Digital Transformation of Healthcare

 

Microsoft DAS (Digital Advisory Services) Switzerland Patient Centered Care – Digital Transformation of Healthcare

The dream of patient care anytime, anywhere is being made real and it is happening thanks in large part to new innovative technology. Digitalization of healthcare systems will enable consumers to have their first video consultations with doctors using remote patient care solutions (see Figure 1). Consumers will be prescribed health apps as part of their therapy as well as to lead a healthy life style, and the use of smartphones as diagnostic tools is being tested in a few markets. Connected medical devices and fitness devices enable “predictive / proactive” scenarios which will result in reduced patient risk.

Insurance companies and pharma companies are integral part of the healthcare eco system, also called New Health Economy, and have larger stakes because of the way healthcare will be paid for, delivered and accessed by consumers.

The value based reimbursement model will result in patients becoming more involved in their own care and they will demand a greater role in the planning of their treatment. The practitioners expect that this will empower patients, who will compare their hospital’s patient experience against other hospitals before choosing one for their care. One of the technology enablers in either diagnosis or in choosing treatment options based on history of other similar patients with similar conditions, is the application and usage of machine learning combined with artificial intelligence (see example of Machine Learning in Healthcare).

The switch to value-based reimbursement will transform traditional billing methods, causing providers to change the way they bill for care. With providers getting compensated based on the results instead of procedures and treatments, there will be a need to track patient health in new, digitally enabled ways.

This has larger implications, not only for healthcare providers (hospitals, clinics) but insurance and pharma companies as well. They need to be able to provide personalized care and participate in greater outcomes-based economics. The healthcare providers will have more bandwidth to move on from EMR integration (plumbing) to the use of new innovative technology aimed at improving care (tools). Concurrently, advances in the fields of genomics and compound specialty pharmacy are enabling new ways for pharma companies to personalize therapeutic delivery down to an individual patient, which is a building block for outcomes-based drug reimbursement.

Microsoft is well equipped to help healthcare providers, insurance and pharma companies to respond to these challenges. At Microsoft Research, our scientists and engineers collaborate on diverse research areas ranging from healthcare to economics and they provide thought leadership and insights to business leaders on topics such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

At Microsoft, we recognize that the #1 goal of the healthcare industry is to improve care experiences & outcomes for people who have medical conditions that require treatment. It is also important to transform a reactive “sick care system” into a proactive one that manages individual and public healthcare more effectively and at a lower cost.

From the birth of the medical profession, the goal has been to collect meaningful insights, such as history and physical, from patients in order to make the right treatments decisions. This has been at the heart of all change and innovation in healthcare. There’s a colossal amount of data available today, and it’s doubling every 24 months. The problem isn’t having enough data—it’s getting access to that data easily, pulling out insights, and doing all of this in a way that’s cost-effective.

If everyone in your organization has quick and easy access to the right information at the right time, then efficiency, productivity, and outcomes will improve for you, your employees and your patients.

Microsoft’s vision of empowering the healthcare transformation to address the challenges mentioned below is based on four pillars (see Figure 2).

• The way you engage with your patients
• How your care teams communicate and collaborate using productivity tools
• How cloud analytics can increase the effectiveness of how you treat people and run your operations
• How you can innovate along the Care Continuum using advanced, emerging technologies like IoT.

Engage Your Patients:

The patient journey through the health system can be daunting, from trying to find health information, choosing where to get treatment, selecting a doctor, scheduling appointments, getting prescriptions, or getting follow-up care. And patients expect more. They already use technology to make their lives easier in many ways— such as with shopping, travel, and managing finances. It’s only natural that they want this kind of convenience in navigating their health care.

Our goal at Microsoft is to help you deliver care experiences that are more patient-centric so you’ll have more satisfied patients and better outcomes.

Empower Your Care Teams:

Clinician shortages and increased healthcare needs means care teams are seeing more patients. We all know the kinds of problems that increased workloads can lead to: burnout, exhaustion, mistakes, patient and employee dissatisfaction. How do you ease this burden and improve not only the effectiveness of your care teams, but their personal experience and job satisfaction? They need tools to help them be more productive as individuals and engage more efficiently with each other and with patients to deliver engaging patient care.

Optimize Your Clinical and Operational Effectiveness:

There’s no shortage of data. The problem is to make it truly useable with actionable insights. Right now, major constraints include data that is stored in different places in different formats, apps that don’t talk to each other, complex processes for accessing data and running reports so technical that only IT can handle them, and data analysis that can only tell you what happened in the past. This makes it really hard for organizations to use data to lower costs, improve outcomes, and promote wellness.

But what if you could use every piece of data you have, no matter how much of it there is, and you had unlimited resources to process and analyze that data—in real-time—and you could use that data to literally predict the future?

Transform the Care Continuum:

Transformation of healthcare systems goes beyond procuring and deploying solutions like Customer Relationship Management or office automation. Microsoft has been working to create systems of intelligence. This means creating continuous digital feedback loops that give you better insights from inputs that arrive from all directions, including from after-market services and customer feedback. One of the most promising sources of data for these feedback loops is intelligent devices.

A wide range of medical devices exist to measure health indicators such as glucose levels, blood pressure, temperature, weight, cardiac rhythms, and oxygen levels. But collecting and displaying data isn’t enough to create health. Providers need a way to amalgamate data from multiple sources, interpret it, and turn it into concrete action that will not only give a clear picture of a patient’s overall health, but also recommend action to treat and prevent illness.

How Microsoft can help?

Microsoft Digital Advisory Services (DAS) guides organizations to reimagine and transform customer engagements, employee experiences, business models and operations. Digital Advisors bring industry and business expertise, as well as Microsoft’s resources, experience and innovation to empower organizations to reach their digital aspirations. By partnering with customers, Digital Advisors drive a program of change to build the digital business. Transformational Consulting is about guiding our customers to make sense of the chaos and realize successful business outcomes. It’s about how we “enable every company to be a digital business,” and embrace this mindset as part of our DNA.

Hemant Anand is a Digital Advisor at Microsoft Switzerland. He looks back at an 18-year career as a Business Consultant, Enterprise Strategy Consultant and Change Practitioner in the Pharma & Life Sciences and Financial Services industry. As Digital Advisor he envisions and drives the digital transformation with our customers to enable every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. As the Healthcare Industry Lead for Switzerland he has a strong focus on hospitals, clinics, pharmaceuticals and biotech companies to successfully embrace digital transformation in the mobile first, cloud first world.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hemantanand/

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