Health Care Transformation

Health Care Transformation – Steps you can’t skip



Healthcare is the last industry that has not adopted digital technology in any major way to help deliver its services. And it’s becoming challenging for physicians and consumers to actually manage care without those digital tools
David Schlanger


Covid 19 has redefined the modus operandi of health care practices across the world by leveraging on digital services for gaining insights about patient health. Medical fraternity has realized the criticality of data which has resulted in adoption of new age technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Application Programming Interface and Cloud Architecture. This has resulted in cutting down lead time for carrying out patient diagnosis and collaborating with doctors effectively with the help of digital empowerment. Let’s look at some of the key enablers that are set to transform the healthcare industry in the future.
In legacy systems usage of patient data continues to remain a challenge. Data sets from different sources could not be connected resulting in data breaks and lack of continuum. Decoupled Cloud native architecture serves as an efficient alternative that supplants the archaic ways of operation by connecting data sets from different sources and provides valuable clinical insights. It also helps in providing clinical forecasts like availability of the number of beds in ICU over a month. Patients can interact with the hospitals and doctors through mobile apps and BOTs for getting the required information from remote locations at their own convenience.
One of the key milestones of healthcare transformation is through harmonization of structured and unstructured data through FHIR. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard helps in creating a common set of APIs for sharing data that can be assimilated in each platform. This helps in building interoperability between EHR Systems. Electronic Healthcare Records ( EHR ) helps in consolidating health data across different electronic systems and helps in exchange of electronic information for providing high quality healthcare for patients. It ensures timely delivery of information to the patients by ensuring safety and security guidelines. It also provides enhanced healthcare management by suggesting lifestyle changes and mitigating behavioral risks through preventive care. Better coordination of healthcare services results in elimination of redundant tests resulting in lesser health care costs. Integrated patient information from multiple sources aids in effective clinical decision making and patient centricity.
Healthcare needs to break the shackles of the past and transcend the barriers of race, ethnicity and language. Data and Analytics helps in addressing these challenges by building a large ecosystem of comprehensive data that covers datasets relating to public health, social needs, reported experiences and its fallout. This would help a great deal in delivering quality healthcare to under-privileged and weaker sections of the society by ensuring distributional equity.
Time sensitive health systems need data which is real time and online. Traditional architecture in healthcare can result in slowness and latency in communication and data transmission. The downside of data latency is mitigated with the help of Fog Computing. It is an evolving technology that helps in reducing latency of healthcare Internet of Things. Fog Computing helps to store, process and analyze data and migrate the data center tasks to the fog nodes resulting in enhanced data transmission rate to the end users.
Machine Learning (ML) has made significant contributions to the healthcare services by analyzing large quantities of data points and its related outcomes. ML helps in building healthcare informatics through early diagnosis of disease by identifying genetic mutations and genome sequencing. It also helps in proper allocation of resources by following a risk based approach and clinical trials. ML also suggests different treatment methods and development of customized drugs based on the uniqueness of DNA.
Well managed cloud services ensure continuous availability of healthcare services and provide flexibility to allocate resources for critical tasks and manage their uptime requirements effectively. The Cloud services need to be built consistently for handling large datasets with computational and storage capabilities for achieving enterprise wide scale.

Conclusion
We at Xforia technologies are equipped to spearhead the healthcare initiatives of the future through digital enablement and innovation.