26.09.16
Finding the Digital Pulse of Health and Care
Mike Badham, Healthcare Solutions Architect for Cisco Systems Inc., discusses the importance of digital technology in the modern world of health and care provision, while exploring how a digital strategy can be the key to unlocking efficiencies.
It was Mahatma Gandhi who said ‘your health is your real wealth’. And he knew a thing or two. Yet when we do require medical assistance, it can often be an anxious, stressful time. For patients and health providers alike, we’re helping to ensure interactions along the care pathway are as simple and comfortable as possible.
Health and care providers face a number of challenges, from an increasing and ageing population to constrained resources. There is also a drive to create better patient outcomes and experiences as they progress through the health and care system. So how can organisations drive efficiency and improve on service delivery?
A digital heart
Many challenges can be answered through digitisation. IT is no longer seen as a remote, reactive operational department within health and care organisations. Digitisation is about elevating technology, taking a proactive approach and making it the cornerstone of business planning. Making it central to the delivery of modern health and care.
After all, how can ‘new ways of working’ or ‘new models of care’ even be considered without considering the role that technology will play?
In our document Digital Technology at the Heart of the NHS, we examine how a range of use-cases along the patient journey can be supported by a common digital technology platform. Offering operational efficiencies and improved service delivery inside and outside of the hospital environment, greater return on investment (ROI) can be gained by maximising technology investments through:
- Referrals – using video technology to create better informed decision-making and information exchange, whether on a referral basis between secondary and specialist care or from a GP.
- Remote consultations – using video and collaboration technologies to extend the reach of clinicians, reducing the need for patients to travel and increasing the scalability of clinical services.
- Discharges – using mobility services to enable discharge at the point of care, with pharmacy notification and other ancillary services.
- Better visitor experiences – using smart app technology to engage patients and visitors, notifying them of waiting times or offering wayfinding while at the same time providing valuable analytics for the organisation itself.
Put to bed
Another example is bed management meetings. Gone is the need for teams spread across different sites and disciplines travelling to meet in person several times a day. Collaboration technology supports the sharing of information instantly and removes the need for participants to travel to a meeting room. The associated cost savings driving such efficiency create a compelling case for investment in collaboration tools.
This is digitisation in its truest sense: understanding business use-cases and applying technology to solve real problems and costly inefficiencies. But what’s most important is that the same technology investments are maximised through repeated, diverse use over and over again, generating optimal ROI. We believe there has never been a better time to transform UK health and care organisations through digitisation.
To find out how you can develop a digital strategy in UK health and care organisations, download the white paper ‘Digital Strategy for Connected Health and Care’.