwaebe, Information System Security Officer at Issio Solutions

Data will drive the 21st century. With the proliferation of electronic health records and the incorporation of other digitized healthcare management and administrative tools into day-to-day processes, huge quantities of data are being captured. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the weaknesses of the modern healthcare system, which is prone to staff burnout and resource waste. The next evolution in healthcare operations and administration will be the use of AI and machine learning to synthesize those data into actionable insights that guide decision-making, increase efficiency, and improve the healthcare environment for patients and providers alike.

So much to consider! Let’s give a thank you to our Healthcare IT Community for sharing their insights and comment your thoughts on this topic down below!

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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