How Digital Transformation is Reshaping Healthcare Industry

Digital! Digital! Everywhere! Buzzword of this decade!

The entire world is talking about going digital:

• Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia is giving access to information Digitally!
• Facebook, Twitter, Instagram is increasing social interactions Digitally!
• LinkedIn is helping in professional networking Digitally!
• eBay, Amazon have opened marketplaces and transactions are happening Digitally!
• iTunes, YouTube is delivering visual content Digitally!

In today’s world, Healthcare industry is the integration of various sectors within the wider socio-economic landscape. The sectors are divided into providers of goods and services that treat patients with curative, preventive, rehabilitative, and palliative care. Being one of the fastest and largest growing industry, sectors under this health care system are broadly classified into 4 sub-segments (at least for the sake of this discussion of Digital Transformation);

• Healthcare services and facilities (doctors, nurses, hospitals)
• Medical devices, equipments, and hospital supplies manufacturers
• Medical insurance, medical services and managed care
• Pharmaceuticals & Related Segments

All these sectors are interlinked and work together to provide medical facilities and services that include but not limited to various lab tests, treatment, rehabilitation and therapies. 

Types of Healthcare Models

With lives at stake, healthcare industry needs to function precisely, executing high-quality services every day, every hour and every minute. Hence, it is of utmost importance that all the sectors in healthcare arena build a partnership to develop a value based patient-centric system. The objective of this system is to deliver the highest quality of care and greatest customer (patient) satisfaction. With the requirement varying from patient to patient depending upon their health problems and needs, the health care is divided into various models. Few of those are briefly described here:

Primary Healthcare Model – In this model, a primary care physician (PCP) also known as a family doctor or general practitioner in the past, is considered as patient’s main doctor. They are responsible for addressing most of the patient’s healthcare needs. PCP will examine patient’s health and determine the medical conditions. If the patient has developed a complex medical condition, PCP will refer the patient to the appropriate specialist like surgeons, psychiatrist, cardiologist etc. to manage the chronic health condition.

But selecting a PCP for a health check-up can be a task. Who can provide better analysis and treatment at an optimized cost? Well, Independent Practice Association (IPA) is a business entity that can help the patient by providing comprehensive services, within a specialty or in a specific geographic area, demonstrate high-quality outcomes, assume the risk and provide unique, innovative or collaborative health care services.

IPA forms an association of independent physicians, or other organization that contracts with independent physicians, and provides services to managed care organizations on a negotiated per capita rate, flat retainer fee or negotiated fee-for-service basis. There are many potential benefits of choosing an IPA;

• Appropriate alignment of physicians
• Influence within the medical community
• Peer support
• Optimized facilities
• Improved services including extended hours, urgent care, outreach services for prevention and follow-up expertise
• Ability to negotiate favorable contracts with other entities such as MCOs, ACOs, radiology, laboratory, and hospital systems

Secondary Healthcare Model – This type of healthcare model varies from one country to another. In secondary healthcare, medical care is provided to patients by a specialist upon referral by a primary care physician. In some countries, patients cannot directly take secondary care because of the imposed restriction of referral on a patient in terms of payment. This type of model is further categorized into District Health System and Country Health System.

Apart from the above-discussed healthcare models, the other two known forms of healthcare organizations that are providing value and helping patients in the USA with all their medical needs are Accountable Care Organization (ACO) and The Centres for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

ACO, as a concept, can be generally defined as a group of healthcare providers, potentially including doctors, hospitals, health plans and other healthcare constituents, who voluntarily come together to provide coordinated high-quality care to patients. The goal, especially for the chronically ill, is to get the right care at the right time.

CMS, on the other hand, is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service that oversees many federal healthcare programs, including those that involve health information technology such as the meaningful use of incentive program for Electronic Health Records (EHR).

Based on all the information shared above in this write-up, we see the complexity involved in this whole process of medical service providers. This calls for ICT (Information & Communication Technology) enablement or, in terms of in-vogue phrase, “Digital Transformation” of the healthcare industry.

Digital Transformation in Healthcare Industry

The ongoing impact of digital in the healthcare domain has greatly revolutionized the industry. By 2020 the healthcare industry is projected to generate more than 24,000 petabytes of data. Healthcare is rapidly moving towards a digital-first environment placing unprecedented demands on healthcare IT departments and their ability to simultaneously deliver stable services while fuelling innovation. As healthcare moves to a model of anytime, anyplace, continuous and personalized care, it is important to identify the key technologies that will enable this transition. Adopting a new technology today is not enough, a clear digital strategy should be formulated for the entire organization.

