When it comes to digital transformation, the healthcare industry can be said to have taken to digitalization as a duck takes to water. Today, the healthcare industry comes third in the roll call of industrial sectors with the highest digitalization adoption rate. The 2020 statistics paint a picture of the symbiotic relationship between digital transformation technologies and the healthcare industry. 92% of healthcare centers have adopted digitalization and this adoption is expected to yield returns of approximately $34billion in the US.
So, what does the admirable adoption rate mean for the industry? According to the World Economic Forum, the majority of healthcare facilities rely on digital transformation to improve patient engagement which is just one facet of the benefits digitalization brings. 2021 is expected to be the year when the healthcare industry continues to expand its digital transformation initiatives to deliver precision medicine, gain intelligence into facility operations, among other services.
Improve Big Data Analysis to Deliver Precision Medicine
Improving patient care is one of the most important aspects of medicine where patients demand growth. According to the Washington Post, the quality of healthcare patients receives defer according to parameters such as a patient’s environment, lifestyle, and in extreme cases, race. The integration of digitalization technology with the ability to analyze large data sets is expected to deliver precision medicine.
What exactly is precision medicine? Precision medicine refers to emerging approaches for disease treatment and prevention where a patient’s environment, genes, and lifestyle are analyzed to predict optimized treatment plans. Precision medicine relies on analyzing available patient data to make accurate predictions and health centers that experience high on-demand traffic generate big data sets from patients.
Digitalization technologies such as cloud computing solutions, AI, and machine learning provide expandable resources to analyze data sets from thousands of patients to make an accurate analysis. The correct analysis that leads to precision medicine will then eliminate the one-size fit all approach to treating patients which have been highlighted as problematic.
Improved Data Security
The stories of data breaches where millions of patient records have been accessed by hackers have become familiar to just about everyone. Today, the hacking tools capable of bringing down digital healthcare systems are sold for approximately $30 on the dark web which everyone has access to.
Improving security to protect sensitive healthcare data is one benefit the continued adoption of digital transformation solutions brings to the industry. Cybersecurity tools such as security information and event management (SIEM) platforms provide stakeholders with the tools to develop a security operations center to track cybersecurity incidents in real-time and mitigate them.
Digital transformation technology also supports the integration of compliance and regulatory policies for data processing. Applying transformative tools can enforce regulations that ensure health centers do not keep sensitive patient data ‘lying around’ for hackers to steal and sell on the web.
Capacity Planning, Resource Management, and Strategy Development
The Covid-19 pandemic put to rest every theory about the developed world’s ability to handle infectious diseases on a global scale. Available resources such as protective equipment, respirators and bed spaces were maxed out as patients thronged hospitals in unexpected numbers. The increased influx of patients left decision-makers speechless and unable to decide the appropriate measures to take to cater for them.
To manage the influx of patients at the peak of the pandemic, the healthcare industry increased its reliance on digital technologies by 15%. Once again, the increase focused primarily on patient engagement leaving capacity planning and resources management behind. But this should have never been the case. Digital transformation technologies such as simulation modeling and risk-based scheduling software are intelligent planning tools with the capacity to solve the most complex problems.
One example of its application is the infectious disease model developed using Simio. The simulation modeled a healthcare center including its operational assets such as available PPE, ventilators, and bed space against patient influx. Results for the simulation could help the average health center make projections concerning the number of additional resources required to meet increased patient demand. Surgery simulations and surgery risk-assessment to determine the success rate of surgical interventions or to evaluate diverse scenarios within the surgery room are also use cases for simulation modeling.
Simulation modeling has been used in diverse capacity across the healthcare sector over the years but with the increased application of data capturing devices, more can be accomplished. Simulation models can ingest IoT data to improve precision medicine initiatives, capacity planning, and evaluating decisions before they are made.
Exploring Virtual Care
The connected worker, intelligent devices, and connected facility are expected to play important roles in bringing the dream of a virtual care facility to reality. Virtual care is expected to improve on-demand healthcare while reducing the number of patients in need of in-house care. Digital transformation provides the tools for delivering optimized real-time virtual care thus, relieving the workload of healthcare professionals.
The digital twin has been identified as a transformational technology with the ability to support the delivery of virtual care. The digital twin is expected to monitor individual assets such as med-tech devices or facility-wide equipment such as respirators, CT or MRI scanners using the data they produce. The ability to monitor these assets provides room for monitoring the patients using them to deliver virtual care in real-time.
Conclusion
As digital transformation technologies continue to mature, multiple use cases or application opportunities within the healthcare industry will be explored. Healthcare service providers are expected to continue pushing the envelope to determine how digital transformation technologies will change healthcare in the future.