Most hospitals and care providers understand the need to shift the core focus of all their strategic initiatives from profitability to patient experience. Today, the patient is at the heart of everything the hospital does, and the patient experience is a key area of attention in these competitive times.
Studies show that 96% of patients pay more importance to the experience they are provided in a care environment than anything else. Obviously, they want to be treated as a person with respect and not as a body with a disease. Meeting the demands of this philosophy requires caregivers to build their palette of experiences around the patient’s needs and interests.
As it happens, this is the right approach to achieve challenging financial objectives too. Healthcare organizations have seen that profits soon follow when they prioritize people and deliver on their expectations.
Obviously, when it comes to technology adoption, the strategy should be no different. People must be prioritized in any tech that is to be adopted. That’s bringing the digital health dream closer than it has ever been.
The arrival of digital health
Digital systems to address point problems have been around in the healthcare sector for years. But soon enough, delivering better care and experiences for patients required the industry to look beyond the basics like electronic health records and digitized billing. Healthcare leaders had to figure out how technology could penetrate deeper into the care delivery value chain. Key concerns like how it would be accessible to patients and not just medical professionals came into the frame too. Looking back, this is where the beginnings of the vision of digital health may have emerged.
In simple terms, digital health refers to all the practices where the provision of care is influenced heavily or delivered primarily through digital channels. From telehealth options for virtual doctor consultations to integrations with wearable health devices that remotely track a patient’s vitals, there is a plethora of smart and connected health technology available today. Putting all these solutions together coherently to create a new care delivery paradigm that forms the spectrum of digital health. In many ways, events like the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital initiatives on the patient side considerably in the last few years. So much so that it is estimated that the global market for digital health will exceed USD 549.7 billion by 2028.
Why is digital health closer to us than ever?
We are living in an age where the internet has become the biggest avenue of knowledge acquisition globally. With more people gaining access to meaningful information and improving their awareness about their health, they are naturally inclined to adopt means that help them stay healthy. A key part of this strategy involves proactively and regularly getting consultative advice from medical professionals and ensuring that every step taken in a healthy lifestyle is measured for results and progress.
The best way to do both is to adapt smart digital health experiences. These digital experiences help them stay connected with care providers as well as gain clear visibility into their body’s functioning through a network of integrated wearables.
For a better understanding of how this paradigm would work and what it means to care providers, let us consider the digital health options of telehealth and smart wearables.
With wearables, vital insights into a patient’s body functions are always captured in all situations. That includes parameters like blood oxygen levels, sugar levels, pressure, heartbeats, etc. Apps on the patient’s phone could track these levels and raise alerts when any abnormalities are observed. As that happens, their hospitals could also get alerted and consultations with the concerned Doctor could get automatically scheduled. The best part is that the patient doesn’t really need to visit the hospital as telehealth facilitates remote consultation as well. That’s a vision of an ecosystem where care is provided to the patient when it is most required.
Another key value benefit of this paradigm is the speed at which care can be delivered when vital information on patient health is always available through connected digital health channels. This is driven by insightful analytics on the collected data. For instance, the analysis of blood profile insights over a period can help doctors adjust medications and suggest better care routines to improve patient health.
For healthcare providers, adopting digital health also offers operational benefits. For eg., it may allow them to operate a leaner operational schedule in their physical facilities and offer self-service options for patients to seek professional medical guidance rather than having to pay a visit. This helps them accommodate more cases without necessarily having to invest in people and infrastructure and expand their facilities. Additionally, they may get to forecast admissions based on connected health data from patients and prepare schedules to smoothen the process.
The future of digital health
Thanks to digital health capabilities, patients and caregivers are getting empowered to handle health decisions much more seamlessly. Moving forward, the integration of tech such as AI and machine learning along with IoT would create an even larger scope of use cases for digital health.
When the healthcare industry began focusing on technology decades ago, the initial benefits being sought were mostly focused on improving operational efficiency and profitability. Patients did however experience better convenience and faster care-deliver as a bonus from such initiatives. Fast forward to today, patient experience is in the driving seat of any strategy that healthcare leaders prepare. With such a high level of critical importance, the technology choices that hospitals and healthcare providers make to enable digital health must be resilient, reliable, and most importantly, tailored to their patients’ desires.
This is where a knowledgeable and experienced digital partner like Trinus can make a huge difference. Get in touch with us to know more.