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(GIST OF KURUKSHETRA) The Digital Shift in Healthcare: Navigating Technological Transformation

(OCTOBER-2024)

The Digital Shift in Healthcare: Navigating Technological Transformation

Introduction:

Healthcare organizations are under pressure to pursue better ways to provide value to the end users of their services. Technology can help in this regard by supporting existing value propositions such as lowering cost or by creating new value propositions.

Theoretical development and framework

Two theoretical lenses are employed and integrated to help address our research questions. First Engagement is used as a lens to understand how technology can create value for end users of service. Second, capabilities, both dynamic and structural IT capabilities.

Engagement

Engagement is a state of being involved In something and can be thought of as a "motivation to act." When individuals are engaged in the pursuit of their goals, they find value in things that will help them accomplish their goals when using technology.
For patients, engagement is seen as an important component of patient-centred care, which captures the notion that healthcare systems should be respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs and values and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions.

Capabilities

The concept of capabilities emerged from the resource- based view (RBV) of the firms, which views resources as assets possessed by the firm that enables sustained competitive advantage.
Capabilities can be defined as organizational routines and processes that combine, deploy and exploit resources to achieve competitive advantage.
Many capabilities exist, structural IT capabilities and dynamic capabilities are together complementary and support the basic conditions for structural change in digital transformation.

Discussion

The digital transformation in healthcare, through the creation of a rich health data foundation and integration of technologies like the Internet of Things (loT), advanced analytics, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (Al), is recognized as a key component to tackle these challenges.
It can lead to improvements in diagnostics, prevention and patient therapy, ultimately empowering care givers to use an evidence-based approach to improve clinical decisions. Real-time interactions allow a physician to monitor a patient 'live', instead of interactions once every few weeks. Operational intelligence ensures efficient utilization of healthcare resources and services provided, thereby optimizing costs.
However, procedure-based payments, legacy systems, disparate data sources with the limited adoption of data standards, technical debt, data security and privacy concerns impede the efficient usage of health information to maximize value creation for all healthcare stakeholders. This has led to a highly regulated, constrained industry.
Ultimately, the goal is to improve quality of life and saving people's lives through the creation of the intelligent healthcare provider, fully enabled to deliver value-based healthcare and a seamless patient experience.
Information technologies that enable this goal must be extensible, safe, reliable and affordable, and tailored to the digitalization maturity-level of the individual organization.
Adopting intelligent technologies will require healthcare leaders to not only reimagine operational and clinical processes around care delivery but also embed these technologies within existing core business processes to reap the benefits.
This will also ensure care givers' focus on high-value tasks and outcomes such as better patient outcomes and strategic planning to accelerate the delivery of innovative solutions that provide an engaging and seamless patient experience, without disrupting their core business processes.
All of this should be based on data foundation capable to handle big data and deliver real-time processing.
By viewing business processes and Innovation solutions holistically and putting fundamental patient needs at the core of the healthcare enterprise strategy, the long-term impact of intelligent technologies to accelerate delivery of value-based care will be a game-changer for the healthcare industry.
This will change the very nature of patient-doctor relationship - from reactive health (a paternalistic approach to diagnosis and treatment in response to signs and symptoms) to proactive health (personalized patient interactions and care delivery based on early warning signs detection complemented by passive data capture and relevant biomarkers, predictive models connected to epigenetic predispositions and continuous monitoring from multiple connected data sources).

Conclusion:

This can only be achieved through digital transformation with intelligent, integration-ready applications and platforms that help to manage patients, networks, employees, and core processes. These must be easily extensible and offer a consistent and intuitive user experience. Going forward, healthcare organizations will consume and experiment more with technologies, so that they can drive ongoing innovation. Applications with embedded intelligent technologies will be crucial for success.