Ahead of the Curve - Digital Transformation in Healthcare

It’s nothing you haven’t heard before, but it’s worth emphasizing. Innovative products are critical to staying relevant in healthcare. The focus should be on offerings that are more personalized and consumer-driven, whether that means specialty products or targeting a specific demographic. People’s expectations, coupled with shifts in consuming healthcare and recent law changes, have made a lot of the big healthcare consumers much less prevalent. Smaller healthcare players are able to focus their attention on new age products that never existed before, particularly around preventative care and wellness advice. Personalization will drive the latest batch of products and those who capitalize on the trend first will win.

#2 – But What Does It Actually Cost?

From a healthcare insurance perspective, educating your consumer base around actual costs is a huge element driving digital transformation. After a major surgery, you could end up receiving 17 different bills – one from the hospital for the operating room, one from the physician for a particular piece of equipment, and so on. These fractured pieces are completely confusing and, for most consumers, that's the standard experience. In no other industry is this tolerated and it won't last much longer for healthcare, either. Someone needs to stitch the whole experience together to create greater visibility and remove all of the waste throughout the process. It's no small feat, but this broader coordination of care will help educate consumers about costs and truly transform the industry. 

#3 – Independence Day

Independence of health information at large is an important piece of digital transformation. At some point in the future, the day will come that consumers have the ability to own their medical records and history, versus relying on various clinics to hold onto those records. Once that shift occurs, it will give consumers greater freedom and ability to choose how and where they consume their healthcare services.

#4 – Keep It Simple

Similar to the challenge of understanding healthcare costs is the difficulty consumers have of understanding the actual product. Healthcare providers and insurance companies need to focus major efforts on simplifying their product offerings and providing consumable education. It shouldn’t take someone a full day to sift through their EOB to understand what they do or do not have.

#5 – To the Cloud!

This will likely cause the most uneasiness to those in the healthcare industry, but based on the technology trends and the unequivocal transformation it will provide, healthcare companies need to take the opportunity to manage their data in the cloud. Yes, this brings about different security challenges, but the outcomes are well worth it. Utilizing the cloud will make things flow more fluidly, reduce the time of new products to market, and create greater ability to scale. All of those outcomes would be very hard to obtain if you attempt to build a classic data center with everything housed internally. Don’t put yourself in a position where you’re on a platform that is 15 – 20 years old and migration is no longer an option…it’s an all-out re-do. Stay on the right side of the bleeding edge – harvest what’s new out there without necessarily testing all the details on your own. You don’t want to be left behind!