What is going on in Healthcare I.T. ?

Technology innovation is fundamentally changing our lives and the way we do business. As the pace of innovation rapidly accelerates, the promise of exponential increases in business efficiency are intriguing to many organizations seeking to harness this power to deliver better customer experience through automation, cloud technology, and friction-less data exchange. However, especially in a highly regulated market like healthcare, organizations seeking to take advantage of this changing landscape and myriad of new offerings must balance efficiency gains with key factors like patient privacy and security. While technology leaders and the populous press alike paint a picture that a massive sea change underway and that everyone is migrating to these new offerings, I sought to better understand what key innovations were actually taking hold amongst the healthcare community and at what stages they are being adopted by your healthcare peers. Accordingly, I polled healthcare professionals, about their technology spend and investment focus to better understand where they are today and where they need to be. It’s clear technology is driving major transformations and this report will cover a variety of topics that are top of mind in the healthcare IT space, including Digital Transformation, Cloud / Hybrid Architecture, Artificial Intelligence, and Health Information Exchange. 

One thing was abundantly clear from my survey:

Securing the “Internet of Things” is a high priority. With a massive uptick in cyber security incidents and breaches protecting sensitive patient and business data is of the utmost importance. No IT executive wants to be the next headline about a security breach.

Other Key Highlights include:

Digital Transformation

I asked if organizations were undergoing any kind of digital transformation. “Going paperless” was a major focus. Also using automation to make existing processes more efficient and highly scalable was a major business objective. Business leaders are driving some major investment in using technology to streamline operational processes to drive down costs while simultaneously increasing productivity. 

Cloud Model

About 15% of workloads today are being delivered in a hybrid cloud model, with no respondents doing cloud only at this time. Traditional license / maintenance software models are decreasing as more companies align software spend to operational costs, with 75% of software now being procured via a SaaS delivery model.  

Artificial Intelligence

Most respondents believe Artificial intelligence will become an important technology in the next few years, delivering significant cost savings for your businesses. Although, at present, most of you are still in the exploratory phase, actively looking into how to integrate this into your business workflows and not deploying it in production.  

Health Information Exchange

An electronic health care exchange is a priority for your organizations and demand is growing. However, given states don’t yet have a fully functional way to facilitate the exchange, there aren’t many live deployments yet. 

disclaimer: the view in this article are that of my own and do not necessarily represent those of 3-D.