How Digital Transformation Is Shaping the Healthcare Industry

 

It’s certainly an understatement to say that 2020 and 2021 were challenging times. These challenges forced us to re-imagine everything we do. The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped how caregivers live, learn, work and care for the sick. Healthcare must undergo a digital transformation to meet the needs of its patients and care staff.  

At the center of this transformation is the intersection of digital innovations and human interactions designed to securely and empathetically meet patient and frontline worker/caregiver demands. The key to success here is creating a strategy or orchestrating an experience to determine what should be a human interaction — and what doesn’t necessarily need to be. Innovating to reduce the repetition of interactions for both patients and healthcare frontline workers allows already stressed care teams to deliver critical services during far-from-normal times. This digital agility offloads patient efforts. 

A good first step to do this is to create a nuanced compassionate digital containment solution, such as a bot, to handle repetitive tasks you can easily automate, such as prescription refills, appointment reminders, referrals, delivery of lab results, patient identity verification, as well as more complex tasks like personalized nurse triage protocols. If designed properly, this automation also reduces patient frustrations. Frontend teams don’t have to handle these interactions and the patient doesn’t have to exert as much effort to complete care plan tasks. Ensuring the digital containment is personalized, humanized and nonlinear (i.e., not cold and robotic) is a key differentiator.  

It’s also critical to design digital experiences in these workflows to include human interactions, where needed. Healthcare must embrace human interactions with a digital face and voice on many occasions — but still keep it real. 

Delivering care to patients anywhere is also critical. The COVID-19 pandemic forced patients to embrace telehealth; the number of telehealth interactions increased 50X by conservative estimates from pre-pandemic years. Most healthcare executives believe 25% of current outpatient, preventative and long-term care interactions could become virtual in the upcoming years. A robust mobile, video-enabled telemedicine ecosystem must be part of any healthcare provider strategy now — and in the future. Careful planning and execution are crucial in reducing pressures on hospitals, more efficiently allocating healthcare resources and improving patient experiences. 

The Role of Cloud in Patient Experience Orchestration
The accelerated need for the delivery of virtual services in healthcare has driven an historic increase in our reliance on cloud applications and the ability to access services via personal devices. Underpinning this delivery is an architecture that’s built for a hyper-scaler environment that’s flexible, agile and secure. This architecture must have consistent and resilient operations within multiple regions with low latency to machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and big data services. And the architecture needs to be open to allow service choices and embrace a broader ecosystem of services.  

An elastic enterprise that spans private and public clouds — and provides for a consumable healthcare development experience — must inform any strategy that seeks to transform healthcare. Most healthcare organizations already are stakeholders in the cloud because it’s a business imperative in the always-on healthcare system. 

The Connected Healthcare Journey
Providers must ensure they offer a connected health experience journey across all channels — voice and digital — and in all interactions. These seamless and connected care experiences across patient activation, patient access, care planning, treatment and discharge, and ongoing health monitoring should be humanized, personalized and secure. This continuity of care is best made possible through shared, next-generation data and interoperable solutions.  

Healthcare organizations need to understand and derive patient intent to drive predictive personalization, digital containment, meaningful interactions and next-best actions. In addition, providers must be prepared to drive continuous improvement through analytics, journey management and Voice of the Customer KPIs.  

Attending HIMSS22? This year, #HIMSS22 is all about re-imagining health and wellness for everyone, everywhere. Join us at HIMSS22 to hear from customers like Rochester Regional Health and Company Nurse and learn more about Genesys technologies and offerings designed to orchestrate connected patient experiences across every channel and every department.