Want to keep up with the digital revolution in the healthcare industry? Learn about emerging opportunities in digitization and the four core principles you need to follow to get the most out of these opportunities.
In This Article
Discover & Prioritize Key Value Sources
Develop Service Delivery Capabilities
Modernize Your Core IT Foundations
Strengthen Your Core Management Capabilities
In an era where consumer expectations for seamless digital experiences increasingly shape how we interact with businesses, the healthcare industry is no exception.
While technology has long been a core utility for healthcare companies, digitizing products and processes has transformed the game for everyone.
Many healthcare companies seek to integrate the latest technologies into their existing business models and IT architectures. This is to improve services while grappling with new entrants and regulatory concerns.
However, pharmaceutical and medical technology companies are typically slower to adapt than other sectors.
In this article, we will explore the changing healthcare landscape and the emerging opportunities in digitization. We will also share the four core principles you must follow to succeed with your digital transformation.
1. Discover & Prioritize Key Value Sources
To digitize your clinic, you must identify your unique value proposition and determine how digital technologies can enhance your day-to-day operations. This will help you prioritize your investments in digital technologies and development approaches to achieve your goals. Doing so will keep your focus in the right direction during the transformation process.
Engage customers in value-based relationships by providing targeted products and services.
Data Analysis
Pharmaceutical makers can build digital platforms to perform big data analysis, collect and analyze medical data, conduct synthetic clinical trials, manage market access, and accelerate research efforts.
In healthcare, you may want to reduce risk by accessing data sets that were previously not accessible. For example, by accessing information such as the cost of care, patient outcomes, and satisfaction scores, manufacturers could develop new types of contracts and risk-sharing models with service providers.
Say a patient undergoes joint replacement surgery. The implant used in the procedure accounts for only a small percentage of the total cost of care. The remaining significant expenses are hospitalization, post-operative care, and rehabilitation.
In that case, you could use big data analysis and shared data to optimize these other aspects of care and reduce the overall cost of care for joint-replacement surgeries. This could lead to more efficient and cost-effective healthcare delivery for patients.
Automation And AI
Use automation and robotics to break down silos between business units and functions, speed up processes and decision-making, and reduce administrative costs. These technologies include sensor-based equipment and the Internet of Things.
Artificial intelligence (AI) assistants can also be integrated into electronic health record (EHR) platforms to improve your value proposition. These AI assistants can assist primary care physicians (PCPs) with clinical decision-making during patient visits.
Say a clinician is speaking with a patient. The AI assistant can listen in and generate notes. The AI can also predict the clinical decisions the clinician might need to make based on the live conversation, providing clinical insights and recommendations in real-time.
This can improve the accuracy and efficiency of clinical decision-making and, ultimately, improve outcomes.
2. Develop Service Delivery Capabilities
To offer targeted digital products and services, understand user needs and re-imagine your workflow and processes. Use real-time insights to automate, virtualize, and personalize their activities end-to-end. Agile development, data sciences, and customer-experience design are useful approaches.
Agile development involves short, fast phases of development, prototyping, reassessment, and adaptation. Modify your organizational structures to be more product-oriented, improve interactions between business users and IT, redefine roles, and reconsider budget and planning models.
The agile approach can be combined with capabilities in data sciences and customer-experience design to develop and deploy products and services in weeks.
Combining agile operations with data science and customer-experience design can have significant results.
Device makers are creating better patient outcomes by wrapping digital solutions around their products, such as predictive diagnostics and early detection in patients with certain diseases.
Pharma companies use advanced analytics to discover new drugs or identify new uses for established ones.
3. Modernize Your Core IT Foundations
Assess your IT infrastructure's capability to support the required steps to optimize your processes. Typically, legacy technology systems become a significant barrier for healthcare companies seeking to adopt digital solutions.
The complex and aged systems are usually a patchwork of new and existing applications and gateways, leading to spaghetti code and fragmentation, which hinders speed and transparency in IT operations.
You must modernize your IT infrastructure to support strategic priorities and agile development.
Build a reliable data backbone that manages all data holistically, allowing quick and easy access to data sets. Data access should follow a single framework and harmonize data sets according to business use cases.
Consider adopting flexible IT infrastructures that incorporate software-as-a-service and cloud-based platforms.
Johnson & Johnson has been migrating most of its computing workload to a cloud-based platform and has been able to manage capacity, ensure network reliability, and control costs.
Connectivity should also be integrated into IT architectures by using sensors and other monitoring technologies to collect data from medical devices in the field.
Some manufacturers have created internal platforms to analyze real-world treatment data to prove efficacy, safety, and value.
Cybersecurity policies and infrastructures are also crucial to protect critical information.
Take the necessary steps to protect your digital assets. That includes the following:
Identifying the required steps and mapping them across the business value chain
Assessing risks
Identifying potential attackers
Locating weak points
Creating initiatives to address high-priority risks and gaps in control
Also, consider using even a VPN with a free trial to secure your digital assets from potential attackers. VPN solutions encrypt data in transit and at rest, which can help protect sensitive patient information from unauthorized access.
4. Strengthen Your Core Management Capabilities
Strengthen and maintain your capabilities in critical areas to successfully transform your projects and tasks. You need to develop a skilled internal team with expertise in digital technologies. You also may need to acquire top digital talent from outside the organization.
Assess and modify recruitment and retention processes to incorporate new skill sets, training needs, and employee requirements.
In the healthcare industry, a sense of mission and challenging work assignments may be more critical for attracting top talent than compensation.
Look beyond traditional sources of talent and develop partnerships with other healthcare companies and relevant industry clusters.
Another critical capability is in financial processes. Ensure investment priorities are clearly communicated, revisited regularly, and updated as needed, with sufficient capital available.
Some companies establish funds specifically for digital initiatives, separate from day-to-day budgets. A formal governance structure that is inclusive should be created, allowing internal and external stakeholders to weigh in on digital decisions.
You could also convene external advisory boards and create internal governance councils to address this need.
Wrapping Up
The healthcare industry is going through a revolutionary phase driven by digital transformation, catching the attention of CEOs and boards.
Digital natives, with their non-traditional approach and freedom from legacy constraints, pose a severe challenge to the established players in the industry.
However, the winners in digital health are rising to the challenge, embracing change, and taking advantage of the opportunities presented.
They are keeping pace with the changes in the healthcare marketplace and leading the way, positively impacting millions of people's lives.
This is an exciting time for business leaders like yourself in the healthcare industry. Embrace the change, be bold and innovative, and reimagine your organization as a digital enterprise.