Digital Transformation draws attention to how data is handled flowing through all the systems in a healthcare organization. There are at least 4 (among several others) most important aspects of data while implementing Digital Transformation initiatives: Data Collection, Data Synchronization, Data Analytics and Data Security

1.    Data Collection

Any industry’s future heavily depends upon the data collection and healthcare industry is no different. A lot of emphasis is being put on the data collection in the healthcare industry. Better analysis of healthcare data today has the potential to improve the healthcare cost and facilities for tomorrow.

Today, a wide range of data is collected by various healthcare entities both public and private via health surveys, administrative enrollment & billing records, medical records and other sources. Healthcare data is massive in size and is expected to grow dramatically in future. U.S. healthcare system alone is expected to reach zettabyte scale and, not long after, the yottabyte levels. All this data, when collected, qualify to be treated as “big data” in the healthcare industry.

But what to do with this data? This is really a billion dollar question! Analysis. Right! But before we analyze the data, we need the data in an organized fashion. While the collection of data requires robust technology, storing the valuable data also requires an equally poised technical solution. Here comes the role of tools like data warehousing. Enterprise data warehousing allows organizations to store, integrate, recall and analyze the information that can be later used for the betterment of healthcare services.

Some of the popular data warehouse tools that are being used currently: Amazon Redshift, AnalytiX DS, Microsoft SQL Server, Actian, Teradata etc.

2.    Real Time Update of the Information between Interconnected System and Data Synchronization

With laptops, smartphones and tablets at our disposal, the internet is accessible from everywhere. Patients today are smarter and they demand better access to healthcare information. Internet of Things in the healthcare market is estimated to hit $117 billion dollars by 2020. Various tools, devices and apps are connected to each other and servers that are continuously sending data to each other.

Real time synchronization and data accuracy are of utmost importance for the efficient & on-time treatment of the patient. Instant access to patient information means healthy, happier patients, as well as improved benchmarks for responding to patients. Healthcare industry is increasingly leveraging the Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) where permissions are granted to data using Global Location Numbers (GLNs).

Some of the popular distributors of GDSN are GS1, IBM, LANSA etc.

3.    Data Analysis with Business Intelligence

The opportunity and potential of big data in healthcare are huge; however, there remain challenges to overcome. The challenge is pooling (i.e. integration and alignment) of data from various sources and analyzing the data for accurate results. Processing this data using business intelligence tool helps to break down the data into more meaningful nodes/chunks. The end goal of big data analysis could be placed largely in two buckets: Discovery/Inference based analysis and Predictive analysis.

One such significant platform that is revolutionizing the big data analysis in the healthcare domain is the open source platform, Hadoop. Many companies (including AWS, Cloudera, Hortonworks, and MapR Technologies) have developed solutions based on open-source Hadoop platform. Though the operation of these tools requires a great deal of programming skills, the open source nature of Hadoop makes it a free of charge platform thus cutting down the cost and is much faster in processing the data as compared to others.

4.    Data Security

Medical data when hacked can lead to both material loss as well as endanger the lives of the people whose information is stolen. Digitization in healthcare not only drives to converting the data into digital form but also calls for the efforts to make it secure. While the digitization of medical records will allow for quicker and more efficient way of retrieving the information, the digital transformation brings with it a lot of challenges.

The increasing cyber-attacks (viz., ransomware etc.) are putting patient data and patient security under huge risk. With continuing rise in the events of healthcare data breaches have cost the industry a whopping $5.6 billion loss per year. Large enough to put a small to medium size practitioner out of business. Healthcare organization thus must invest towards making their data secured at every level, i.e., from data collection to data synchronization to data analysis and business intelligence. Securing the networks, connected devices, and all potential endpoints are of utmost importance.

Some of the popular data security tools used today are Microsoft Secure, AppDetectivePro, Symantec, Zenmap, F-Secure etc.   

Conclusion:

More people today are receiving healthcare on regular basis. Managing such huge demand needs technology intervention. Healthcare industry cannot anymore ignore the importance of digital transformation. We can say that the internet based digital solutions today have fundamentally revitalized the medicine and healthcare industry in many ways. The evolution in data, mobile and IoT technologies is working as a booster for the healthcare industry. A more customer-centric approach is being adopted today. The best patient care is only possible through the on-time access of data and its predictive analysis. Technology today places patients at the centre of the healthcare ecosystem. The future is bright, start investing in IT, the human race will be rewarded with amazing healthcare solutions through modern technology.