The events of the past year have taught us that “resiliency” is as important as speed.Creating a resilient healthcare business is crucial and necessary along with the quadruple aim (Outcome, Cost, Patient Experience, and Clinician Experience).
Why are resiliency and speed so important?
Digital transformation in the healthcare industry is evolving at a blistering pace despite the COVID-19 pandemic. While there has been a significant negative impact on the healthcare industry due to the pandemic, there has been a remarkable resiliency and adaptability (with speed) shown by healthcare companies. The rise in telehealth is one great example. The adoption of telehealth doubled to 28% since 20161. By 2026, the telemedicine market is anticipated to touch $186.5 billion2. About 74% of millennials would prefer telehealth visits over in-person consultations3. 91% of patients stated that telemedicine helps them stick to their appointments, follow good wellness regimens, and 93% stated that telemedicine helps them manage prescriptions better4&5.
While digital transformation in the healthcare industry happened rapidly, creating seamless virtual experiences close to real-life remains elusive. The current scenario addresses speed but does not lend itself to a resilient business model in the long run.
The symbiotic relationship between digital transformation and the healthcare industry
Despite the gains in telehealth due to the pandemic, the healthcare industry has always been considered a laggard in digital transformation. The changes in the past year or so include people across the globe living differently, thinking differently, and availing healthcare differently. Healthcare providers, patients, and payers are looking at healthcare delivery through a whole new lens.
While some habits and changes developed during the crisis will disappear when normalcy returns, many will sustain in the future. These habits will shift the way the healthcare industry operates. More than ever, it is imperative for the healthcare industry to think about how technology can help deliver better patient experiences. While 2020 has shown the benefits of adopting technology, will healthcare embrace and build upon it, in the long run, is a crucial question.
Some of the significant digital tools that will benefit the healthcare sector
Digital front door
Shrinking reimbursements, increasing use of self-funded plans, and higher out-of-pocket expenses have created a new generation of consumers with zero tolerance for inefficiencies. Consumers today not only have multiple options for caregivers but multiple means to receive care. So, what can healthcare organizations do? For starters, go beyond patient portals by having a comprehensive digital front door strategy encompassing first-contact, on-demand scheduling, virtual check-in, navigation, benefit lookup, payments, reminders, refills, and automation to not only attract but retain consumers.
Telemedicine and Remote Patient Monitoring
Since 2016, virtual visits have increased from 14% to 28%, and the use of remote monitoring and management for improved support increased from 13% to 22%6. Telehealth and Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) provides an array of benefits to clinicians and patients. For clinicians, some of the benefits are ease of access to patient information and the ability to offer quality healthcare services to more patients. For patients, it offers the means to seek care unconstrained by time and geography. Despite the benefits, there is ample room for improvements such as reducing long waiting time, improving the patient experience, and better coordination.
Caregiver collaboration
Did you know that 75% of medical communication is still exchanged through fax?7 Healthcare businesses must adopt a robust tool to make communication between all parties efficient while adhering to HIPAA and other regulations. The right tool should be scalable, seamless, and agile.
Patient self-diagnosis/triage portals/bots
We live in a world where if we want something, there is probably an application or a tool that offers it already. One way of approaching this to help patients understand symptoms, guide them on seeking the appropriate care, and provide curated information on diseases and conditions.
Some of the other areas in healthcare that technology can help are:
- Marketing and sales
- Home health and wearable solutions
- Customer service
- Customer support
- Remote working
- Collaboration
- Product-based approach to applications facilitated by agile and DevSecOps
The challenge- Are we “perfect” yet?
As events unfolded in the last 12 months or so, most healthcare businesses did not have the time to strategize their digital transformation to align with their business goals. Without any warning, businesses had to accelerate the shift to the virtual world. While many healthcare organizations quickly implemented off-the-shelf technology solutions, the experience has been at best uneven and, in some cases, misaligned with business goals. Organizations must fill these gaps, and, in some cases, the misalignments cannot be adjusted easily or quickly and requires a comprehensive “redo.”
All of this requires a technology partner who can help businesses proceed on the right path. Increasingly, the role of technology in delivering “value-based” health services at cost and speed is becoming paramount. Most IT departments in healthcare are being challenged to transition from a cost-center to a revenue generator.
So, how do you bring agility, resiliency, and experience together and generate revenue without any impact on quality? The answer lies in creating a robust IT ecosystem comprising digital-native partners and best-in-class solutions that will add exponential capabilities to create patient experiences and yield cost and labor efficiencies that are resilient.
How can Mindtree help the healthcare industry in this digital transformation journey?
Mindtree helps overcome these challenges with its robust consulting and technology solutions. Our clients include payers, providers, products (Healthcare technology and services), retail pharmacies, and pharmacy benefit managers.
Mindtree is helping our clients in this transformation by identifying opportunities across the value chain to:
Reduce the cost of care: Through process automation and cost take-out initiatives.
