The healthcare industry is going through a drastic transformation in the way it uses digital information–and healthcare information technologies–to treat patients as well as help physicians, nurses, payers and other stakeholders offer a higher quality of care.
This shift largely revolves around three major IT initiatives – Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data Analytics and Mobile optimized healthcare applications. These three areas go hand in hand as healthcare organizations are realizing they can use them together to better manage their massive volumes of clinical, claims and demographic data.
For example, utilizing Big Data Analytics in healthcare can enable organizations to better analyze information in electronic health records (EHR). They then can combine it with vitals and other diagnostic data collected from devices connected via an IoT network app and then enable clinicians to access the integrated data on mobile devices at the point of care so they can offer more personalized medical care for their patients.
Challenges and opportunities for IT
But at the Who’s Who in Healthcare Breakfast held this past spring in Chicago, one of the biggest discussion topics was while such healthcare software solutions are available, there are still are a lot of challenges preventing provider organizations from using these solutions.
Some of these include:
- Regulations
- Lack of funding
- Technology that currently works against physicians, not with
- Need for data quality assurance
- Lack of integrated systems – silos are everywhere
- And staffing shortages.
The panel of industry stakeholders at the event also, however, discussed some mitigating elements that could help healthcare organizations bypass these obstacles and more quickly and effectively collaborate with firms offering Big Data Consulting and Analytics, IoT, Enterprise Mobility and other emerging technologies in healthcare.
For example, younger clinicians are eager to adopt emerging technologies, especially ones that innovate the care process and patient experience. And as necessity is the mother of all invention, some healthcare organizations—and clinicians–are taking their limited resources and diving into developing new technologies that that not only improve the care process, but also streamline costs and improve the patient experience.
Unlocking the Value of and Access to Data
How do healthcare organizations that are faced with various hurdles above, gain access to the technologies they need to drive efficiencies and innovation in patient care? This is where an experienced IT consulting partner with expertise in healthcare software can really drive value.
Healthcare organizations can employ their expertise with developing integrations and data lakes—and the various tools that can be used to do so—to unlock unstructured patient data. They can then mobilize the complete datasets so physicians can optimize the information at the point of care.
Further, they also can create large scale data models they can use for Big Data healthcare analytics applications to mine the data to discover health patterns or ways they can offer more preventive medicine to chronically ill patients.
As healthcare organizations begin to use these technologies, they will be better poised to adopt more sophisticated innovations, such as using artificial intelligence to help radiologists read images more quickly, as well as other IoT-based healthcare solutions.
With more than 10 years of experience in this domain, Emtec brings extensive experience to the table. Contact us today to discover how Emtec’s analytics team can help your healthcare organization breakthrough its data and IT challenges to offer better quality of care.