Health Technology: How To Implement Digital Solutions?

Health Technology: There are many opportunities to insert digital technologies into health, but how do we leverage them? Technology has always been present in health equipment such as OPMEs and medicines.

Despite this, the sector’s low adherence to digital technologies, whether in terms of diagnosis and care or management, was noteworthy. The technologies most targeted by the segment are RPA, artificial intelligence, 5G, virtual and augmented reality, blockchain, IoT, and ERPs.

But as a traditionally reactive sector about digital technologies, the natural question is: how to leverage the use of technologies in health? That’s what we’ll see in this post.

The Opportunity For Digital Health Solutions

With a push from the pandemic, solutions that would take years to implement – ​​such as telemedicine, aimed at interoperability of medical platforms and patient portals or other direct contact systems – are already taken for granted in the short term.

Never before has technology applied to healthcare challenges been seen as the cornerstone for improving the patient experience and end-to-end care, creating new sources of growth and reducing costs. 

The applications even come with the endorsement of patients, who are increasingly receptive to the digitization of healthcare, and physicians, who are experiencing the value of the tools.

As a result, the first companies to move will probably be the first to be among the best able to shape the segment and reap the benefits of it. 

However, for a sector that is not usually proactive in innovation but rather reactive, leveraging health technologies will depend on action.

How To Leverage The Use Of Digital Solutions In healthcare Technology

Strategy

Simple technological adjustments will not systematically generate value. The potential applications of technology for healthcare involve the entire patient journey, from prevention to monitoring of the condition, so it is not possible to remain only in one part of the process.

However, it is necessary to be clear about the dimension of the transformation sought by the organization through technologies, as well as the business objectives and performance indicators that result from them. 

Having figures like a CIO and CTO will be necessary but insufficient, as technology alone does not lead to success. It is essential to identify the needs of the health system. It is not enough to delegate such a strategy to the technology team. CEO and other leaders of the business areas must be involved.

Identify Opportunities And Prioritize

If, on the one hand, the creation of a strategy will mean a comprehensive approach to technology, on the other hand, it will imply the need for prioritization. Mapping the main pains of patients, physicians, services, and providers and how digital technologies can solve them will provide the visibility needed to design new products and experiences for users – patients, doctors, or providers.

Similarly, doing POCs and pilots to get started quickly to see the value (or not) in an idea is another way to prioritize. But you can’t just stop there. It is necessary to gain scale, so it will be essential to develop the infrastructure.

Develop The Infrastructure

For healthcare technologies to gain traction and meet the needs of digital solutions, the industry will need to modernize the infrastructure that underpins existing business processes and the business strategy of the entire organization.

Few companies in the healthcare industry have the capabilities needed to implement digital technologies quickly in terms of IT infrastructure, integrations, and analytics capabilities.

For example, despite collecting a large volume of data, most health services still keep them in silos, isolated. As a result, data-driven solutions such as analytics are limited to individual use cases.

Accelerating the migration of systems kept in silos, which inhibit innovation and agility, to modern infrastructure, even if it is not an urgent change at first, will inevitably give scale, performance, availability, and security to digital solutions.

Review Your Operating Models

In many cases, organizations will need to review their processes to leverage the use of health technologies. Translating current streams into value stream maps will help build an understanding of the as-is and provide opportunities for improvements in a to-be scenario.

Transforming new processes through solutions will imply adopting MVPs and agile development methodologies to create validated learning in each iteration to meet the real needs of users.

Technology In Health: Adding To Care

These variables didn’t seem to be in the same equation: a better patient experience, new ways to generate growth, and be more sustainable. However, health services have already realized that technology can be the key to uniting and solving them. If the opportunities are many, leveraging technologies in an industry where innovation is always a reaction to a previous move can be difficult.

Also Read: What Is A Technological Advantage, And Why Invest In It?