Better health outcomes: By leveraging telehealth, population health, and care management.
Enhance consumer experience: Adopt experience-led design, digital front-door, omnichannel experience, and judicious use of self-service.
Better work-life for employees and healthcare professionals: Aid clinical decision-making with responsible and explainable AI/ML, best-in-class collaboration, documentation tools, and streamlined contact centers.
Our capabilities
Digital health: Drive omnichannel experience across multiple touchpoints leveraging our digital front-door offering. Mindtree can help integrate data across the enterprise to support personalization and help change behavior through predictive analytics-based coaching. We can help build portals, mobile applications, and conversational AIs to extend and enhance your support availability and gain operational efficiency.
Value-based care: Our end-to-end offerings addresses the quadruple aim of lower costs, population health, patient experience, and clinician experience. Our solutions will help you develop strategies to increase patient and clinician experience, deploy a population health platform and analytics to support value-based care.
Intelligent automation: Through our innovative, intelligent process automation services, we help clients improve speed-to-market, business KPIs, quality, and compliance, along with elevating and empowering their workforce.
Immersive and cognitive technologies: We help clients ideate, implement, and operationalize AR/VR/MR based immersive approaches to enable clinician training and patient care such as rehab, pain management, mental health, workforce training (on front and back-office processes), and other general training such as compliance, diversity, disaster response, and first response.
Our services that can help the healthcare sector thrive
Customer success: Attract and retain patients/members and improve satisfaction scores by leveraging CRM for a relationship, marketing outreach, customer support, care collaboration, and employee relationship management. Our strategic partnerships with Adobe, Sitecore, Salesforce, and Microsoft enable us to bring next-generation product IT-centric-based customer success transformation solutions.
Data and intelligence: As the amount of data generated by the healthcare industry keeps increasing, the need for actionable insights, security, privacy, and an effective data governance plan is paramount. We provide integrated capabilities spanning data strategy and architecture, data engineering, data sciences and analytics (including ML/AI), advanced visualization, and business intelligence. Our partnership with Databricks, Tableau, and Informatica, in addition to the hyper-scale cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and GCP), enables us to drive data-driven digital transformation for our clients.
Cloud services: We enable clients to adopt cloud technologies and assist in infrastructure, application, and data modernization. Our cloud service line brings in integrated capabilities of advisory, migration, modernization, API-fication, and operations. We deliver cloud transformation at an industrialized scale for our customers through our partnership with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
Enterprise IT: Our wide range of consulting, implementation, automation, UX, and testing services, support BPM-Business Process Management (Pega), ERP-Enterprise Resource Planning (SAP, Workday), CRM-Customer Relationship Management (Salesforce and Dynamics), CMS-Content Management Systems (Adobe) and ITSM- IT Service Management (Service Now).
The bottom line
The healthcare industry faces several disruptive trends, including rapid population growth, longer lifespan, and increasing chronic conditions contributing to an overall healthcare costs increase. Rising consumerism fueled by consumer-centric companies is driving increasing demand for quality, transparency, and access. The ever-increasing regulatory burden and documentation needs coupled with lower reimbursements lead to higher levels of frustration, disruptions, and burnout among healthcare professionals. Disruptions are pressurizing the healthcare providers, and only 22% are deemed fit, and 41% are still fragile8.
How can an industry with strict regulations and complex systems emerge victoriously from the on-going global health crisis? How can the healthcare industry convert all the risks, chances, and insufficiencies into opportunities that not only ensure their survival but thrive and fulfill the primary goal —enable better healthcare for everyone?
Digital transformation is a necessity, and accelerating it should be the #1 priority for healthcare. Today, as well as in the future, delivery quality healthcare will require an increasingly complex array of technologies, seamless collaboration and communication among caregivers, and a robust support system. Having the right technology partner who can build the foundation needed for digital capabilities and elevate healthcare and patient experience to an all-new level during this fast-paced transformation is crucial for success.
Sources:
1. A study by the American Medical Association (AMA)
2. A report by Fortune Business Insights
3. GlobalMed Report
4 & 5. A study by Doctor.com on "Telemedicine Adoption in the Age of COVID-19 and Beyond."
6. AMA Digital Health Research
7. A Vox report
8. Gartner Report on Healthcare Digital Transformation
Authors
Ganesh Nathella
Head of Markets, Health Business Unit, Mindtree
Ganesh heads our Health Industry Group. He has over 24 years of Industry experience and counsels leading organizations in the health industry on strategy, growth, margin improvement, business building, and large-scale transformations through digital, data, cloud, and enterprise technology.
Amar Prasad
Industry Solutions Leader, Health Business Unit, Mindtree
Amar brings a unique mixture of the domain, technology, and consulting experience in a career spanning 20+ years. Amar has successfully led and delivered multiple high visibility, complex and transformational engagements across the payer, provider, and health tech segments. Amar is passionate about leveraging technology to enhance patient care, provide operational benefits, interoperability, and reduce cost of care.
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