Digital transformation in healthcare replaces conventional and outdated procedures with modern solutions and adopts the latest innovations and technologies.
If you are a patient or work in the healthcare sector, you’ll be glad to know that digitization in healthcare offers many promising benefits to enhance patient care and operational procedures while lowering costs and improving quality.
This article will help you understand the impact of digital transformation on healthcare, including some of the most important trends and technologies currently shaping healthcare.
What is Digital Transformation in Healthcare?
By utilizing cutting-edge technologies and techniques, digital transformation in healthcare aims to provide accurate assistance to patients, healthcare organizations, and healthcare professionals.
To maximize benefits, digital transformation is the involvement of the latest technologies and innovative techniques to cater the advanced solutions.
Key Digital Transformation Trends & Technologies in Healthcare
With the help of technology, healthcare has reached a new level where advancements in treatments, surgeries, and overall health have become possible. Below are the latest trends and technologies that are highly impacting today’s healthcare:
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Machine learning and AI technology offer several opportunities to the healthcare industry. Through machine learning, large medical data sets can draw insights that may be utilized to enhance patient outcomes and clinical decision-making, accelerate medical research, automate the daily workflows of healthcare professionals and boost operational efficiencies.
Much Artificial Intelligence work in the healthcare sector focuses on disease diagnosis.
AI algorithms are reshaping how diseases are diagnosed, from cancer to schizophrenia and psychosis to liver disease. To detect anomalies, machines are now being taught how to interpret CT scans and other imaging diagnostic procedures.
Importance of Big Data in Healthcare
Big data is an information technology that compiles information about a business from several sources, including e-commerce, financial transactions, social media, and online transactions, and discovers trends for future purposes.
The technology of big data can serve several advantages to the healthcare sector, including:
- The information acquired from big data analytics has a huge advantage since it provides a thorough clinical insight to the physicians. This powerful technology facilitates health professionals to treat patients by making accurate clinical decisions and prescribing effective treatments.
- Predictive analytics, in particular, considers the population-wide data for a specific location, identifies the segment of patients more vulnerable to disease, and provides recommendations for early diagnosis to prevent them.
- By estimating future admission rates using big data’s predictive analysis, hospitals and clinics can strategize and allocate the proper staff for patient care.
Wearables & Smartwatches
Wearables and smartwatches allow patients and healthcare providers to gather health information by wearing electronic medical devices.
Wearable devices have sensors in order to keep track of an individual’s physical activity and other health conditions.
The most common features of such devices are:
- Exercise Tracker
- Oximeters (to measure the oxygen rate in the body)
- Sweat metres (to diagnose blood sugar levels)
- Heart Rate Sensors
- Body Temperature
- Perspiration Sensors
Online Patient Portals
The primary aim of patient portals is to engage patients with the healthcare system and health professions virtually.
Patient portals are web applications or websites facilitating patients to access their medical information anytime from anywhere; Healthcare organizations are responsible for providing patient medical records through Patient Portals. The patient portal includes doctor notes, lab test results, immune information and a patient’s health history.
Let’s check out how online patient portals are beneficial to healthcare!
- Streamline administrative tasks and patient registration
- Boost clinical outcomes
- Better doctor-patient communication
- Quick access to important information such as educational materials or medical reports
- Build loyalty
- Have 24/7 access
Health Apps & Virtual Doctor Visits
From tracking your heartbeat and physical activity to speaking with your doctor via Skype, health apps and virtual doctor visits transform how we approach healthcare.
Usage of health apps and virtual doctor visits health apps is one of the most recent breakthroughs making information more readily available than ever before and streamlining the process of getting diagnosed by your physician wherever you are.
Multiple medical professionals have rapidly adopted this cutting-edge technology to provide better care at an affordable cost.
Here’s what patients, healthcare professionals, and the healthcare industry can expect from these types of services:
- Personalized health care: Virtual doctor visits through skype or any other application give patients worldwide the ability to get personalized medical advice without having to leave their homes.
- Cost-effectiveness: Nowadays, it is estimated that out-of-pocket hospital expenses for an individual with employer health coverage (about $4,000) could be eliminated if we all took advantage of the technology available to us. There is no need to travel hours just to be seen by a physician; instead, you can use your computer or your phone and have a virtual doctor visit via telehealth.
- Increased accessibility: Patients can now be seen by doctors through video calls or over the phone, which makes it much easier for those who live in rural areas or have trouble with transportation to access medical care.
Electronic Health Record (EHR)
Electronic health records (EHR) are digital systems that allow patients to access their medical records and provide healthcare professionals with instant access to patient information, making it easier to monitor patient health and maintain quality care.
While this technology has its benefits, EHR systems can be complex and costly to implement, making them difficult to justify in a corporate setting.
The key benefits of implementing an EHR system into your medical practice include:
Improve medical data organization.
- Enhance communication between doctors and patients.
- EHR facilitates increased profitability and revenue by eliminating expensive, paper-based.
- By implementing an EHR system, healthcare providers can easily track data from multiple sources and use them to compile health records, diagnoses, or procedures completed on a patient.
- EHRs provide 24/7 full digital access to patients’ records, where they can see all their health information. This includes everything from test results and physicians’ notes to prescriptions and family members’ medical information. Patients can share their health information with any doctor, hospital, or clinic with a single click.
- Doctors can view patients’ test results and prescriptions to offer the best care without waiting for a patient to come in for an appointment. Patients don’t have to remember every medication they are taking because their provider can access it through the EHR.
Implementation Of Blockchain Technology
Blockchain technology is an electronic public ledger that helps to record virtually everything of value and importance to humankind, from financial transactions to property titles to medical procedures and pharmaceutical research findings.
This blockchain technology can revolutionize healthcare by providing transparency and trust at every level of patient care and clinical research, leading to greater security, efficiency, and accuracy in the industry overall.
Medical data management can be cumbersome and even downright dangerous. On the other hand, Blockchain-based solutions offer a new way to solve these old problems.
Using this system, patients can see their data when needed, with their doctors, and from remote locations like their home or another country if needed. It also helps reduce administrative work for healthcare providers.
Advantages of Digital Transformation for Healthcare Organisations
In the digital age, healthcare organizations can serve their consumers conveniently. Due to technological advancements, people can easily interact with their healthcare providers remotely without interruptions.
Let’s find out the benefits of digital transformation for healthcare organizations!
- Enable access to the real-time health condition of a patient
- Provide data security using big data technology or cloud services
- Ease of online appointment with the patient
- Provide seamless experience of a doctor-patient coordination
- Modern technologies help diagnose patient’s health conditions easily
Advantages of Digital Transformation for Patients
As the healthcare industry becomes more digitized, patients will have more access to their medical records and treatment data. Patients who are better aware of their health conditions can play a more active role in their care. This will result in faster treatments as physicians determine what treatments patients have already tried and if any side effects may conflict with current treatments.
Let’s check the significant benefits of digital transformation for patients:
- More accurate health diagnosis and personalized treatment
- Easy access to the medical records of a patient anytime
- The usage of health wearables and smartwatches allows patients to keep a record of their health metrics
The Summary
Digital transformation is causing a significant transition in the healthcare sector. Healthcare professionals and patients must remain educated on the latest technologies for their betterment.
An effective healthcare digital transformation facilitates the implementation of new business models, new ways of thinking, and transparency to deliver better medical care and doctor-patient interaction effectively.
You can also get in touch with digital transformation consultancy companies in India to know more about the impact of digital transformation in the healthcare industry.
